As I'm getting more settled, things are getting even better. For example, I learned this week that our showers do in fact get hot water, after you flick the water heater switch! Such excellent news, although it's so hot here that I've barely needed it. My laundry came out fairly well, although a bit stiff with all the soap that I failed to wash out but the ironing helped soften things out...

Last week was good, we're kept so busy for the first three weeks with Swahili lessons, cultural sharing, etc that by the end of the day we're exhausted! This week we had a female human right's lawyer who spoke to us about gender issues in Tanzania, which was really interesting. She talked about girls in school (or lack thereof), women and HIV, etc. We also had many Swahili lessons so now we've all got the grammar and vocab down pat and are totally fluent (not!).

Teaching English has also gotten easier. For the first week, I mainly just watched but last week I was thrown into the position of "mwalimu" (teacher) when no one showed up on Thursday. One of the translators had come down with malaria so wasn't able to be there and the other volunteer wasn't there so it was me standing in front of the class with my Swahili dictionary staring at the students. Having learned numbers in Swahili class on Wednesday, I decided that I could at least teach them that. After a painful hour of me getting blank stares after everytime I said "sawa?" (okay?) they eventually started to understand me and I them. They're also very shy and so it's hard for me to know if they know what I'm talking about. They're very cute but scared to look silly if they get something wrong, so no one ever volunteers to answer questions. A little different from SCS where we all wanted to have our voices heard!

The women's group also made mango jam last week. The German volunteer, Paul, led us in the jam making and it was a big success for round one. The women all brought a couple mangos and some sugar from their homes. Using a solar cooker donated by a past volunteer we endeavoured to make jam. Paul had found jars in the local dump so we sterilized them and then used them... some Tanzanian recycling for you! The end result was very tasty and there isn't much left! This week tomorrow at the business meeting hopefully we will talk about whether this is something that they could do long term and as a source of income. Potential problems include lack of jars and lack of drive to continue once the volunteers are no longer there to help, but we'll see.

This week we are headed to Arusha on Wednesday, a city about an hour and a half's drive away from Moshi. There we are attending a court session at the International Criminal Tribunal for war crimes committed in Rwanda. I am really looking forward to it and afterwards we get to talk to someone from the court, ask questions, etc. Hopefully there I'll be able to get a micro sim so that I can get my iPad kicking and upload some photos! Hope you're all surviving the Canadian winter, I hear it's particularily brutal right now. I'll try my best to send you some heat; we certainly have more than enough!