What Letter's This...

Day Ten:

Today Colin and Nigel dropped Angie (from the LIFE Project) Nav, Aryn and I off in Ngandu Village. We went to work in the preschool today and we brought our tents because we were planning to spend the night there. As Nigel and Colin were driving away I realized that we had forgot all our food in the back of the Land Rover and there was no way to contact them. So we pooled our money together and bought... a chicken. An alive chicken that they would have to slaughter and pluck all the feathers off for. So after dealing with that we sat outside and waiting for class to begin. All the school kids, atleast 50 of them, gathered around us and introduced themselves. Then all together they began siging for us. All the songs were sang in Tonga and it was SO GOOD! I couldn't believe it. I wanted to get on the phone will a music producer and get them down there immediatly. And of course, I cried. It was inspirational to hear them so alive with their music. They are the most positive people you will ever meet in your entire life and they have the worst lives.

Then after we listened to them we were welcomed into their classroom. The kids were around 4 -6 and they were working on their alphabet. (this is a different school than the one I was talking about in my earlier blogs). The school was 100 years old, and it was one large room with a chalk board. We handed out crayons and paper and sat with all the kids one by one and went over the letter 'L'. That was an aweosme experience, one of my favorite since I've been in Zambia.

The SAM Project is involved with their school feeding programs, with this program it provides the kids who attend school to have a meal, and sometimes it will be the only meal a child will receive that day.

It was close to night fall and the teacher had been the one preparing our meal for that day, since we had no idea what to do with that chicken. She cooked it for us over some rocks and we got some rape that we grow in our gardens. After we ate all the school kids came to our camp and sang and danced with us. I was so amazed by it all, I had such a good time. This is slowly starting to feel like home for me.