Winding roads, choirs, and cement

Another week has flown by! I can't believe it's already Friday! The last few days have been busy as usual. Wednesday we went on another village visit. It was a 3 1/2 hour drive through the rainforest up around part of a mountain. The ride was bumpy but no mud or water this time :) We arrived around 12:30 and were greeted by the children's choir. After the usual tea and bread, they also served us goat before the church service. The service was unique because they were having a choir festival, so there were villagers and choirs there from about 5 different villages from the area (6 choirs total counting the Wartburg Choir). They are a lot of fun to watch and listen to, and they seemed pretty entertained by our performance as well. After the service we had a meal of rice, beans, and more goat. It was 6:30 before we left, so it was a bit of a late night with the long drive back. It gets dark here around 6:30 so it always feels much later in the evenings than it is, and I think we were all exhausted after a long day.

Yesterday was a service day. Our group divded into two groups to work at two different houses. I was in the group working at Luka's house. We were helping lay the foundation for a cow barn for his family's animals. First we mixed together cement, which involved carrying buckets of sand and gravel and stirring that with concrete and water, kind of like making dough. I guess this is the way you do it when you can't just drive up a big cement truck. Oh the things we take for granted. We then layed the cement out on the foundation that was already in place. In the process some people thought it would be fun to paint red mud on other people. Fortunately no one cemented themselves into the ground, although a chicken did run across the wet cement a few times. Luka's wife served us a really nice lunch of rice, beans, goat, chicken, cabbage, and fresh pineapple.

After lunch we came back to the Seminary and began a new task of constructing soccer nets for the goals here. Turns out this is actually a pretty big task. It's going to take another day of working on it, but I think we'll be able to leave them with a net in at least one of the goals, and hopefully the supplies and skills to build the second themselves.

Today's plan is to head to another village and leave some books and school supplies and have a church service. It should be a shorter visit than most have been, and it's not as far away so we should be back early in the afternoon. Tomorrow is mountain-climbing day, which I've been looking forward to, and Sunday will be our final village visit. These are our last 3 days in Morogoro before we head off to Zanizbar where we'll spend our last 2 days. Hope all is well back home. It won't be long now until we're back there.

Peace,
Emily