Long Time No Talk

wow. i hadn't realized it's been so long since i last posted a blog. If any of you still actually look at this thing, i'm alive. I guess a lot has probably happened since then b/c it's been 3 months. Things are continuing pretty well and i'll soon settle into a regular teaching position at the local primary and secondary schools. There i'll be teaching health-based courses centering HIV/Aids and Life Skills development. It should be good and it will give me a little more regularity and routine in my life.

I'm currently in Morogoro town for the next couple of days just taking care of a couple things and meeting up with a couple of friends of mine. We'll be travelling to Dodoma where we'll be having our In-Service Training (IST) for a couple of weeks. Not sure exactly what the focus will be, but i think it's to give us ideas for projects and teaching techniques back in the village. We're eaching bringing a counterpart from our sites. I'll be bringing Hatibu who's a teacher at the local primary school who has been helping me out quite a bit. As my work partner i think the conference will be good for him as he gets a better feel for what the Peace Corps is all about. The training should be helpful, but i'm also looking forward to seeing a bunch of my friends from my training class that i haven't seen since my site placement in August.

Things back in the village are going pretty well, but i ran into a bit of a problem with my previous counterpart. He's an older guy named Jimmy in his late 50s and had helped me tremendously with forming a number of the groups and projects i initially started. He's well, arrogant as hell and it's been getting to me for some time now, even though i consider him a friend. We had an argument and he acted like a baby and now he won't work with me. So that has made continuing with these groups really difficult and now i'm under a lot of pressure from these groups to get things going for them. It'll be a difficult task to organize all of them without Jimmy, but i'll try my best. I'm glad to start working within the schools, kids are easier than grown folk here. They don't expect handouts, they're just happy to hang out with me and learn new things. I'm gonna try to stick to kids.

So Christmas and New Year's was a blast here. I spent Christmas in Morogoro town with a buddy that lives here and a few other volunteers that hadn't met until then. They were all really cool and we had a great time. Lucas, who's house we celebrated at, got a turkey from a neighbor who raises them. The other guys and him slaughtered, defeathered and cooked that thing. It was awesome, less bloody than i expected. Best turkey i've ever had. For real.

New years a whole bunch of us traveled to Kipepeo Beach which is just across the bay from Dar es Salaam and surprisingly really nice. It was only a 10 min ferry ride and you couldn't even tell that you were near the city, which is nice b/c Dar is by no means the nicest place. The place we stayed at had a resort kind of feel, but they also had camping on the beach which you only needed to pay $5 a night for. Not bad. So i slept on the beach in my sleeping bag every night. It was awesome. Actually it was so good i stayed about 3 days longer than i had planned. I mean $5, come on.

Alright well i gotta run. I'm gonna try to be better about this thing from now on. Swear.
Happy new year! Hope ya'll ain't freezing yo' butts off!

Peace
Justin