"I don't know! She just came and ate my kuku!"

Oh. So much has happened. This won't all be in order, but it doesn't really matter.

The mama who cooks our lunch and dinner for us, Mama Sisi (so AWESOME) also owns either the restaurant at the Royal Beach Hotel or the whole hotel. We're not sure. But we went down a couple of nights ago to have dinner there. It is beautiful. It is right on Lake Babati, which is full of hippos and sometimes crocodiles. There were also a few canoes carved out of tree trunks, like the Native Americans would do. There were a few patches in them. All the volunteers and teaching partners wanted to go for a ride in them, so some locals kept bringing their own canoes over and charging for rides. Hilarious. Some of the canoes were patched pretty terribly. They kept having to bail water out. But I got some great pictures of the lake and of the group going out in canoes.

Speaking of the lake and hippos... I forgot to mention earlier about the hippo on the side of the road. One night Evelyn, one of our coordinators, gets a call. "Guys, there's a hippo on the side of the road!" We all start running, practically anyway. We thought it was dead and saw a large groud of people around this object. Then we saw that the object was moving and I kept thinking, "That is a weird looking hippo..." We get closer. It's a cow. And her calf. Then we realize the hippo is on the other side of the street. Which makes more sense, since that is where the water is. We got so many pictures. All of us were getting so close and getting into the swampy areas with the hippo. The locals were smart and stood back. Sam and Yonas got really close. Ester did a little dance trying to get close enough for a picture with it and the hippo "charged" at her. Yonas kept disappearing into the trees and popping out at a different place to get a good picture. He was super close and Peery and I just said, "Oh, it's okay. He's Masai." Not really a good excuse, but whatever. It was just awesome.

Grace, Frank, Sara, and I saw the hippo again just last night. We were walking and all of the sudden I see Grace stop and grab Sara. I see what she's looking at it just as she does, and I grab Frank's arm. The hippo is on the side of the road, literally five feet in front of me. All we could really see was its glistening skin in the moonlight. But it was so cool. To be that close. We could have touched it!!

I can't even begin to write everything. We've been having a really great time. Orientation is going great. It's sad we'll be splitting into our neighborhoods so soon to teach!! I wish we could all stay together! But we've been doing teaching demonstrations. It is kind of cool to do official demonstrations. We always get up and teach stuff, but it's not official. We really have learned a lot about our teaching styles and translating a lesson and everything. I'm excited to get in the classroom and on the street!

We've been getting dinner for ourselves the past couple of nights. It's cool to check things out for ourselves. There's a supermarket with peanut butter, honey, nutella (ridiculously expensive here...) and anything else you could ask for! We are all stocking up on it for our homestays so we can have a variety of flavors. That's what we're lacking here: flavor. But we deal and find nutella.

Speaking of dinner... Last night after our hippo incident, Frank, Grace, Sara, Peery, Danny, Kara, and I went to eat at Mama Sisi's place. Frank had some chicken. This woman came in and we all thought she was waiting on us. All of the sudden she reached down to Frank's plate and took a bite of his chicken. We were all wondering what was going on. Frank just sat and stared. When we asked what had happened he said, "I don't know! That woman just came and ate my kuku!!" It was hilarous. Kuku is the Kiswahili word for chicken. The whole incident was hilarious. Plus the fact that Frank threw in a Kiswahili word instead of just using chicken! So great.

Well, I know there's more. I think I might have written about the hippo twice, but oh well. More detail in this post. Next time I will bring my journal so that I can make sure I get all the funny stories. I just don't remember all that now.

Kwaheri!