our adventures and wanderings

In front of our house I know that it has been a ridiculously long time since our last post. Sorry about that! Here's what we have been up to:  We moved to Kenya, to Rosslyn Academy's campus, specifically. The transition was difficult at first because Nairobi is very different than any of our previous African experiences. But, we are adjusting well and love this country just as much as we did when we came in 2013.  President Obama flew into the campus and landed on our soccer pitch (basically in our backyard). We completed a week of new staff orientation and learned tons about Kenya and Rosslyn Academy. We completed a week of full staff orientation, met all of the staff, set up our classrooms, and made lots of new friends. We began teaching. I am teaching third grade and John is teaching kindergarten. We have just finished our third full week of teaching. Here's a little more about that: Teaching here at Rosslyn Academy is incredible. R...

As we have mentioned a couple times, we spent most of our time at Chidamoyo helping teach English at Dandawa High School. This was a new experience for us as we are both elementary teachers. We taught students in Form 1 and Form 2 in "small" groups ranging from about 8 to 20. Coming here, we didn't really know what exactly we were going to be doing. We just figured we would fly by the seat of our pants for awhile until we would figure it out, and that is exactly what we did. One of our "small" groups  Our very first lessons we just introduced ourselves and tried to gauge how well the students could speak English. The first couple days we were faced with a lot of blank stares and confused looks. We would soon learn that a big part of this was our accents. It was pretty tough for the students to understand us and they were also nervous to speak to us. After having them write, we found out that their English was better than we thought, and they just weren...

Dad, Amy, and Grandpa On Wednesday, July 8th, Major & I picked my dad, my aunt, and my Grandpa up from the airport in Harare. As I waited for them in the airport, I was filled with anticipation. I could not wait to experience everything with them. They hadn't been to Zimbabwe since 1978. That's 37 years! And yet, in those 37 years of being away, each one of them spoke often of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe forever changed each of their lives and would always be treasured by each of them.  I was beyond excited to see them. We headed back on the long, five hour journey to Chidamoyo. Major introducing the family at the hospital The next morning, we woke early to eat breakfast and have devotions at the hospital. Dad, Aunt Amy, and Grandpa were introduced to the patients and the hospital staff. After that, we headed to Dandawa Primary School (which my Grandpa built, Chidamoyo's local primary school). We toured the school and then they put on a wonderful program for us. Ther...

June 30th Journal Entry: The Smoke that Thunders. Holy smokes. Most unbelievable part of creation I have ever been able to witness. It dwarfs Niagara, and the land around it has been respected more. The first part you see when you walk up is the Devil's Cataract, which is the fall in the corner and it just roars powerfully along the edge as it banks the water down to the bottom. From this viewpoint, you can also see part of the main falls which are clearly huge, but you don't realize how wide they are until you keep going. Multiple viewpoints later I was still saying, "we still cant see the end of it," stunned. There were baboons everywhere along the paths. They do not fear humans one bit. At the second or third lookout there was a little mist, but I felt some more water hitting me than just mist. I looked up confused and saw that a baboon was peeing from the top of a tree. Seriously... a baboon peed on me. He got Rileigh too. I was disgusted but thought it w...