Tanzania Trip Day 7

Started today with a lovely breakfast prepared by our cook, Loveness. We then had a welcome ceremony with the whole school (they sang and danced their welcome song for us) and a tour of the campus by our host students.

It is quite an operation here - they grow some of their own vegetables and have a chicken farm that produces meat and eggs for them.

 There was even a physics lesson happening on a Sunday morning - we look forward to seeing the school in full action this week. We then boarded the bus for our day in Morogoro.

 Our first mission was to buy some fabric for when the tailor (who will be making custom items for us) comes to visit tomorrow. We visited three shops where the kids were all able to pick something out.

We went to a downtown hotel, the Oasis, for lunch. Indian food was their specialty and we had a spicy and leisurely meal. The last stop of today’s tour was to meet up with our SEGA host students at the Mgolole Orphanage.

This was  a home run by Catholic nuns for several dozen kids whose families had been hit by disease or other tragedies. The SEGA and Monomoy students brought supplies (diapers, cooking oil, etc.) and then played with the kids for a couple hours. They had a chance to hold babies in the nursery and play games with the others on the covered part of the courtyard - too hot to play on the playground (mid-90’s). Our students were wonderful with them, giving and receiving love, entertaining them to no end. It was hard to pull them away at the end. After another fine dinner at SEGA, we took some time to debrief and talk through their experience today and so far on the trip. They seemed to have a new perspective on what we have, what is important, what we can learn, and how different experiences can be for people in the same society - here and there. They had the evening to relax before bed - up early tomorrow for morning assembly at 0720.