I have made it back to the school and through my travels and now in the village the question I would ask myself if I did not know what was going on in the rest of the world–What Coronavirus? No one here wears a mask. While the church still is putting a couple of feet between chairs instead of having the armrests overlap, the buses still operate at 130% capacity (estimate). We do have signs up telling the students to wash their hands, cover the mouth when coughing and maintain distance between students. We have preschool and 3 elementary school grades-how do you think that is going. The biggest concern is how to recover the lost time the school was closed (approximately 2 months) so we have added an hour to their schedule.

When I left I thought we were at 150 students because we had pictures of new students being added to the enrollment. However, no one told me about the students who are no longer enrolled. In the end we have 129 students (1 less than when I left). From what I can tell none of the students were sick from Coronavirus. Most likely they were living with other people to be near the school and they went home when the school was closed and have not returned. That is what I am hoping right now.

Meeting the students after having been gone for so long was another What Coronavirus moment as they started to crawl all over me immediately. I have had at least two draped on me at all times I visit the playground area. One of the new students though is a lot of fun. He has a great big smile and joined our baby class. His name is Steven (not Stephano which is the norm in Tanzania because no one uses the “v” also interesting is that a student’s last name is actually their father’s first name. He is Steven William. (for those that don’t know my father’s name is William).

We are also doing some construction, one of the main reasons I needed to return. We are currently building a new classroom building which will house two classrooms. The cost of a Classroom Building is approximately $16,000 (why approximately-exchange rates). This will get us through Class 5 but we will need at least two more classroom buildings to finish the school. We also need an Office building and Dining Hall for the minimum needs of the school. We have other buildings like a maintenance shop we would like to build, but those are the ones that satisfy the basic needs of the school to operate. All in we need $80,000 to complete our basic building needs. This does not include the money to purchase chairs, cabinets, desks, dining tables etc. to make those buildings usable.

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Our kids are loving all the new playground equipment installed during the Coronavirus break.

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