Camp Sky and More!

I spent the last two weeks in the most beautiful part of Malawi, the original capitol city, Zomba. I went as a volunteer teacher to teach hand sewing at camp sky. Camp Sky is put together by the education sector of the Peace Corps. Two students (a male and female) are chosen from every secondary (high) school that has a Peace Corps volunteer at it. We find a place, this year Zomba Catholic boys school where we move in for two weeks.



The camp is 7 periods of 50 min classes for a total of 8 days. Core classes such as Mathmatics, Biology, English, and others. There is also business, health and hands on like pottery and hand sewing. I assisted in other classes like Health and Wellness, Performing Arts and Accounting and taught my one class of sewing. I had 22 students 8 male the rest female. I had only planned one project after all hand sewing takes time, but the students finnished the second class! So I ran to town and came up with a second project which they finnished the next class, so for the last class we talked about how and where they can get resources for sewing in their village and how they can make money from hand sewing. One of the things we did was a goat disecting session with the whole camp. We had two goats a male and a female that were disected, the kids enjoyed seeing and naming the different parts. We ended that day by not being wastfull and eating the goats for dinner.



Saturday halfway through the camp we rented three busses and drove out to Liwonde National Park where we met Peace Corps Enviornment Volunteer Julia. We went on a game drive through the park… until we got a bus stuck in the mud... after pushing it out we had to turn back but not before seeing lots of animals! We saw impala, bush bucks, water bucks, kudu, wart hogs, elephants (big and small), baboons, vervet monkeys… The day was cool and cloudyish so we were able to see many animals.



The last day of camp we had a disco party which is the Malawian way of saying a dance. For the dance I and several others collected loads of flowers to decorate and then when we had way too many I decided to make several lei. We made 13 of them with real plumeria flowers, it was fun and smelled so good... they didn't last very long though.




Now onto more exciting news…
When we returned home after Thanksgiving and Bryans knee surgery we found 6 boxes awaiting us at our home!!!!!! It was like Christmas morning. We got so excited so we decided that we should start a Care Package Update section of this blog, so if you look on the left you will find the color coated list. This will be where we list every package we recive here on out. We will list who sent it, the date we received it and our favorite item in the box… this is hard however because we are two different people and well sometimes we like different things and sometimes it is all so good we can never really agree.

We also want to thank the people who sent us the wonderful care packages! It is always so very awesome to receive something from home! Here is a picture of our neighbor kids playing with the game Trouble that Petra and Tiara sent, the children love it!



If you want to send something and just don’t know what to send you can check out our list of Things We Can Never Have Too Much Of (formerlly known as Wish List). The cool thing about this list is that they are all links to websites where you can purchase or just look at what we are talking about… even the teas!

We do not have any set plans for Christmas yet... but I will tell you it is so odd to be singing Christmas Carols and sweating so much because it is over 90 F! What we do will depend on if the rains start where we want to go. So far the rains have not come to our area but have in Machinji and Blantyre... lots of flooding. I do miss the cold weather... and ice even. We wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!