Nov 4, 2006: Fixin' roads

Good Day All,

Hope all is well there in the frozen tundra. It is hard to take my mind off another deer season missed. The only thing to hunt here are mangos in my back yard. Things are going well. Our health is on the upswing after weeks of not so good. We have been battling some real nasty head colds this week along with most of the staff. Classes are going well and all the kids are trucking along. betsy and I had the opportunity to speak at the chapel service a few weeks ago and tell everybody a little bit about ourselves and how we got here in our faith journey. That was fun.

Today I spent the morning working in one of the neighborhoods by school fixing some washed out roads and cleaning some road ditches. We cut out a bunch of overgrown vines and bushes next to a soccer field and fixed some steps, too. I saw that it needed work a few weeks ago and thought it would make a great community service project for the school. I put up a flyer saying we would do it Saturday from 0800 - 1200 assuming i might get a few kids to come and help. i enlisted a couple of janitors at the school and my night watchman to come down too. I was very surprised to see 19 kids from school show up at 0800 on a Saturday morning with shovels and rakes in their hands ready for work. We got so much done. THe people down there were very excited to have the roads fixed. It was really great.

When we were done with that I had to get the court ready for a basketball game at 2pm. The other team wanted to play at their school but we said no way because it was our turn to host. We went so far as to bring the team taxi money on Friday to insure they would come because they didn't show up last time. They finally came at 330pm and we started. We played so well adn i was really proud of the boys. We were up 24-4 at the end of the first. I saw the rain coming in hard up the hills so i worked in all the younger players and my bottom 5 guys played most of the 2nd quarter. We were ahead by 12 or so at halftime and the rain came. We play outside with no roof so the concrete court gets real slick when wet so we called it quits. We have had 11 games scheduled so far: 4 1/2 games played, 3 1/2 rainouts and 3 no-shows. THe other schools don't want to travel to play so they just don't come. They sometimes call later in the day and tell us they aren't coming but not always. The soccer coach says "AWA!" (Africa Wins Again!)

That's it for now. I better get going before the traffic at the bush taxi stand builds up and I get stuck for an hour.

Take care and stay warm!
Brian (& Betsy)