Children's day

I woke up ready to really work out and learn more Tai Kwon Do, and Tarika was ready to teach me.

Actually, that's only half true. We woke up not wanting to leave our warm beds, but we had a lot to do before our flight out and I was still unsure if I would have luggage.

When we did make it out to our practice yard, we had a proper audience; the staff really loved us. Not that they decided to join us or anything...

After we finished I grabbed the paper with my luggage info and headed into reception. All the ladies were keeping themselves busy either on the phone or shuffling papers, but as I turned to find a place to wait, one of the ladies handed the phone she was on to me. You know what that means? I was happily jumping for joy for several minutes.

At this point we still had about an hour before we were scheduled to meet Paul and Josephine to catch the taxi to the airport, and we spent this time qt the orphanage next door.

GOHECHI NURSERY SCHOOL

We walked through the open gate and entered into the school's courtyard, although calling it such is probably too grand a word for what really amounted to a 1/4 acre of packed dirt.

Standing before us and talking with another man was a sharply dressed guy in a black striped suit sporting a mandarin collar and a yellow tie. He welcomed us to the school and offered a brief introduction on what we would find. We were in the nursery school section of a group of centers scattered throughout Arusha that educated children that either did not have parents or whose parents worked to much to take care of them. Children without parents in Arusha are taken in by other famlies in the community.

Although we happened to find the school in passing, most of the Americans to visit in the past have come specifically after hearing of the school through a blog written by an young American student volunteer. She chronicled her work with them and all the plans and programs she was working with the school to implement.

Americans - well, all foreigners, really - are very welcome to visit schools. There is a general assumption that we are all completely loaded with cash. Compared to them, we really are. Tanzanians live very simply, in either mud or cement bricked homes. Dirt floors, or perhaps poured cement. Pattered squares of cloth to cover the windows.