Right, the usual apologies for infrequent blogging, but it's been a hectic couple of weeks....

Tomorrow I'll go to J K Nyerere Primary for the last time, say goodbye to my students, appear in heaps of pictures but not take any (my camera was stolen along with my phone AGAIN), hand out lollipops and stickers to the children, write out my email address for each and every one of the teachers, recieve thiers in return and leave. Which will be horrendous. Then I'll go to my creepy-crawly infested yet cosy little home (as it really is my second home now) pick up my packed bags, lock up for the last time, go over to the landlord's house to give some presents and swap email addresses (people are obsessed with keeping in touch!) and then head into Arusha town for the last time, staying in our cheap and useless favourite hotel for the last time....Argh, it's all a bit tragic. I can't believe four months has gone so fast.

We've spent the last couple of weeks just having FUN, having finished with the syllabus. We recieved our donation money from AV and spent it on some badly needed textbooks, a lot of sports equipment (previously the equipment consisted of a deflated football, and they didnt even have a pump for it) and 3 beautiful maps of the world, tanzania and east africa respectively. The maps were painted on the wall as given the large class sizes here, taking everyone outside to have a look is much easier than passing around a battered atlas. Then we've put all these new things into practice, and had a fairly epic game of rounders today interesting as we had easily 200 children on the field and no one had even seen a bat before. The other teachers tried to help but most of them had only an abstract understanding of what we were doing, and one even tried to swing the bat like a golf club....Still, many hours later, the kids had got it and a very spirited game was going on. Team Simba (team lion) and Team Kiboko (team hippo) battled fiercely, though it was all so chaotic I honestly couldnt tell you who won....

Anyway, on saturday morning I leave, along with 11 other volunteers on our massive trip around East Africa. We head from Arusha down to Dar es Salaam for an overnight stay, then get the ferry over the next morning to Zanzibar. We'll stay there for a few days, beaching and checking out the arab style markets, then go back to Dar and get the train on an 800 mile (39 hours!) journey up to the north of Tanzania to the town of Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Luckily 1st class on the train is only 25 quid, so we'll at least be able to sleep a bit, avoiding the chickens and general chaos that happens further down the train....From Mwanza we plan to border cross into Rwanda, spend some time seeing the museums and memorials, then head to Lake Kivu for watersports and some general chilling (border crossing sounds like we'll need a break afterwards....). From the Rwandan capital we're heading to Uganda for white-water rafting on the nile, bungee-jumping and quad biking. Then a bus from Kampala to Nairobi so we can arrive in Kenya in time for our AV organised 5 day safari in the Masai Mara. And from there, home on the 19th June. And typing that epic has basically taken up all my internet time, but at least now if I don't blog for a while, you'll know what I'm up to!

Hopefully speak soon, but you never know....

- Ruby x