My sweet transportation situation

i don't want to complain. i really don't. but the rainy season is just not that awesome. this is our "road" out of villages and to the paved road that eventually takes us to town with electricity, water, banks, post office, and internet. its a big pain in the butt. i reach this about 30km out of my village and the road is still 10km out. ugh. only a few more months of rain.

potty pics

above: me and walter. painfully close and not at all related to toilets but i had to anyways
above: walter loves his christmas presents!!!
above: the reason we're doing this. these are the current toilets. full, crumbling, totally unsanitary. you really are making a difference!
above: our new bathrooms! this will be the boys side. as you can see the building is up, part of the roof is on.
above: there will be 8 stalls in all. this is the girls side. we still need doors, locks, bars and curtains for the windows, to finish the roof, cement over the brick. but we're getting there!
above: people come everday to work on it! that part amazes me everytime i come to visit.

POTTIES!!!

the toilets i asked for help to build are almost done! this is seriously lightening speed for africa. one of the beliefs here is that there is always more time. which is true. and lends to a slower pace of life but can often be frustrating for a volunteer whose time in the village is in fact limited. anywho. its coming along. i've included some pictures of the new ones in progress and of the old ones that are full (yikes!) and are falling apart. i wanted to take more. and some with me actually in the pics but my batteries died. so this will have to do for now. but i'm really happy and proud of what we've accomplished so far. there are 8 stalls and its already a huge improvement on what they had. the next thing i'd like to help the school with is getting enough text books for each child. as of now there are about 5 kids per book. as you can imagine, its not really conducive to learning.

other news in my work here is that i've started a monthly health class for the mama's in my village. they gather every month to weigh their babies so me and my tanzanian counterpart, an amazing woman named Olipa Mpiruka, have put together a curriculum relevant to them. So far we've had one class and it went really well. i'm excited because simple projects like this seem to have more staying power. i think its looking promising.

besides that walter is still walter. getting in trouble and making me laugh all the time. my nearest peace corps neighbor, mary, just got two brand new puppies. i realized how big walter's gotten and now walter has two little pups that look up to him. so now we've dubbed him Uncle Walter. he takes this new responsibility very seriously, hearding them up when they run too far from the house. so despite everything else i still consider him a good dog :)

* ok i have 15 minutes left at the internet cafe and the outrageously slow internet here has yet to post 4 pictures that i started to upload 30mins ago....this isn't looking good. so i apologize if i'm not successful. i'll get it next time