June 9, 2013
It has been a few days since I posted on the blog. We had a very successful completion of our work before vacation, which 2/3 of the parents we requested coming to talk to us their children and we learned a lot of valuable things about the children and their home life and health histories to fill in some questions we had from our assessment work. We have now shared our information with the parents and are helping them to get appointments at various local clinics to take their children for further evaluation.

We had two days of parent meetings it was very interesting who showed up. On day 1, we had all babas (or fathers) except for one grandmother who was the guardian for that child.  On day 2, we had almost exclusively mamas, with just one father and one mama and baba who came together. We are very pleased with the progress. After the last meeting, we sat for a while with the teacher in the standard one class and reviewed our findings and our plan for children. She is doing extra tutoring for children who need it during break, so we recommended some of the children go to her. Because it will cost the families money for the tutoring, we don’t know how many will do it, but we gave her the list of students who we think need it and she had a list of students she developed based on how they did on their end of term tests.

Next week, we are working on data analysis and Sarah has some other business to take care of for the organization.  Since, there is not much to share on that over the next few days, I will share the pictures and adventures of last week over the next few days.

Today’s pictures of are Mount Kilimanjaro. Since I see the mountain every day at some point (because it is there and I look for it because I am in awe of the it), I have become increasingly interested in climbing it. I can’t do it on this trip because of time, expense, and lack of proper equipment, but I am really planning on it sometime. Maybe it will be my gift to myself when/if I get tenure. I hope Keith will climb with me.

Look for the snow

Last weekend, I discovered that I could see the mountain from our backyard. It is not the best view, but I love walking out in the morning with me tea and looking. Frequently in the morning it is in the clouds, but sometimes I can see it. These aren’t great pics, I call them my mountain specs. When I was on safari my animal pics were so small barely discernible as animals, we called them specs. Enjoy and I will try to get better pics from a different location.

Look to the left of the triangle roof