Some Fun Things From This Week

1. Eli (the assistant director at TOA) has a two year old daughter. This week she was wearing her mother’s high heels and jumping rope with a tape measure (in the high heels)…she is non-stop entertainment.
2. I went outside to feed our puppies (One Way and Huckleberry) and there was a hedgehog drinking out of their water bowl. Went outside the next night and same thing. Went outside the third night and it looked at me and waited for me to set the food down…I think we have a pet hedgehog now! What should I name him…hmm…Jodie threw out the names Hedgy and Hoggy, but I am tossing around Rainbow.
3. We went to town this week and Moses was in an exceptionally out-going mood. He waved to everyone at every stop we made. He even went over to a woman who had a little shop and greeted her and told her he’d like to come back again when he has more time to visit…we were kinda in a hurry.
4. We had the honor of being selected to host a launching celebration for an insurance company providing medical care for orphans. Got the dates mixed up and no one showed up when we had TOA all set up. Called the insurance people to find out it was the following day…the good news is that all the TOA kids were home from school so they helped get the place spic and span from the inside out two days in a row!
5. We had some visitors here from CA and one day we took some of the kids with the visitors to the new TOA property to fly kites…there is a great breeze at the new property. The kites were Dollar Store kites so they had a life-span of about two hours…after that they looked like nothing that resembled a kite, but the kids had a great time and so did the visitors.
6. Our cat Cupcake had four kittens on Saturday. I knew she was going to have them because she has laryngitis…always has since she was a kitten…and she walked in the room we were in and cried out so loud right in front of a bunch of us. When I heard her cry out loud I got up and put her in box with some old clothes. She had her kittens within an hour.
7. We brought our cat Cupcake to our home with her kittens and put her box with her kittens in our hallway. Cupcake was wandering around our house and decided to use Jodie’s bed as a litter box. It was horrible and Jodie had to sleep on the couch that night…thankfully everything washed completely clean and Cupcake is now banned to the hallway except when we let her outside.
8. Jodie and I got into a conversation with the very nice man who owns the coffee shop that we like to stop at to enjoy a latte. He asked us where we buy our eggs for the children at TOA and how much we pay. He then gave us the address of a friend of his who sells eggs at a cheaper price then what we were paying. After giving us sketchy directions we proceeded to drive over to find Mr. Aziz to purchase five trays of eggs. Mr. Aziz owns a spare auto parts shop so it took us a while to find him (since selling eggs and spare auto parts didn’t really seem to go hand in hand)…and then throw in that the name of his shop isn’t even on his shop anywhere. But we didn’t give up and eventually we walked into his spare auto parts shop and after introducing ourselves, he very happily sold us the eggs we needed at an excellent price.
9. When Jodie and I are in town sometimes we like to park our vehicle in one place and then walk around town to do all our errands. When we were looking for Mr. Aziz’s shop to buy the eggs we decided to park and walk to find his shop. We found his shop all the way down the hill from where we parked. It was good exercise walking ALL THE WAY BACK up the hill carrying all those eggs!
10. It is very common to hold hands here in Tanzania. I love that…I find myself holding hands with the older kids (they are teenagers) and they are perfectly fine with it. I love holding their hands and walking together. I love that they are completely comfortable and at ease with me. Tonight on purpose I held hands with Innocent, Benny, Irene, Witness and Margaret at different points throughout the day and they just smiled and flowed with me…love those kids so much!