Thursday...

Finally home. Its been a crazy day! So the regional celebration for
arbor day is taking place here tomorrow. The governor and everybody
else is supposed to be here. So instead of school they just made the
kids clean the school, which included picking weeds from the ground,
some of which are as large as high bushes, raking sand, cleaning
windows and a series of other manual labor tasks. The boys kept coming
up to me complaining about the work, even though I wasn't instructing
them to do anything. I just sat around with my girls and had some
pretty intense conversations. One of them was called out about
sneaking out of the hostel to go meet her boyfriend and how she
doesn't like to wear condoms because they make her break out. She's in
6th grade. So now I'm on a search for free latex-free condoms that
she'll have continuous access to. There's a lot of older boys living
in the area, but they're all drop-outs, so I'm tellin them like, stay
with boys in school, not ones that couldn't pass the grade you're
currently in. Also, I finally learned how to do cornrow's! Took a
while, and a series of teachers, but finally my fav girl Umuna came
through and thankfully she was patient. I'm not good at it yet, still
have some trouble starting it, but I got the pattern down. I'm always
thinking like, I know I'll want to do cute little styles on my
daughter so I need to learn this before I go. Success. Its getting
really hot, so a few of us headed over to a ladys house to buy some
'ice'. Ice is basically some type of juice drink that they pour into
little bags, tie a knot, then freeze. You buy one for fifty cents,
bite off the corner, then start sucking out the juice. So that was the
first half of my thursday. 2 weeks left of school!