First few days in placement

Hey guys,
So we arrived in Lugarawa on the Wednesday the 11th of april after a 5hr extremely bumpy bus ride. Lugarawa really is beautiful, its in a lush, green valley surrounded on all sides by huge, rolling hills. In the mornings its all misty and makes me want to sing “the hills are alive with the sound of music...bongo flava!”

Anyway we were slow to get started because our house wasn’t ready yet so for the first two nights we stayed with the head master of Lugarawa Secondary School (where we will be teaching) and this was heaven because his house is really nice and we had every meal provided! I was looking forward to getting settled in our own house though so we could get started on our SPW activities. On Friday morning we moved into our small, cement, 3-room house. It needs a lot of loving to make it a home but it was exciting anyway! Besides all the spiders and rats (huge bloody rats too!) its starting to feel nicer, I’ve stuck things on my bedroom walls (photos, poems, quotes) and the kids from next door have drawn us pictures and stuck them up for us. The house is in a compound type thing so we share a courtyard, toilet and bathroom with our landlords and someother people. Everyone is really nice and our landlords have 4 gorgeous children (Flavia, France, Francisca and Fllaa….something a rather) who now spend most of their time in our house. The family also has a cute (if neglected) cat who I’ve named Betty, 2 dogs, a cow (now called Pickles), 3 fat ugly pigs and many chickens. If we didn’t have so much to do I could spend all my time at the house being entertained by the family!!

Saturday and Sunday we spent meeting with village leaders and introducing ourselves and planning for our first lessons. We didn’t get much done because Neema wasn’t feeling well and on Monday we had to go to both our secondary (Lugarawa) and primary (Matika) schools to organize our timetables (26 lessons/week all together…and some of the classes have 80 students in them….im scareddd!!). We also met with and introduced ourselves to some representatives of the community we will be working in (Mdilidili - not where we are living…we were confused for a long time!) and then returned home. Neema was feeling even worse by this stage so our Baba Comfort (the Village executive officer of Mdilidili and our father here…he has been taking good care of us!) took her to the hospital to be tested for malaria. It turns out she has Malaria number 6…which is apparently quite bad! She was supposed to stay at the hospital overnight but didn’t want to so they gave her tablets. She was still sick this morning and couldn’t keep her medicine down so we returned to the hospital and now has to stay here for 2 or 3 days on a drip! The poor thing, she couldn’t even talk to her mother because there is no reception close by.

Anyway so now im staying at home by myself…eating scraps of food because I can’t cook hahaha and our teaching has been postponed until next week which stressed me out at first, but what ya gonna do?? I spent most of today at the hospital with Neema.

There is another mzungu who lives in Lugarawa, he works for peace corps and teaches biology, chemistry and physics at Lugarawa Secondary School. I’m so glad he is here (he’s been here for 3 months now) because I think I overestimated the amount of time I could spend talking to myself! Also he makes some banging pasta and he even has a DVD collection at his house (shhhh don’t tell anyone hehe). I’m so spoilt! The village we are living in is more like a really tiny town - they have everything except network. I’m very lucky and I hope all my fellow SPW vols are coping well.

not much else to report - am missing everyone lots at the moment. I'm nervous abou teaching too..it seems like such a huge task!!

love you all

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