Jinja!

hello all! it's been a very productive and fun weekend. we've had many many meetings with partners we are going to work with over the summer. suzanne and i have met with pastor frances to talk about educational needs and starting a writing contest while we have writing workshops in the schools. he is giving us some great ideas and we are very excited. today we met with chairman livingston, he is like the senator of uganda. its kind of awesome, we get to meet with all these people in high positions basically because help international has built such a respectable reputation in the country. he talked with us about developmental needs and specifically answered our questions. i am becoming more interested in developing a program in the schools for special needs students. the teachers dont know how to deal with them so they are essentially kicked out of school. we want to train teachers on how to adapt lesson plans for these students. we want to pick five schools and do teacher trainings in the evenings each day for a couple hours. in the mornings we are setting up workshops to do directly with students. another commitee is focusing on public health, and we are going to combine with them to teach hiv/aids awareness and sanitation in the classrooms. i love all of the projects our team is doing! our five main areas are
1.education/schools(that me and suzanne are leading-teacher training, writing workshops, high school service clubs, teaching creativity and life skills)
2.public health(hiv/aids, hand washing, basic health, nutrition)
3.construction(adove stoves, mushroom houses, square foot gardening)
4.business(training, savings and loans groups, womens group)
5.volunteering(orphanages, elderly, soccer with street kids, hospital help)
yep! our projects are coming along! i'm excited to work witht all of the groups at some point througout the summer.
so on saturday we went to jinja to spend the day being tourists! it was so fun to go around to all the souvenier shops and see all the handmade crafts. i loved it! and it was crazy because everything is ridiculously cheap. i bought a really nice drum for about 7 bucks it is so sweet. our guard morris was jamming out on it with me the other day haha. after we went around to some shops, we went swimming at the triangle resort. it was sweet! it felt sooo nice to swim in a cold pool when it has been so hot and sticky. we had a blast. have i mentioned how many indian people live in uganda? i was very surprised! we felt like we were in india at the resort haha. but ya life here is sweet! i have to tell you about the drive thru's here! our taxi's pull off teh side of the road and i kid you not, at least 20 ugandans run up to the windows and nearly get run over. they stick poles with chicken, samosas, water bottles, fried bananas, etc INTO the car and ask you to buy them. it is chaos! very fun though. well i'm off! i hope all is well in the states! what is this i hear about the volcanoe erupting like crazy in iceland? am i going to be stuck in africa forever? at this point, it sounds pretty sweet to me! bye!