Mlale

Mlale is by far the nicest school we've visited, partly because they had desks and furniture but also because of the students' English abilities and prior knowledge of what we were teaching them. This school was supposedly a Catholic school, so we had to ask if we were allowed to do the condom demonstration. There wasn't much evidence of it being religious though, and turned out it was actually a boarding school too.

Our questions during the negotiating sex portion of the class were not as harsh as last time. The teachers also get to do anonymous questions too, and the teacher meeter shared one with us that said they had heard AIDS stood for
American
Invention
Discouraging
Sex.
There were more teachers here than was usual, about 18.

Something different also came up about vitamin K. Some of the boys think that semen contains vitamin K and that girls need it for nourishment...another fatal cultural practice in action. Apparently labia stretching is common here too, I'll leave that description out.

We planted cassias again today, and it went well. My partner at this school was Bridget, so we decided to combine our names and name the tree Midget. Our kids were extremely enthusiastic and a lot participated, we really enjoyed them. They also worked really hard on their presentation and even came into school before we got there to practice it. It was nice to be able to communicate with them somewhat in English too, it made it more fun. Their team name was Nyika, which is a park ?...better than the Hungry Lions name which comes up at every school.

Since tomorrow is our last camp and we have a few days in between that and going back to the lake, we voted on visiting a refugee camp and coming up with a curriculum to serve them. We did lots of planning for this and met in committees but were informed yesterday that it wasn't going to happen...they wanted too much money from us believe it or not. So instead we are going to visit kids in the city for a day and visit an orphanage. Tomorrow is our last homestay and our last camp. I can't believe that we are so close to the end.