End of school and start of building

It is now the beginning of February the hottest month of the year here although we are having a few periods of heavy rain which is unusual but very welcome as it is cooler for me and it helps the locals shamba's (gardens for growing loads of fruit and veg).



At the end of January we finished our beginners class at language school which was good fun and we learnt a lot. This is us in our classroom with our teacher who was very encouraging. I am glad that it is over with for now as our days were very busy and I feel that any more information would have gone straight over my head.



This is a picture of us at our house with the certificates from the school. We are unfortunately moving out of this house this month as we are moving into our friends house for a few months while they are back in England and then we will have to find another place!

On Saturday the 24th of January we had the official ground breaking ceremony for the vocational training centre we are building. This was attended by lots of influential people such as some people from the government the German consulate, members of the board of the school, local traders, etc


This involved a few speeches from various important people including our project manager Mr Alex Kittow. This was followed by a viewing of the proposed site (with the sign which Paula painted) and then the Principal Secretary for Education (the guy in charge of the ministry of education), dug the first part of the foundation and finally we had some refreshments.

(Note the lady in the red top with the camcorder just behind the guy's head, she is filming for the local TV-enough said)

We did manage to record the local news which I have included for you to see although it is in Swahili you can see what happened. We are all in it at some point except for Alex although when Hans is explaining details of the site he is called Alex!

Since then work has begun. We have dug the foundations, installed a water supply and the laying of the foundations starts tomorrow. (For those of us who are interested this is not done with concrete as cement is expensive but is done by packing bits of coral rock closely together with a little bit of mortar in the gaps! We will see how it turns out.)

On Friday we are heading to the mainland and will be driving up to Kenya for a conference. I am looking forward to this as it sounds like an awesome road trip and we haven't been to the mainland yet but have heard that there are such things as supermarkets! We will also spend a couple of days in Northern Tanzania on the way which I am looking forward to as it is supposed to be beautiful and a bit cooler!

This is a picture of my friend who helps me with my language. Here I am writing stories in Kiswahili and then I tell them to him and he corrects me. I wanted to include this picture because if you look closely he is wearing a Royal Mail T-shirt-Amazing!

Finally here is a picture of me attempting to windsurf in no wind. I think that I this will be my hobby whilst I am here because our team leader has the equipment and there is not much in the way of waves as can be seen below