I have had trouble getting blogs out and really it is a sign of good things not just me being lazy. As this school year raps up we are having our competitions, getting 2023 budgets ready, preparing Christmas gift budgets, going through government inspections, the church is having fundraisers and we are giving the students eye exams.

Let’s start with something fun and enjoyable. Two of the dogs that hung out with me as puppies have returned to me though I still maintain they belong to the students who are supposed to be taking care of them, Seth and Yusuph. However the two started showing up and they were barely able to stand. Malnourished and dehydrated along with various injuries, I could not turn them away. The female dog, called Buttercup, had most of her neck raw and bleeding from what I suspect is a rope tied to choke her if she tried to get loose. At first it was just her showing up. She is right around a year old. I got some cream for her neck and after a month the skin seems to be healed but no hair has grown back. It is still easily damaged. The first three days were only allowing small amounts of water and feed until their system got used to it so they would not throw it up. Then the boy dog, called Max, showed up without as bad of injuries but very malnourished and I guess he was less than a year old when he showed up. After about a month they seem to be putting on some weight, have energy to play with each other for hours on end. We have sit down, but are still working on stay and no to biting. The female dog does not leave my side often and likes to sleep on my feet during the day. I am not sure what will happen when I have to leave, but hopefully I will find a solution. I have been able to find actual dog food though a little expensive. 18 kg bag is about $60. My other big issue is that I cannot find a vet to “fix” them and they are getting close to the age that will be a problem. Buttercup is on the left.

This year I wanted the Tanzanian side to take a bigger role in our budgeting process for 2023 and the Christmas gifts. You know sometimes when you want to show someone how to do something you have been doing for years it sometimes takes you four times as long to walk them through it than it does for you to just do it. I really thought including them in the process over the years and showing them how we came up with numbers would avoid that pitfall but it did not.

The biggest issue with both budgets are the inflation rates. Food has been skyrocketing in price and so have things like bookbags, water bottles and good exercise books. Our Christmas gift budget went from $16 per student to $22 and we now have 189 students to purchase for plus our staff.

We did start giving our pre-unity through Standard V students preliminary eye exams this month. I say preliminary because I am just using a basic eye chart and keep the students the prescribed 20 feet to read the letters I point at. It did not go well in pre-unity because so many still don’t know their letters. But for the rest it went well. For students I saw struggling to see, or just got the lines wrong I will try to find an eye doctor in Moshi to take them too and have their eyes checked properly. I identified 3 having real problems seeing and another 4 on the borderline. The rest read to the 20/20 or 20/25 line with no issues. Next is to find the doctor and get an estimate on the cost of exams and glasses.

We have been doing our spelling competition last week. Things went well and overall the girls dominated the competitions. 11 of the 16 to place in the top three of their classes (16 because we had a tie) were girls. So congratulations to them. I switched things up for Standard V this year, using a large block of homonyms after the competition went through about 8 rounds and down to 4 students. I did this because most learning here is memorization and that is true of spelling also. So I wanted the older kids to have another element to expand their knowledge. By using homonyms, they had to ask for the word to be used in a sentence so they would know which version of (heir, hare or hair) the word to use. This allowed for mostly easier to spell words but it made them think a little more. Memorization does not always give good results. For example my sheets have the word bookshelves but if I ask for bookshelf they will write bookshelves because that was what they memorized. Pictures coming after the math competition next week is over.

We also are having some fun with the sister school project. We have submitted our first video and are currently working on our second one to Mauldin United Methodist Kindergarten program. They have done a fundraiser to help fund feeding our students and raised $1500 their first time out.

The church recently did a fundraiser as well. They started building a new Sunday school building as part of their compassion program about a year and a half ago. It still remains about 40% complete so they wanted to raise funds to complete it. It was a rough day for me as Pastor Stephano told me it started at 10 am but actually started at 1 pm. After arriving early, I spent 7 full hours at the church outside in the sun. I did not bring food so by the end I was starving. They had several groups come in to do some lip synching to popular songs. Weirdly, the Maasai choir did the same instead of singing themselves like they normally do. Several of our students participate in both the church choir and the Maasai choir.

This event did follow some of the normal fundraising activities of important people getting up to make a big show of their donations and then forcing everyone to make their donations and telling what they donated via the microphone. I cannot say I like that particular system as it tends to be more about showing off than giving for a reason. In the end they probably spent as much on food and paying for groups to come in and lip sync as they raised for the building. I was glad I had a phone call home so I could leave after 7 hours.

This week I head out to Arusha to buy bibles for the Christmas gifts.