Laura's dorm and my first trip to the market...

One of my new jobs at the moment is helping Rebbecca (one of our newest missionaries) run an afternoon program for the boys in Laura's dorm (ages 5-9) while she is away visiting family and friends in the States. We come up with a fun/educational activity each week and have a different room of boys come in Tuesday-Thursday for the activity. This week we hung the alphabet across the room and asked the boys to match the first letter of words with the letters hanging up. They thought it was fantastic!

Here is Room 2...the oldest boys (our Wednesday group)!

Rebbecca is there in the middle of Room 2 showing them what to color so we could add their creations to the row of hanging letters!

Here's a closer look at the row of letters and some of my drawlings...yep lions for all you ADPi's out there!

After helping run the afternoon program in Laura's dorm, Rebbecca and I decided to take a few boys and go to the market today. It is about a 20 minute walk up the road. We started our trek with 3 boys (aged 6-8), Rebbecca, a visitor, and myself. About half way there after discovering that keeping 3 boys with the 2 of us was more difficult than I imagined, we ran into an older boy from the center and he decided to join us. So we gained another hand and a translator!
Let me just explain to you what I got. About 10 gorgeous tomatoes (bright red and ready to eat), 5 mangoes, and a sink full (seriously!) of lettuce...for 35 mets. That is $1.17! Everyone said it was cheap...but really $1.17! I'm pumped! So, I'm thinking I'm going to try and get there once a week!
So other than worry about the boys staying out of the road and not running into people (they don't leave the center too often and therefore seem to loose the small amount of common sense they do have as soon as they pass through our gates), it was uneventful minus one small issue. On our way back, I realized Rebbecca had stepped back in horror of something in front of us. I quickly looked to see what could only be described as a hog...not a pig, a hog on the ground in front of us. It was tied up in a sack except for it's head, which was laying in the walking path. I later found out she thought it was dead and was horrified until two men came along and picked it up and it began to squeal. This caused even more horror...but I quickly pushed the boys ahead of me and made sure Rebbecca kept walking. I figured we needed no more attention directed at us then our white skin already caused.
It appears that white skinned people with small black boys is a sight to be seen around here.... But with few issues we made it there and back, the boys have salad for dinner tomorrow, and I have the mangoes I desperately wanted! A success in all!