Hello all,

There was a bit of excitement yesterday. 5 of the volunteers went away for the weekend to do a safari, spend a night sleeping with rats and bugs in a masai village and then finishing off with a trek up a live volcano yesterday morning. Apparently all went well until the volcano exploded. D'oh! Thankfully there were no injuries worse than cuts, bruises and a suspected broken foot, but all 5 had to run for their lives all the way down the mountain, dodging flying rocks, with one of the guides shouting 'Today we die' over and over. Note to self, never climb an active volcano!

Other than that things have been good. Yesterday I was told I was to teach the form ones (who are straight out of primary school), so I prepared a nice basic lesson, only to find that they were all around 15 years old and they already knew everything I wanted to teach them. Today I was back to teaching form two (the ones I had last week. However as last week not all pupils were back because it was stil technically christmas break, I got away lightly with 20 pupils. Today I counted 49! But they were still very well behaved, until the raucous game of fizz buzz at the end. I was also sharing the classroom with not only lizards, but also chickens today. Not sure how much English they picked up though.

The weekend was good. On Saturday I went to Arusha with a couple of the girls and spent too much at the Masai market. Ah well! Arusha is the nearest big town to Moshi and is mental. We had lots of people trying to be our friends. To be fair, most of them were actually really nice and helped us find our way around and didn't expect payment. They just wanted a chat with the strange white ladies. The Rwanda genocide tribunals are currently being run in Arusha and I'm hoping to go over there tomorrow with some of the others to watch some of it. But that still needs a bit of planning. I'm hopefully going to visit an orphange later on today too which I'm looking forward to, so gotta run.

See ya,
Sandra xx