Ba-rock!

Please note who's face is all over ine and Jane's kanga wraps. That'd be Obama.

Last night was spent by myself, my fellow volunteers, and a whole crew of others at a bar called "Glacier Inn" ( although there is no Inn to speak of). The drinks were cold (a wonderful surprise), the tv screen large, and all the seating outside; all-in-all a wonderful setting.




but wait! around 11:35 DC time, the power went out. It was 7:45 pm here in Tanzania, pitch black, and the Tanzanians, Canadians, Brits, Irish, Aussies, and Americans in the crowd all let out a gasp together...only 25 mintues till inauguration and we'd lost power! EEK! Luckily, Glacier Inn was prepared for this kind of thing, and they had a back up generator ready to go...just a few minutes spent in the dark and then the screen lit up again.





oh no again! 11:45 DC time and the screen starts to flicker, we loose sound, and then we loose the signal from CNN altogether. Luckily Aljazeera was doing live coverage as well. So with less than 15 minutes to go till Obama's inauguration, we were ready!





And praise be to Krishna, there were no more mishaps until the very end of Obama's speech...we missed the last few minutes due to another loss of power, but I'm pretty sure he ended with, "I will Ba-rack you! Peace!"

After the inauguration itself a reggae band set up, and played until late into the night. They even had a rockin original reggae song, with a chorus of "barack obama. barack obama. barack obama. oh yea."

And earlier in the day Jane and I spent the morning at Juvi talking about Barack Obama, his daughters, his wife, where he went to school and other such things. Now, if you've been reading this blog semi-regularly, you may remember that we no longer have a local liaison to translate for us at Juvi. So then, how did we manage to share all of this knowledge with the Juvi boys? Well, we spent much of the prior afternoon sitting down with our program coordinator translating some select sentences...which we then practiced saying before heading off to Juvi. We also brought with us two Magazines (Time -- Person of the Year, and Washington -- Special inaugural issue) and spent a lot of time pointing. We wrapped up our civic lesson with drawings/letters to Bais Obama, which we will be packaging up and sending off to him in the near future.