Triumphs in the picture for Tanzania Team

Jambo Everyone!
I'm so excited to finally blog. Since I haven't had a chance to blog yet, I have a lot to say about the whole trip in general. The entire experience has been remarkable!
In particular, it has been really great to see all of the plans we have to improve the school and orphanage come to life. The cabinets and storage have now been officially put into the school, and the hand washing station is really coming along. In addition, all of the little projects we have been doing are having a visible effect on the children. Alex Stern organized making dolls for the orphanage kids and they were handed out today. Seeing each child grab their doll that they had made and hug it was just priceless. We handed out the shoes and uniforms today also. It was almost like taking the kids shoe shopping as they tried on sizes and chose their colors. At the end of the day it was really great to see every student smiling in a new uniform.
One thing that I have personally loved about this trip is the bonds I've been able to make with some of the kids here. A girl at the school named Martha is so smart (she showed me her immaculate exercise book) and it is so much fun to be able to identify her and run up to receive her greeting everyday. Hussein is a 15 year-old boy (although he looks closer to 12) who is the son of a teacher at the school and he comes to help out everyday. I've gotten to know him a little and today we talked about American music he knew. He recognized JT, Beyonce, and we even sang Temperature by Sean Paul together. When Michael Jackson came into the conversation he broke out into dance; he was pretty good, too! I love to see all these connections pop up that I never would have though we had. Two other girl, Mwanaid and Miriam, help out at the orphanage and I talk with them everyday. As we were walking to the orphanage the other day Miriam was also walking home from school and she yelled "Alex!" and ran up to me; it totally made my day! I love how she remembered my name and was so friendly. Mwanaid is 14 and the other day we talked about our shared hatred or physics, haha-- if she lived in the US I could totally picture us going to Starbucks together after school and being great friends.
The culture and atmosphere here is surprisingly comfortable for an African country. Even the people on the street wave and say hi. Honestly, I am loving it here and I feel so good about what we've been able to accomplish. I feel like by this point the group camaraderie is strong and we're making some big strides towards helping the kids we've come to love.
Well it seems like there is never enough time to explain everything I want to (time to go to a before dinner meeting), but hopefully through all these great posts you're getting an idea of whats going on here.

-Alex Miner

P.S. Before I'm late for the meeting, I wanted to share some cool things I've seen.
1. People are really resourceful; you can see a bunch of people wearing shoes made out of cut tires.
2. Today we visited a Bitik maker. It's an art form along the lines of tie-dying. There were some beautiful pictures and he was telling us all about the whole process of painting on wax and adding different colors.
3. Obama is loved here, as you could probably guess. We've seen multiple guys with Obama belt buckles! Whenever we say we're American the first response is usually "Oh, Obama!!".
4. T.I., Rihanna, and some other American artists are pretty popular here. Today our guide Nelson was playing us some of his ringtones (even Deb was jamming out, since she's so up on the hip-hop music ;)