abcd. 1234.

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Hey everyone!

So this is my last week in Tanzania, and I'm starting to get really quite sad! Most of the other volunteers that lived with me for 3 weeks left on Friday and Saturday, and thirty-something new volunteers came on Saturday night. The majority of them are from a youth group in Canada- mostly 15/16 year olds. It's a lot different because they've known each other before coming to the homebase, but there are also 6 or 7 people who have come individually. There is a couple who are have taken a year off to do CCS in about 6 different countries. This is stop number 4 on their journey. I think they've been to Ghana, Peru, somewhere in South America, and then here. Their stories are really interesting.

Two of the old volunteers left for the weekend to climb Mt. Meru and will be back tonight. Another 2 of the old ones left on Friday to climb Kilimanjaro and one of them will be back on Wednesday- hopefully she made it to the top!

My placement has been going really well. I'll describe some of it now since I've got a whole 12 minutes left! I work in a Catholic Parish in a one-room school house. It is right next to a HUGE church which could probably fit more than a thousand people. There are on average about 16 kids in my class, depending on if they are sick or not, or if they have paid their school fees or not. If they haven't paid, they aren't allowed to come to school, so there are a few who don't show up for weeks at a time because their parents can't afford the $20 a year. I went to the ordination ceremony last Thursday and it was amazing. It was "supposed" to start at 10 in the morning- so naturally I got there aroudn 10:05 and I thought i was late. ha. I sat in the peus until about 11:30 when it actually started. All of the women sit on one side, wearing white with their hair wrapped in cloth- and the men sit on the other side. It's like that in all of the churches here. there was an electrical wire by where i was sitting, and it started to catch fire, sparks were flying everywhere. EVERYONE started jumping over each other trying to run away, but it blew out quickly. We all just laughed for 10 minutes at how silly it was. They church hired a band and a choir and the music was soooo beautiful, enough to give me goosebumps. The whole service was in swahili so when the sermon came I was pretty bored. It ended at 2 pm with a party to follow, but I had to get back to the homebase.

Today I went to Moshi Baptist Church and it was probably one of my most favorite experiences here. I walked in , it's a pretty small church, about 30 people in the congregation, and the pastor asked us ( a friend and I) to stand up and say our names and where we were from. I'm so grateful that he knew English. He translated all of the announcements and parts of the sermon into English for me and gave us our hymn books to use. He was SO nice and welcoming. I was walking home after church ( I had gone to town for a while) and he pulled over in his car and gave me a ride home back to CCS, saving me a 45 minute walk. He gave me his card and made sure that we should keep in touch.

The maasai school is actually on break for a month, so Kate and I will still be going to Arusha on Thursday, but we'll just be meeting Edward ( a head teacher) for lunch instead of going to the school. 1 minute left, got to publish this! Love you all!

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