Hot, hot, hot.....& not just the weather

I know that for most people the weather has been chilly or even cold. Here, it is summer, and it has been extremely hot—to the point where sweating while sitting is normal. Not only has the weather been hot here but the political scene has been hot everywhere.

We stayed up all night watching in anticipation on the outcome of the presidential election. There was a lot of late night eating—barbequing an almost 5 lb steak and roasting a lot of chicken. At 6 this morning, we celebrated Obama’s election of president. After watching both Obama and McCain’s speeches, we headed out to work where we were surrounded by all of our co-workers celebrating. Everyone was hugging, laughing, dancing, and cheering! It was an amazing experience, and really wonderful to see other people become excited as us. Yes, this is biased to my political opinion so I apologize for offending anyone…however, McCain did say that Barack Obama is president now and we must work together for the good of the United States of America.

Dumela (bobedi)!

Hello all,

I have been a little behind on my posting and will try to catch everyone up with what is going on here. Well, work is work not to much has changed since last time. I have been reading a lot of documents that may deal or not with child poverty. Recently, it became really interesting because I started reading the laws and Acts that would affect a child and it is interesting to see how their laws are written.

The weather here has been heating up and there is really no rain. We experienced a storm last night that consisted of a sprinkle (rain for here) for about 20 minutes and then just a lot of lighting. Last night we had fun! James (my old professor from school), Kat (a fellow alumn who was in Mike's class), and I went to a dinner, dance, and raffle to celebrate Ugandas independence. There was plenty of food and dancing! It was a really nice casino complex and well we felt a little underdressed. It is amazing how developed it is here. I am regretting on not bringing some nicer clothes here because people love to get dressed up here. Oh well.

I am meeting a lot of really nice people and started to run on a regular basis, and starting to go to yoga (yes, they have everything here!)

That is pretty much all of the excitement for now. I am still having trouble uploading photos, so I do apologize!

Dumela!

I have made it to Gaborone, Botswana. This journey took a little under 20 hours on a plane, where 15 hours of that time I spent going from Washington DC to Johannesburg, South Africa next to a man that was very nice but had the worst smelling breath ever that, hopefully, the world will not have to endure.

Luckily, when I arrived there were several holidays back-to-back and I did not have to go to work until Friday. However, my first work day consisted of meeting a lot of people (whose names I do not remember entirely because I could not pronounce them correctly) and sitting and reading a lot of documents in order to write reviews...yuck. (But I will be able to know what is going on in this country).

We are about to start a child poverty study, which I think will be good and things are already in motion with data collecting. (We are not doing the data collecting.) So far this weekend has been very relaxing: running errands, eating, and trying to stay on top of the news in the US.

My first real day here (Wednesday), we went to a game park where we saw one giraffe in the shade and sleeping (sitting up). We also saw some wild birds, ostriches, antelope, elephants, cheetahs, and hyenas. It really was too hot for the animals to moving about so there were very few to be seen. However, we saw them none-the-less.

That is it for now, nothing too exciting yet! This might really be a good thing.

In case anyone is wondering I am 6 hours ahead here that is for the east coast.