Day 7: Week 1 Thursday

Well hopefully firefox will be more stable than Internet explorer and we can write this entry.

Today I (Ruth) went to meet with the local Lions Club with Peter to organise the contract for the joint building of the dorm and showers at Msandaka. Really good people to meet as it turned out that there was another Lions member across the road who could sell me lots of mosquito nets at a good price. We are going to distribute these tomorrow when we go back to the school that we gave out shoe boxes to this afternoon. Unfortunately the younger classes go home in the afternoon (and those are the ones we wanted to distribute nets too) so we have to be there at 8 am in the morning. Arghhhhhhhh that means getting up even earlier (be impressed Gnome the queen of lay ins is even getting me out of bed and then we try and get the other girrrls up). These Lions guys are real go getters when it comes to this sort of thing.

We didn't get to our school today but we felt that the afternoon at .......... (to be filled in later) was well worth while as it seemed to be even poorer than our school which is already very poor. It was at that point that it really hit home to me, when I saw children without shoes, just how poor some of the people are here and how just a few pounds can make a difference.

There are 35 orphans at our school that the community already fund, and they have very little extra to give to start off with. It would be nice to be able to fund these orphans which wouldn't take much and this would then enable the community to use any extra they had to help further fund the new classrooms which have been sat unfinished for over a year.

Keilah and Amy went shopping for materials this morning and spent the afternoon at their school (hopefully they will update you all soon).

This evening we went to meet the Moshi Kilimanjaro Rotary Club who were discussing Tshirts for their 50th anniversary amongst the charity bits. Not a meal meeting but we have been promised dinner at the Lions next week (not that we need any more meals as we are being fed so well there is not much chance of losing weight).

Time for bed (said Zebedee) for this couple of thirty year old blonds who just can't hack the late nights and early mornings.