I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! We celebrated Thanksgiving here in Tanzania by having a nice Indian dinner at the Impala Hotel in Arusha. (Tandoori chicken and samosas makes for a great substitute for turkey and mashed potatoes.) We’ve been extremely busy here working on several projects before the children leave for their holiday break next week. I can’t believe how quickly the time has passed!

Here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on:

• Land Purchase: Mama Lucy has just received her NGO bank account with Barclay’s so that she can go forward with purchasing the land for the new school site. As you might imagine, the process is quite different, and quite difficult here. There is no MLS or Zillow to search for available properties and land values, and much of the land is still on tribal lands where an elder must approve of any land transactions. I’ve been getting a crash course in Tanzanian real estate but let’s just say I won’t be applying for a Tanzanian realtor license anytime soon. We’re hoping to put a down payment on the land by early next week if all goes according to plan.

• Greeting Cards: I’m extremely excited to announce that we’ve finally put our greeting cards up for sale on our CafePress store today! Pius, Naomi and Faith who are pictured as snowflakes on the card below have told me to insist that you buy some. This was great fun from the outset – we had several photo shoots with the kids and they had so much fun wearing the costumes and designing the artwork for the cards. Remember that all proceeds from the sale of their cards goes directly to supporting Shepherds Junior in rebuilding their school. We’ve got two different cards available and I can’t thank Fineline Graphics & Design enough for their generous support in helping us design these cards. I can’t wait to show you what we have in store for Valentine’s Day!

• Postcards: The Class 3 children were taught a photography lesson by a professional photographer, Eoin Vincent. Mr. Vincent brought 2 digital cameras that were donated to the school through the generosity of Olympus. The children were delighted to learn how to use the cameras and some of the children were holding one for the very first time. The children have been taking turns checking out the cameras each night so that they can take photographs. Some of their photographs will be made into postcards that will be sold in some of the local outlets in town. We took a few of the kids on safari this weekend to help jumpstart their photo collection - here’s a picture taken by Leah Albert, 9 years old of a Baobab Tree. I think she may have found her calling.

• Pen Pal Letters: We brought a few Pen Pal letters written by 2nd grade students from Holland Elementary in Satellite Beach, Florida to some of the children at Shepherds Junior. Some of the letters are hilarious! Tyler from Holland Elementary asked whether the children ride elephants to school and Zoe Monk asked if she could get help with her math homework. We’re bringing back equally funny responses from the children here at Shepherds – hopefully we’ve just planted the seeds to a lifetime of correspondence and friendship.

• The Big Debut: The faculty and students of Shepherds have started rehearsing for their first-ever fundraising performance! Their performance will be held at Via Via Cultural Café in Arusha, on Friday, November 30 at 4 p.m. and admission is Tsh 3,000 (roughly $3 USD). The children are really excited about the opportunity to perform in public and this is a wonderful opportunity for the school to begin fundraising for themselves. Just today, one of the parents stopped in and picked up 10 tickets to sell at a meeting she was attending. I can’t wait to see just how many people show up!

• Storybank: Since we’re hoping to share some of the stories of the parents, children, and teachers of Shepherds, we’ve been making unannounced home visits to some of their homes this past week. I can’t even begin to describe to you how amazing an experience it has been to learn about some of their situations. We’ve interviewed a grandfather who uses the income from a few banana trees in his backyard to care for his orphan granddaughter, a mother living with HIV, and families with two white-collar incomes all living within a few blocks of each other. We’ll be posting their stories on our site in the coming weeks but I wanted to share one story with you now:

Sayuni, who appears on our “Peace on Earth” card, is a 6-year-old orphan who attends Shepherds Junior free of charge. She lives in an orphanage a few blocks away from Shepherds Junior, where we visited her last week. There, we met Mama Ana, a woman who couldn’t be older than about 20, who single-handedly - and without any pay - cares full-time for Sayuni and 10 other orphans, ages 3-15. While we asked for some details about where Sayuni came from, and what happened to her parents, Mama Ana knew very little, except that she was brought to the orphanage by someone who attended her mother’s funeral. Like over 1 million orphans in Tanzania, Sayuni has lost both of her parents. A Shepherds Junior, though, she attends school in an environment that doesn’t brand her with a mark of poverty or shame, in a uniform that is washed regularly by her teacher, Rachel, to ensure that little Sayuni fits in with her peers.

This is, for me, the most compelling thing that differentiates this school from many others in the area: it does not isolate the poor and orphaned nor segregate children of greater means. Instead, Shepherds Junior is a unique place where children from disparate backgrounds can learn from and grow with one another.

I hope you’ll continue to support our efforts to build a new school for Sayuni and so many others like her.

Til next time…