This Ole House

These are two of our students and one of our teachers who were selected to attend a three week leadership event in the United States through the U.S. Embassy.  This is the second time Orkeeswa has sent students on the trip.  Lisa and I were luck enough to be traveling through Denver when these guys were there with Bold Leaders. So, we stopped in and visited them for a while. It was strange seeing them in the northern hemisphere!  The man on the left is the director of Bold Leaders. 

These are the first four recipients of the Orkeeswa Rural Entrepreneurship Development Program loans. They immediately began their small business with these loans and have already brought in their first repayments. Some of the money is going into a savings account for them as well for university.

We had a random layover in London on the way home. So, we stayed the night, ate some food and walked to a palace. We weren't expecting this (mainly because we hadn't looked very closely at our plane tickets!) but it was a nice holiday!

We moved into a new house. It's small but we are living on our own...which is nice. It's also right behind the other volunteer house, so we can have company if we want.  There's been a lot of other stuff happening too since we got back:

• our goat had a set of twins! Plus we added four new mama goats so now we're up to 6 plus three babies. They sometimes try to walk into the classrooms...they have no respect for boundaries
• we have a swarm of bees in one of the hives
• we are getting chickens (20) today (fingers crossed)
• our rabbits lived over the holiday and I think one of them is pregnant
• that garden still struggles (as does our ability to manage it successfully!) but we got some sorghum sudan grass as hay off of it, so that's good. Also, the fruit tree orchard looks great with all the rain we've been getting.
• classes are underway and going well. Honestly the first two weeks went really well. We have great staff and a really good group of students. We have something like 15 teachers now, which is GREAT!
• We're making progress on the entrepreneurship program. Brady, the other ag teacher received a $1500 grant to buy curriculum. We're going to use the ESI curruculum from Nebraska 4-H.
• Mud- had to walk a few times because of the mud and also slogged through it successfully a few times.  I think that's a fun element to the day...but it sure can eat up your time and morale if you're not lucky!
• Oh, we also got our form 2 (8th grade) results back and they were very good. We had NO students fail (first time for that) and also were around the top 11% of over 370 schools in the region.  Agriculture was 10th out of 90 some schools too, so I was proud of my kids for doing so well.

We've also had some struggles too..

• Lisa's had a bit of a chest cold...hopefully going to whip it soon
• New house has LOTS OF MOSQUITOES  The little buggers find their way right to your ears at 4 AM. I appreciate the music, but their timing is all wrong
• We had to make some tough decisions on managing some of our lower academically performing students. I'm learning a lot as a leader from these conversations and decisions, but my hope is we (I) can use any wisdom we have to help these students and also build a solid school with really high standards.
• Tough mentally transitioning our way out of here. We've been here for what seems like forever. But now, we find ourselves having to say "when we're not here, this responsibility is going to be done by so and so..." It's good to have this time and try to equip the new leadership as well as possible.  It's just tough personally because you have such a connection, etc...  

That's the happs around here!  It was SO nice to see family and friends at Christmas and we're really blessed with a few final months here in TZ.  I guess we'll see everyone at home around the first part of April!

Seth