Our first day with TunaHAKI

We visited the orphanage, TunaHAKI, with Scott for the first time yesterday to see the children in person for first time since last year. It's difficult to put into words how emotional and moving the whole experience was. All of the children remembered us and gave us huge hugs and patted our backs. We were introduced to the new younger children too. They all said in English, "Hello my name is . . . ."

The children were delighted with our gifts. The spinning plates were a real hit..also the books and shoes. They were forever greatful. Their smiles were so touching.


Dorrie spent time with David reviewing the architectural plans for the new dormitories and theatre and training space.
There is space planned for visiting atists which would make things easier for visitors. Maggie had a great time dancing and drumming with a big group of very rhythmic and excited kids. Those kids are awesome drummers!

We are on our way to visit the children the with entire group on the retreat 15 in all. We plan to do some writing, yoga and some gymnastics. We will try to write again soon but internet use is VERY limited around here.

Arrival to Tanzania

Checking baggage in Amsterdam was quite an ordeal. The weight restrictions for check-in luggage was 23 kilos and for carry-on was a 1 bag limit that was not to weigh over 12 kilos. We were just under the absolute maximum for all our check-in. 3 bags were 22kilos and 1 was 21.5. The cost for additional bags was 105 pounds. The ticket agent was not impressed that these bags were full of donations for AID orphans and street children.

YIKES!!!!
Well lets do the math.
2 extra bags would cost 210 pounds or $450.00
What were we going to do? First of all we moved our 300 pounds of luggage to the side so the anxious people waiting in line at 5 o’clock in the morning can check-in…..then we consolidated 4.5 kilos of the luggage in the underweight luggage, packed Maggie’s extra carry on into my larger extra piece of carry on which left us standing in line with lots of disgruntled people paying over $200.00 for our black bag of donations for TunaHAKI

After all is said and done we are feeling positive about what we are doing and looking forward to our arrival in Kilimanjaro which is just about 30 minutes from know.

We are in London

We arrived in london at 1pm where we will be spending the night before our last 2 legs of our trip to TunaHAKI. We will be up at 4am in order to make our flight to Amsterdam at 6:30. Then, we'll meet up with a lot of folks who we'll be spending the next couple weeks with, and they will be continuing on with us on our journey, a 10 hour flight to Tanzania!!! Maggie thinks "I can't believe it's actually happening. . ." We are both very jetlagged and exhausted from lugging around 300 lbs of luggage. It will feel good to get it off our shoulders and into the hands of the TunaHAKI center (both physically and emotionally)! We'll be writing next time in Africa and we may not have much internet access there. . . so stay tuned.

November 26 - Departure date!

Today is the day Dorrie and I embark on our adventure to Tanzania, Africa! The flight we are flying standby on looks great, according the expert, Jack Huntington. He said "you guys are for sure getting on." Dorrie and I are both very excited and anticipating our trip. The packing has been tricky to load 50 lbs in each of our luggage we have to donate to the TunaHAKI orphanage. THe Huntingtons have set up a bag scale on the dinningroom table to accurately pack as much as we can!