Pole Sana! Arusha TZ

Hey guys!
Sorry that it has been so long since our last update - we have had some internet difficulties at home! We have a beautifully long blog about Zanzibar we will post next week along with some pictures! Yay! We managed to survive a ten hour long hair-raising bus ride to Arusha (a city in the north of Tanzania) and are preparing to climb Mt.Kilimanjaro tomorrow! This past week has been hectic but very fun as we were wrapped up in preparations for graduation which happened on Friday. On Tuesday we went on a field trip with the girls to a town on the coast called Bagamoyo. It was an old slave town and the girls had been dying to see it, so we went as an end of the year treat. We took a big bus and a dalla dalla there and we both sat on the big bus. Somehow the girls managed to sing the entire three hour ride there due to excitement, and all of the songs were about Mungu - God. Typical of TZ, the dalla dalla got lost and ended up in Dar in terrible traffic and arrived an hour and a half late. We then proceeded to get everybody some chai-tea and maandazi -doughnut before starting our day at noon. We took a tour in Kiswahili around the various ruins - and actually managed to understand a fair amount. The highlight of the day was the beach. Many of the girls had never seen a beach or the ocean before, and a stampede of sixty girls ran, fully dressed, straight into the ocean. This included Babu Jona, who had a great time splashing around! The bus home was full of soggy, salty girls who insisted on drinking water bottles full of salt water that they had collected at the seaside. Days later, Mama Pili showed us a bottle of sand that one of the girls had brought back for her. She was so excited! Friday was graduation and was a beautiful ceremony to celebrate the school's past year. The girls performed many traditional dances and speeches were made by the headmistress,a guest of honour, the chair of Nurturing Minds, and a parent. We all cried at the awardingof the certificates to the pre-formals who were graduating to Form 1. Half of the crying was because we were so happy for them but we were also affected by the fact that many of the girls had no family to witness their graduation and give them the tajie (a flower lei) that is traditionally given to the graduates. We remember our graduation and how lucky we were to have families present to support us. As usual, the ceremony terminated in wild dancing and everyone was in such a good mood! Now we're off to a Maasai Market, and then to conquer Kili!