Hi All,

Sorry for the long delay in writing. I got out of the habit while we were traveling over the holidays, and between a terrible internet connection and every-other day power outages, it’s been hard to get going again… Enough excuses. The power is now fairly stable (unless it rains, but the rains are getting less frequent as the rainy season ends) and we finally have a decent internet connection again after a couple of bad months. So, I’m going to try to get back in the habit.

Our biggest news is that after much consideration, we’re going to return to Virginia in July instead of staying for the optional second year. The two biggest reasons are money and the boys’ education. We’ve been happy with Charlotte’s class, but secondary education in Dodoma is just not very good. One year of a “cultural experience” has been worth a year of poor academic education, but we can’t justify a second year. Also, we’re running out of savings/home equity to finance the trip. We’ve gotten a lot of help from a lot of people, but the reality is that we’re still paying a lot out of our ever-shrinking pockets.

About the title of this post: 4 of the 5 of us have now gotten malaria. Charlotte and I have had it twice each, Henry once, and Leslie had one case that wouldn’t go away after the first treatment. All of us are well now, but it really knocks you down for a couple of weeks and isn’t much fun. Since the rainy season is ending, the mosquito population should decline over the next month or two. Everyone says that it can still rain in April and May, but that it’s usually not as frequent.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll post updates about what we did over Christmas (trips to Lake Victoria and Zanzibar) and some observations now that we’ve been here for a while.

Peace,
Kirk