Final days - Annsley

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Jambo!
I am in shock that our trip is coming to an end. I can remember counting down 48 hours until Africa, and now we are 48 hours away from leaving. Although it seems like we haven't had enough time, we have packed so much into these two weeks. It is impossible to understand how incredible these kids are without meeting them because we can only begin to describe their awesome-ness. We have all totally fallen in love with them and I don't know what will happen when we have to leave on Friday. This morning we went to town and did a little souvenir shopping and practiced our bargaining before meeting with the Deputy Mayoress of Moshi. She was also one of the key players in an women's HIV/AIDS organization. It was extremely impressive. She said they began by going around educating communities (nearly 600 surrounding) about HIV/AIDS and they discovered the huge number of orphans. They began funding to try and re-locate these children and make sure they were safe and healthy. They also discovered that most of them suffered from severe psychological trauma, so they decided to train their counselors to handle that as well. It was almost too much to handle, and I could feel a lump forming in my throat, but we really were all just very impressed. A man from the testing organization in conjunction with the education center said the rates of people coming to be tested had gone up while the positive samples have gone down. It was nice to hear that they were actually making a difference and I hope that it is an example that can be followed. After lunch at the hotel, we went to school. Monday we began work on the swing sets. Cindy and I painted signs to advertise the school while most of the boys started digging holes for the steel poles that would not fit together. Yesterday, Julius, the welder, returned the poles totally put together into the swing set frame. We, including me, spent the day putting them into the holes and solidifying it with concrete. We all got pretty down and dirty, and after a swim in the pool that night and a shower, I still had dirt on my knees. Today we began painting our mural - a rainbow over Mt. Kilimanjaro with some flowers an butterflies. In the rainbow, we will write Peace, Hope, Dreams. The kids were totally blown away when they walked out of the school an saw Kilimanjaro on the side of it. We also stenciled alphabet letters and numbers in some of the classrooms, and after some touching up, it looked great. Some of the boys taught the kids how to swing on the swings - which of course they all loved and wanted to try. We have not had too much time to just play with the kids this week, so I really hope we spend Friday with them.
See you all soon!
~Annsley McKinney

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