Update from Moshi

It is very hot here.  Also very dusty much of the time.  Oh well, I guess that's what I should expect from living near the equator.  My work at Amani continues to go well and the kids are showing a lot of progress with their reading and math skills.  I do have a few who have started to test me a bit to see how much I will let them get away with, which as they find out is not very much ;).  But overall they are working very hard.

This weekend we held a mexican night at our house in Karanga, which was a vast success.  It was really good to eat mexican food after 3 months without it and one of the other workers at Amani made some delicious salsa.

I'm definitely beginning to miss people in the US a lot.  I think spending a solid 9 day cruise with my family gave me a good dose of family time right before I left, but it is beginning to wear off as I realize it will be 9 months before I see anyone from NC.  So to deal with this issue I have decided to go on a big safari over Christmas and New Years.  I was looking at the itinerary today and found out I will be spending Christmas in Etosha Game Reserve in Namibia and New Years in Chobe Game Reserve in Botswana.  Now that I have blown any sympathy anyone ever had for me about spending the holidays away from home...Anyhow, I am really excited to get to see some different parts of Africa, especially Namibia which is supposed to be just spectacular.

So that's pretty much it from Moshi for now.  Hopefully the short rainy season will start pretty soon.

Hi all, just a quick update - it is getting much hotter and much dustier in Moshi, but we did get some rain this week.  The rain is good for cooling things off but makes the clay soil very slippery so it definitely makes walking around an adventure.

I am continuing to work mainly in small groups with kids on reading basic Swahili and doing basic math.  I enjoy it and the kids are eager learners who (mostly) are making good progress.  Thank God that Swahili is a phonetically regular language - each letter only makes one sound so it's very easy to teach even though I am still learning the basics myself.  

I continue to enjoy living in Moshi, especially since the Americans who work here at Amani have taken to getting together occasionally and cooking "wazungu food" such as macaroni and cheese or pizza.  That makes life a little more like home.