Hello outside world,

I hope your Christmas season is going well, and that you are all eating an extra cookie for me. This will be my last contact for a few weeks, because we go on outreach tomorrow at 5:30am. All the westerners got together this weekend for a Christmas party, it was so much fun. We played a game of secret Santa, and had a cactus for a Christmas tree. Karl caught one of the cats on the base and put it in a box, that was his gift for the secret Santa. It was pretty funny when Anna, from Finland, opened it, she jumped pretty good. We then stayed up until 2am watching the movie It's a Wonderful Life. We are going to Tanga for outreach, where it will be consistently around 30 degrees all the time. That should make for interesting Christmas weather. Sorry I have not been more consistent in my blogging, but hopefully when I get back from outreach on the 8th there will be lots of stories to tell. Until then,

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Holiday

This weekend Raymond and I along with Nick, the computer teacher here, took a trip to Moshie. Moshie is a town about an hour and a half from here, situated directly at the base of Kilimanjaro. It was a lot of fun. We left Arusha yesterday and then spent the night at the leopard hotel in Moshie. We had an incredible pizza dinner at the hotel, I had the Kilimanjaro pizza. It was a two sided pizza shaped like Mount Kilimanjaro, it was snow capped, using tomato sauce. We did some walking around town and a little souvenir shopping today, and then left Moshie at two o'clock. It was nice to have a short break from the routine of the base, and to see a new part of Tanzania. It is starting to get warmer here it was around twenty five degrees today in Moshie. I guess that is a little warmer than for most of you guys reading this blog. It is very weird to think that it is coming up on Christmas and it is still so warm. I don't know how the southren hemisphere does Christmas in summer, it just doesn't work. This will be our last week of class, then we leave for outreach on Monday. I will then be out of contact until January 14th. For outreach I will be going to Tanga on the coast of central Tanzania. I am in a group of twenty people, but Raymond and Karl will be going to Karatu, so I will be a little lonely...oh well. I hope the Christmas season has started well for everyone, and you are all starting to enjoy some pretty good food.