Good Samaritan School and Harwood's Visit.

The Harwood 2008 Group has come and gone. We hope that a few of them were inspired enough to think about coming back and continuing the first annual trip that Sophia and I have implemented over the past couple months. They were all happy to be here, did a lot of traveling around and got to meet a lot of great people.

Unfortunately all schools have been on holiday for an extra two weeks. There was a teacher's convention held during the school holiday, and they extended the holiday an extra week for the convention. Then when the convention was over, the teacher's demanded a holiday, and so the vacation was extended yet another week. So classes were supposed to resume on April 28th. However, nothing is how it seems in Rwanda. Boarding schools tell students to START arriving on April 28th, so when we showed up for class on Monday, there were no students there. We tried again on Tuesday, but we only had 3 students. We were planning on going in on Thursday, but May 1 is Rwandan Labor Day, so all schools had a one day holiday. So we have been out of the classroom for quite a long time now.
It has been very unfortunate. The HUHS group was not able to come to one of our classes and didn't get to meet many of our students. However, they did do a wonderful job working on the Kabuga High School garden. They brought over about 200 seed packets, and 13 sets of gardening tools and gloves and spent two days working on the garden, planting vegetables for the students to eat!
They met with some teachers who were just as excited and hopefully a KHS Garden Club will be starting up, where both students and teachers take the responsibility of keeping the garden going. The Harwood group also brought over hundreds of reading books, a set of math text books, 800 forks (!) and many other school supplies donated by Staples, that was givent o KHS. So we as teachers, and all of the students and staff were very grateful for that.

With our extra time, we were able to spend more time with the Harwood Group. We brought them to our friend, Teddy, who has started her own Nursery School, Good Samaritan School, running it off love and very little money. She has about 360 students, and 6 classrooms. The students range from ages of about 3-6 years old. You can imagine they were overjoyed at the visit from all of the white Americans, and everyone had a lot of fun singing songs and playing games with them. Harwood also gave some small gift donations (including candy which the kids went wild over). Below are some pictures of the students at Good Samaritan School.






















2 weeks from today we will be boarding a plane to return to America. We are both not looking forward to that day. Although we miss home, we have become very comfortable here, with the lifestyle, the people, the country in general. It is going to be an interesting transition back. We will be making many differnet presentations, which will hopefully make it easier for us, being able to share our experiences.

Keep checking, we know we haven't been updating as much. With Harwood here we have been busy. But thank you for all your on going support!