Life Recently

This week has been fairly uneventful. We are all starting to get into our routines and our house feels like our home away from home. I always love seeing my kids on Monday morning. I miss them over the weekends! We continue to work on letters and colors, but it's hard since now we have 31 kids signed up for class! New volunteers (9 of them) come on Saturday, and one of them will be joining Living and I at Watoto Rau, so it'll be nice to have someone else there to help us with the kids. I went to the legal aid office on Tuesday, and Esther and I decided it would be better for me to go in the mornings after all, since that's when most clients come in. Katelyn and I returned today but no clients came in so we chit chatted with Esther and two other attorneys and had a break for tea. It was nice, but I hope on Tuesday some clients come in so we can start working with them. I talked to Mama Grace yesterday and she is going to try to hook me up with volunteering at Rupanga, a secondary school in the area. The school is only open until 3:30 every day, so I would probably go straight from Watoto Rau to Rupanga and eat lunch on the way or stop at CCS for a quick lunch and then go. It'll be nice to have something to fill up part of my afternoons, and some of the kids from Tuleeni orphanage (my first placement) go to school there, so it would be so great to see my kids from Tuleeni every day! We'll see how everything works out. Everything in Tanzania is pretty unorganized, so it's hard to get concrete plans made, but everyone wants volunteer help, so I'm going to try to go to as many places as I can while I'm here. Last night after dinner we all went to Ibraham's house (Abraham actually spells his name Ibraham, so I figured I should actually start typing it correctly). We watched Rush Hour. Ibra is a huge movie buff, he's always asking us about American movies he's seen. It was lots of fun but I, of course fell asleep around 9:30. Stanley, our faithful cab driver, picked us up around 10:45 and had us home by our 11 pm curfew. Today Ellen, one of the volunteers who was here for four weeks then is taking two weeks to travel, comes back from Zanzibar. We are all so excited to see her. She's staying at Hostel Hoff, one block away from CCS, and she's here until next Thursday. We missed her! We are all planning on going to Glacier tomorrow night to celebrate her return. Should be a blast! After this week I will have officially been in Tanzania for 5 weeks. Halfway done! 5 weeks to go! I already know I'm gonna miss my friends here and my kids so so much! So very sad.