A week of waterfalls and markets...

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Jambo! Habari? (How are you)

Sorry of my late entry this week. I wrote a whole entry on saturday and moment before I went to send it the power went out and then yesterday I was busy so here I am....
This week has been just as eventful as the rest including receiving news from home - congratulations with the baby bump!
The week at Kili Kids has been just as hectic as the last couple. We have established a new lesson plan to continue with because what seems to keep happening is that new volunteers come with a unique teaching style and the kids are get confused. So what happens now is that Sophia (the one teacher Kili Kids has) teaches one class, sets them a task and then the next class and sets them a task and I then help them with the task in hand. This system is working out much better than me having my own class with a massive language barrier and I enjoy helping them instead of having to be a bit mean when they are naughty. Apart from that one day the water to the village got cut off which was perfect timing seeing as a little boy names parsely decided (whilst I was holding him) that he might releive himself on my arm. Not a big deal as long as I could wash it. So that was nice having urine on my arm for a whole half day. The water thankfully came back the next day so the kids are fine.
I think I told you in my last entry that I'm also doing a shop for another project called second chance twice a week. This week it turned into a bit of a nightmare with the teachers claiming they had eaten all the rice and beans that we'd bought for them to last a whole month and insisted we buy some more. This of course is not in the budget so we got them as much as we could with the money we had left and tried to explain that the rice we got them needs to LAST. This was hard to communicate with a language barrier and Alice and I felt that because we were new to it they were trying to milk as much food out of us as possible including asking money for some maize from the farmer which we'd given them the money for a few days previous to that! So we have to be careful on that front.
When talking to the other volunteers in the hostel, most of them said that we must go to this night club called Laliga as they had all been. It is apparently the 'Best nightclub in Moshi' - all I can say is that I probably won't go rushing back. Around 15 of us went on friday night and it was the equivalent of a cheesy western nightclub like liquid or one of those big chains. It had fake plastic palm trees all around and pumping dance music and then waiters/waitresses dressed as sailors. It was an experience I must admit but I think I prefer the more traditional bars around.
On friday after work Aice and I took a daladala to this place called Memorial Market. Which is essentially a dumping ground for all the clothes we send over from the west for the locals to sell at cheap prices (obviously not cheap prices for us) So alice and I had a competition who could find the cheasiest t-shirt to which she won. I bought a couple of t-shirts for around one pound but nothing much else. Its so funny to see all the locals walking round in 'oxford university t-shirts' and old worn out local school jumpers.
One day this week I was walking back into the hostel from work and I see a taxi waiting outside with a couple of white people in it. So iI continued walking in untill the gardener Richard came running in shouting "Mee-gan, Mee-gan come back" so I came back and it turns out it was this lady and her boyfriend from holland waiting for some volunteers to come back from work so they could interview us. She is writing a book on international volunteering so arranged to meet alice and I the next day to ask a few questions and today I bought her to Kili Kids so she could have a direct view of what goes on. So that was nice and we got a few sodas for free doing it. They call them soda's here its so weird. I don't know when she will be finished with the book but said she'd let us know.
On saturday we went to some local waterfalls which are about an hours daladala away. It was great, we were able to swim in this pool below the waterfall and then jump off this really high rock above it. I think it was around 20ft or 10 meters or something like that - pretty high. It was quite daunting standing at the edge but once I'd mustered the courage I jumped and got met with icy cold water. It was such a shock but not shock enough to jump twice more. After a couple of hours of jumping swimming and lazing around our lovely surroundings we walked further up to some smaller waterfalls and then got the daladala home.
I think that is pretty much all I can say about this week. Haven't got anything particular planned for the week ahead. Saying this something always pops up or a job needs to get done.
Hope everyone at home is well.
Lots of Love
Meg xxxxx

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