May and April Update

It's hard to believe that April and May are already gone. It's been a busy couple of months. The week after spring break we had an Easter egg hunt at the school for all of the students and their younger siblings. We decorated the eggs at the beginning of the week and had the hunt after school on Friday.


Also in April, we had two guest artists. One was from Canada and did a chalk drawing for us. The other was Megan and Melissa's grandfather. He drew a picture, cut it up and had the students draw the pieces and then put it back together again. Can you tell which is his and which is the student's?




Our house worker, Agnes, invited Michelle, Brad, Bethany, Scott and I to her house for dinner one evening. We were able to meet her seven children, her sister in law and her nephew and neice. He children sang several songs for us and we sang "If you're Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands" and "O Holy Night" for them. We ate dinner with them and stayed talking for several hours. It was a good thing that Brad was there to translate for us. My kinyarwanda is still barely beyond the meeting and greeting stage.

In May one of the rabbits in our back yard gave birth to eight baby bunnies. They are very cute and lots of fun to hold now that they are several weeks old.




Students also took their first standardized test in Rwanda. This was new as some of the students have never taken such tests before. We had them brought over from the states with a short term team. We did testing in the mornings and then activities in the afternoons. On Thursday, Barb Bennett came in to do cooking with us. We made meatloaf and microwave cupcakes. It was a little messy, but lots of fun.












Other exciting news is that we finally have water. After two plus months of carrying water and conserving as much as possible, Debby got someone to come out and figure out why we weren't getting water in our pipes. They discovered that the pipe we had paid for and had connected at our expense had been cut, and no one had told us. It's been reconnected now, and even though we don't have water all the time, the situation is much better than it was. Of course, to make up for that, the electricity went crazy a couple of weeks ago. The voltage got up to 305 and fried several appliances. We couldn't use it for about three days. It even started a fire in a house near Brad's. One of the things ruined was our wireless internet box, so now we all congregate at the Thomas' to use their internet until we can get a new box.