Politically Charged Day

So much happened today that I can't wait until tomorrow to update you about what's going on in this neck of the woods. Before my placement I emailed my mom talking about the huge support Obama has here in Tanzania. There's been a Reggae song written about him, I saw a truck with his face decaled on it in red, white, and blue, plus one of my friends, a local here, is making t-shirts that say "Tanzania for Obama." (If you want one let me know, they're ten dollars and I'll buy them and you can pay me when I come home.) Little did I know how the rest of my day would go.
I went to juvy were we began to till the soil in the backyard so that tomorrow I can go out and buy some seeds for them and then we can start planting crops that will help feed the kids there (the government doesn't supply the juvenile hall with much money for food and the children usually go without lunch, one of the children has a type of fungus that grows in your hair when you are suffering from malnutrition.) As I left juvy a motorcade drove by, apparently the prime minister was coming to visit the secondary school across the street from juvy for some kind of graduation.
Once I was back at CCS, after lunch we all loaded into the vans to go to Arusha. When we gotthere we attended the Rwanda trials. It's was very intguiging to see all this going on, but I also got tired of the sheer beauracy of it all. Some much time was spent on trying to decide whether or not to use a document that had just been presented or whether or not to play an audio clip. At four o'clock I leave the court room because our driver and a good friend of mine, Simmon, told me that there was a camera repair shop in Arusha. Simmon is told there isn't enough time to go to the camera repair shop because most of the people decided to skip going to the market so they could stay and watch the trail until 4:30. That meant we would still have at least a half hour to go to the camera repair shop after everyone gets out at 4:30, but instead everyone decides to stay until five and then we end up having to head straight back to CCS, so I waited around for an hour doing nothing when I could have been getting my camera fixed. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed; here it's what we call TFT, Tanzanian Flexable Time, which I don't always like. If I had known that we would have to wait until 4:30 I wouldn't have left th courtroom at four and same goes for if I had known it would carry over to five. Luckily, Simmon told me that he heads home for Arusha on Friday so I can catch a ride with him there, he'll take me to the shop, then take me to the bus station afterward and set me up for a bus back to Moshi.
So today was pretty crazy and tomorrow we get to make this cool African painting called a batik. Please be sure to also check out the pictures I was finally able to post of my safari, the internet here is very slow and we only have one computer to share with all the volunteers here so it ended up taking me about two days to finally finish the whole post. Plus I had to condense the pictures to make the upload on this slow connection faster, so if the quality is bad I still have the CD so I can show you a better version of the picture once I get home. Also, a lot of people are telling me they are having trouble posting comments; you can comment if you have a gmail, livejournal, or AIM account. If it's not a gmail account then you need to click the bubble for open ID, plus remember to type in the verification word to assure the computer that you're not a robot. I'll let you know soon about progress with the camera repairs and growing crops at juvy.