Day #? We have no idea what day it is!

Hello,

Today we went to Saint Andre school. It poured this morning. I'm glad that I have all of my rain gear, but I do miss my polka dot rain boots! Saint Andre used to be only for boys, but recently they started allowing girls to attend. Education has become so important to everyone here. We take it for granted in America. All of the students that I have talked to have such high aspirations! They all want to go to college in America (MIT, Harvard, etc!....Iowa State :) and then they want to be doctors, work for NASA, be like Obama! Everyone here loves Obama. I highly doubt they know everything about his political views, but they love him regardless. Anyway, the English class was very interesting. Even though this is a nice school, they still do not have the resources we have available at our finger tips. The students were studying English and they practiced reading a script that the teacher made up, hand written, and made copies for the students. They weren't learning from books, they were using the resources they had to learn the best they could. So impressive. The students love us everywhere we go.
After we left the school we went to a large market! This market had everything from fresh butchered meat hanging outside and people handling it (gross!) to arts and crafts, fabric, food, dish ware, clothing, etc. We spent most of our time in the arts and crafts. We realized how high priced everything was at the women's center. For some things we paid almost triple what we would have at the market. However, we don't feel bad about it because we know the money is going towards a very good cause. It was interesting because we were told to barter with the people selling the goods in the market. Some spoke a little English and we also had our drivers to translate so that was helpful. However, we had two drivers for 15 people so at times we attempted it on our own. I wish someone had a video camera because I'm sure it was funny. We all (the girls...boys don't buy as many things! Shocker) walked out with at least an arm full of stuff. It also made us realize how much we are going to have to leave with the orphanage to be able to fit our souvenirs in our luggage!
We ate lunch and tried to start organizing our donations. That was a nightmare. We took over one entire room and had stuff everywhere even on the balcony. We took some things to the orphanage to start giving them items. Today we played with ISU Frisbees and footballs. I wasn't feeling like running around everywhere because I was a little tired so I sat down with some kids. Cortney (there are two Courtney/Cortney's) and soon we had two little girls on each of us doing our hair. Then three or four other ISU girls sat down and we had a little beauty saloon going on. There are lots of fun pictures. It gave us practice because we want to get our hair braided, but we know as white people we will look stupid....but we may do it anyway. We already stick out, why not stick out a little more?!
That was pretty much our day. It felt like we did a lot more than we actually did.
Something interesting is that I am now called Chelsea on our trip. Cortney forgot my name (no idea how) and accidentally called me Chelsea. People made fun of her so much by calling me Chelsea, that they actually started calling me Chelsea on accident. So I guess my name is Chelsea now. The weird thing is that I respond to being called Chelsea.
We are starting to miss some American food. The food we are eating here is good, but we are craving coffee, Mexican food, s'mores, and chocolate!! Sounds so good to me!
To answer questions from the comments... Daddy, I haven't had corn here so I don't know if it is as good. They don't grow it in fields like we do. They just randomly plant some stalks where ever. You will find some along the road, outside of a house, where ever there is room. I highly doubt they use John Deere to pick it. Kathryn, our driver hasn't named the baby yet. At least he keeps telling us he hasn't. We put the names of the people riding in our jeep (we totally have the fun jeep!) in a hat and drew out names. Unfortunately, he drew out Ashley. He said he would use it as a middle name. We think he has already named the baby, but is thinking that “If I tell them I'm going to name it Ashley, they will never know!” haha. We love our driver. He keeps us safe and he likes us!

Tomorrow we check out of our hotel for four days. We are driving two and half hours to Ruhengeri where we will trek gorillas, relax on Lake Kivi, work with the Great Ape Trust (yes, from Iowa) in the Gishwati forest. We will be in more rural areas. Kigali, the capitol of Rwanda, is huge! I will only take a back pack for the four days, so I will not have my laptop. I don't know if I'll be able to write blogs or not while I am gone. Thought I would give a warning if you don't hear from me! We return to Kigali Wednesday, May 20th.