sawa sawa sawa

Sawa means good in Swahili, and is here street language for anything between greating someone and answering a greeting. This last week , wow, it has been a sawa week. Well there were two sad parts, I had to say goodbye to two of the kids Blind John who is special to all volunteers , and Jacky who was special to me because even though she begged a lot and was known for stealing ,she was so sweet to me and looked after me begging to do my washing for me etc. I will really miss them both. The end date of my stay is looming closer and closer and I am not looking forward to it one bit .In fact I might even start crying writing about it. Of course I will miss all the kids but there are a few kids that I am really close to. I especially will miss my best friends here Dominic and John Baptiste (yes thats right boys). My best friends are all girls so its great to have a males perspective as a close friend. I think also I will miss all the declarations of love that I get all day. Back home they dont have much taste , haha. Dad has been busy building mud brick fireplaces which produce no smoke and is also making a bio gas plant with claude , he has been very busy. My claim to hard work was friday , they are busy making a basketball court and there are about 40 people working on making concrete by hand and then passing it down the human chain to put it on the court (why they don't use wheel barrows don't ask me) .So first I tried my hand at shovelling , after 15 minutes I was super tired , but of course I reufsed to  admit that .Then I was asked to be the one who carries the emptied concrete buckets from the end of the line to the beginning to be filled up again , this was a piece of cake and I was told to slow down because it wasn't there culture to work fast! After lunch and a short break because of the rain , I joined the line of boys to pass on heavy buckets of concrete to eachother. I was the only one with no protection , I really didnt see the point of wearing socks on my hands , I did it for 5 minutes and my hands got all wrinkled . No socks , no problem. So I passed on concrete until the work was done for the day it was suprisingly really fun and initially there was no pain ( I had made fun of all the boys who had come nights before wanting me to nurse there injuries) , but the next day and the next and even today I had muscle pain -woah!I am now nursing without making rude comments:) Our kids have been performing very well these last few weeks , last week there was the football game we won the semi finals 6 to 1 , the most amusing part of the game was that there was a path right throught the football field and people had to go through the path the whole time . Today I went to watch volleyball and dancing in the next town with most of the older kids, our 'kids' (they are all my age or older) drew with volleyball and then we watched the disastrous traditional dancing competition  , every team except for two sucked (one being ours that didn't suck) .There was everything you can imagine that went wrong , extremely old people dancing with young , skirts and hair from the inore dancers falling off , bells from their legs falling on the ground , a drunk guy dancing through one of the songs picking up the bells of the ground , a guy dressed as a girl with thick makeup on , an extremely feminine guy dancing with a girl in such a way it was wrong considering he was practically a girl etc etc. It was hilarious , The modern dancing was much more successful. Our kids got second place in both tradtional and modern dance. My nose was killing me after that day , it has been burnt several times already and being burnt again was not fun. Its nice having dad here , not only is he a good cook but there is someone to do things with I wouldnt do with the other volunteers. We had dinner the other night goat brochettes which you can buy extremely cheap , you can get a salade chips a drink and two kebabs for less than three new zealand dollars. Dad really misses meat , I bought meat for him once at the butcher but the experience  of going to the unhygenic butcher is a little too much for me , and I refused to eat the meat . yuck!
thats all for now I hope you all enjoy eating meat etc ...
love from keza