April 17th: Friday

Wednesday evening I went with Cameron and two of the teenaged boys to a house in Rita (btw, when I walked to 'Rita' and thought it was not that far, I went to a point, but it was not at Rita which is a couple miles further down, I knew the map couldn't be to scale) and we had a song service and story with about 17 kids anywhere from 3 to 16 years old. After, on the way back we stopped at a community hall that has a open ping pong table and played a few games. Cameron is pretty good and some of the locals are extremely good. They have a lot of time to practice. Which is better than watching a lot of tv. Cable tv is available but it is too expensive for most people to afford it, and that translates into the hordes of kids and people mingling on the streets in the afternoons and evenings, playing volleyball, or any other game and just spending time together. I talked with Matt, the guy who will be teaching the scuba class and he has enough interested people to do two classes, which is good because normally he does a eight week program, but since I only have until May 13, he is setting up an accelerated course.

Thursday was overcast all day. I made arrangements to move over to the SDA school and took half of my stuff over there. I'll check out of the FlameTree Friday. We still have not gotten word of when we can meet with the irooj from Arno, so I'm treading water on that right now. We went to a Taiwanese restaurant this evening and had some really good food – mushrooms, vegetables, rice, cabbage and wasabi. Then stayed at the ping pong place until closing at 9pm. We played a game of Scrabble before I headed home for the night.

Today, I checked out of FlameTree, moved my stuff over to the Delap school, had another really good lunch at the Diabetes Wellness Center, got a smoothie at MIR while posting my last set of notes, traded four of my finished books for a few new ones (The World According to Garp by John Irving and Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy), played with a kitten, listened to a sermon by Tim Mitchell, wrote out these notes, made couscous and am now headed to evening vespers. I'm glad for another sabbath.