Writing is not something I'm doing a lot of right now. I'm just experiencing. But I'll let you know a bit of what I've been up to...
This last "weekend" was a four-day weekend for us volunteers. The schools are closed for the summer, so we're not missing many scheduled teaching days, and being in Africa so far away from home, SIC gives us opportunities to travel a bit. So this weekend most of us went on a 21-hr bus ride through Kenya to Uganda to raft the Nile River from its source (Lake Victoria)! It was a crazy weekend, starting with the bus ride itself (we hit a suicidal giraffe) and on through bungee jumping over the Nile and dipping into it and rafting its whitewater rapids for the next two days. In a text message I sent to my mom: "Uganda is beautiful the Nile is amazing the rapids are outrageous." The company was great and despite the class-five rapids rating, we felt quite safe. (Helmets, life vests and rescue kayakers, we're good to go!)
We're back in Arusha now and heading back into our villages in about an hour. Tonight we have scheduled a kakas teaching (literally, "brothers") with my homestay kaka and his friends. They should be around the age 20, which is a primary target audience for our education-prevention effort, in my opinion.
Last week we taught a group of around 48 village leaders, both male and female, and we had a scheduled subvillage teaching where we taught 51 mamas and 53 babas! It was likely the most successful community teaching I've been a part of, in either of my villages. My whole group is excited.
Speaking of my group... I love my teaching group. I love this village,and I love my homestay situation. It's really turned my experience around from my first village. We have a lot of fun together and still get effective work done. I guess this is what happens when you set intentions for such things... hehe.
We're going into our third week of our five-week awareness campaign and brainstorming ideas to make our work sustainable for after we leave. So far we've got a soccer teach started up that might be turned into an awareness-team, if possible... But this is all still in the works, as well as our actual on-the-ground work.
World AIDS Day is this Saturday, December 1st!!
And, that's all for now...
Peace.
