Kids at Play

Kids with homemade bicycles:















Rolling harvested sunflower heads:

Craftspeople and Potters

Tangazo, a hatmaker in our village.
He uses thin strips of baobab bark and painstakingly stitches them together.

Potters in a neighboring village. Their pots are made by pulling the clay from the inside of a solid lump of clay and working it upwards into the walls of the pot.

Our Village Primary School

Hello everyone! This post will be devoted entirely to our village's Primary School, including lots of pictures. The school has about 450 students from 1st grade to 7th grade. When we arrived the school had 7 teachers, most of whom live on the grounds of the school. Unfortunately, one of the teachers died this March after being in the hospital for over a month. Needless to say, this has affected the school greatly, and we witnessed a long line of students making small (10 to 20 shillings) donations to the teacher's family. All of the pictures below were taken in about early February. We apologize to James' aunt who has probably been waiting for news about the 2nd grade class that has been communicating with her class in Texas. We hope this helps!


Part One: The Road to School









Someone giving 2 students a "lifty"

























Part Two: Big School Pic and Cathy's Friendship Class





























Maria Ngatunga, teacher of the friendship class

















Students who wrote letters to Cathy's class












Other students in the friendship class














In the classroom








Part Three: A Meal A Day and the Student Shamba (Farm)

Thanks to an outside project (not Peace Corps), students have started receiving a meal a day in the form of uji, a stiff porridge made from corn flour, peanut flour, sugar, and salt. We were thrilled to see this since even after the rains started the village was experiencing food shortages, an obvious obstacle to learning. According to the head teacher, school attendance has increased from 57% to about 84% daily average since the program started. Also, teachers and students have been working together in the student shamba, growing corn and peanuts to keep the project going.







The line for uji. Students bring their own cups.


































Teacher in the kitchen.


























































Student hoes outside a classroom













In the peanut field with teachers
















In the corn field









The End. Til next time, take care of eachother.

At our village

Our kids :) (well, ok, actually our neighbors kids) They're sitting in our courtyard:



Loni (our nearest PC neighbor) and James visiting potters at a nearby village. There is unfortunately very little clay in our village.









Wilson, the chairman of our village's organization of small groups who is working closely with us, teaches us to build a fuel efficient stove in front of our house:


The local cement fundi helping us build a rainwater catchment tank. We're trying to follow a design to use less water. And on the very first day... The rains come!!!





(the road in front of our house!)

Mikumi National Park

(The suspension on our bus)