Crab-Walking Through Middle School

A dear friend from high school is following me around my old middle school in Panama. Curundu Middle School, to be exact. I am sliding trough the halls on my back, propelling myself with my legs. Kind of like crab-walking. We travel through the halls this way for a while. Finally we come to the cafeteria, only to discover that the school has been converted to a women's college.

I pitched in with a lot of the work this past week, mostly carrying stone and mixing mortar. The problem has been that by becoming more of a laborer, I lose some of the clout I need in order to be a manager. I got really frustrated when some of the workers did not want to do their jobs because it was something that I had been doing. "Oh, Andrew will do it". No, Andrew is reading plans and trying to talk to the stone-cutters right now. So you need to mix the mortar. Lindsay and I talked about it for a while. It is more important for me to do my job and keep track of quality control than it is to feel good about pitching in with the work. I plan to keep working hard, but giving more attention to my managerial duties. The building is going up, the plumbing is installed, and we start digging foundations on the nursery school next week.

This weekend was AWESOME. My friend Lacey just got in country a few weeks ago and is the librarian at a Christian school in Kampala. She and her friend Jean came in to Jinja for the weekend. We celebrated my birthday, ate cake, had some great conversations, went to the official source of the nile (tourist trap, but fun), and watched Lost.

Lindsay is moving back to Kampala next week. I am really pretty busted up about it, I won't have my Jinja buddy to eat pizza with on Friday nights. But now that we know it isn't that hard to travel back and forth from Jinja and Kampala it will probably happen a little more often.

Other news, I am going on a project trip to Kenya in May. There aren't a lot of other details yet, but I will let you know as I get them. Time to work on my Swahili!