ESW

Hey, guys. It's been a while, and I figured it was about time for another boring blog post. Lots of stuff has happened.

There was Educational Support Week, more commonly known as ESW or Homeschool Week. ESW is an annual five-day thing, where homeschoolers (mostly people from our mission, Africa Inland Mission) from all over East Africa (and some from farther out) come to the mission boarding school, Rift Valley Academy, to do standardized testing. While we're not in the computer lab testing, we're hiding in the library, hanging out on the playground or outside the cafeteria (which people usually call the cafo), wandering around getting lost, or eating (I misspelled 'eating' five times just now.). On Friday, us Junior-Highers followed someone in our grade around the whole school day because we didn't have testing. Normally, we would have presentations on Friday, but this year they separated the higher grades from the rest (because there were so many of us) and we had our presentations on Thursday. Like last year, I read a short story, this time about dragon kittens.

Then there was our time before and after ESP in Nairobi. My dad spent a week in the USA for job interviews (those went well, and he has a job) and to line up a rental house for us to live in while we re-adjust, get my sister settled in college, and travel all over the place visiting friends and family (and while we look for a permanent home). Funnily enough, one of my dad's current co-workers (another AIM AIR pilot) and his wife used to live in the area we're renting in.

And then, there was the trip from Entebbe to Arua yesterday.

Somehow, Eagle Air managed to double-book all three of our seats, and since we were the last ones to the check-in, we didn't get on. So, after several phone calls to try to figure out what happened, my dad suggested we bring an AIM AIR plane down to pick us up. That didn't work, so we ended up taking a taxi.

It was an eight/nine hour drive, on rough roads, with one stop around 1:00 PM. (We started around 9:00 AM and got there at 6:30 PM.) On the way, we saw at least nine broken-down trucks and busses, and one truck that had flipped and landed sideways all the way across the road. People had made a dirt road around it, and there was another truck broken down in the middle of that road. So there was a narrow, rough road/track around that, and then another broken down truck just off the dirt road. About five minutes after that, we saw another broken down bus. There's a reason us Mundys count the break-downs and crashes we see on that drive. It's sort of a tradition.

When we got back to Arua, our friends had a wonderful taco meal for us, and the best chocolate cake (with red, white and blue sprinkles and a ton of frosting) I had ever tasted.

And now, I'm sitting comfortably in my room typing this up.

Today, I chopped half my hair off.

I went from this:

To this:

I'm still in that stage of "do I like it or not", but I'm leaning towards the 'like'.

See ya later, people!

-Sam

(Edit: Yay for html coding lessons! My post no longer looks like a brick wall.)