Visit to Umoja School

What a difference a full night's sleep in a real bed can make! We awoke marvelously refreshed and ready for the next adventure. After a satisfying breakfas, which included coffee for Ms. Salamon (which made everybody happier), we set off for Umoja School with a bag full of sports equipment and school supplies.

We got a taste of the massage benefits of rural African roads as we headed further off the main highway and down the muddy, heavily rutted roads. Umoja school is charmingly situated between the Ngorongoro Forest and Lake Manyara - picturesque despite the occassional marauding elephant.

"Our" water tanks are completely constructed and curing and construction is proceeding at a furious pace on the girls' latrines. We were treated to a spectacle of song, dance, poetry, and a hilarious skit about the perils of drinking "pipe water" - the unsanitized water from the bore hole that leads to trips to the doctor or frantic runs to the toilet, all acted out so capably that it transended language barriers.
We symbolically  helped prepare a vegetable gardenand then shared in the school lunch - a special treat of beans and rice eaten African style (fingers only).

Finally we got to drag out the bag of sports equipment and spent the rest of the day playing with the children - volleyball, skipping, frisbee, soccer (some GREAT girls-only games), and the biggest hit - the parachute. The Tanzanian chidren quickly warmed up to us and were soon touching  our hands, our hair, and our cameras (one found the "delete" button on mine and managed to delete every single picture from the past two days - here's hoping card recovery software is as good as it professes to be).

Some impressions of the day are in the next post...

Written by - K. Athayde