Wrecked

I'm sure you've heard, but the ship went down off the coast of Brazil, you can read all about it here:
http://www.thesurvivorsclub.org%2Fnews-and-articles%2Fsurvivors-of-the-concordia-sinking-arrive-safely-in-canada-_986.html

New and old

I'm in recife brazil, and just met the 16 new students only a few days ago, I am really excited for this semester, they seem like really neat people.

Almost done

Over the last three days I planted, dug, mulched, raked and watered a garden at a hospital, in order to provide the majority of the food for the infectious diseases ward, and also at the SOS village in the city of Lugga, providing food and skills to the children aged 2 - 14 there. It was definetly hard to maintain the high energy needed to deal with a swarm of children that all want to shake your hand and look at your camera and pull on you chlothes and so on. I will definetly appreciate ice cold drinks and air conditioning a lot more at home, as well as free time (not that there was much at shawnigan)

Senegal

Haven't been able to get on the internet much, security is a big issue so we can't caryy computers around much, same with cameras. I hope to get some pictures when we are doing our projects. The project I am a part of is Urban Agriculture, we are working on a container garden at a hospital, and trying to set one up at an orphanage. We are working in conjunction with SYTO, a group of Senegalese university students. The garden at the hospital is run by a US Peace Corps volunteer who we are also working with. I am definetly excited to get to the actual site and start working! The sail over was alright, but we had headwinds (so we couldn't use sails, and had to motor) most of the time, which usually happens like 1% in the trade wind area. Christmas was fun, we did a secret Santa, I knit a toque and I got a little anchor charm made of copper wire for my necklace as well as a canvas bag for my knitting stuff. Not much time until I'm home, but that also means saying goodbye to first semester students, which is a little sad.

This is the first from morocco

Morocco

Tunis was great, and morocco has been one of my favorite ports so far; we got to ride camels to a campsite where we stayed overnight, as well as getting to jump off of sand dunes, which was fun. I haven't had much time on the Internet so I'm going to upload a bunch of tunis pictures, then some from morocco. Hanukkah was cool onboard, the polish engineers made latkes and Dina made challah.

Tunis

Tunis was pretty interesting, we saw salt flats, the place where the first scene in Star Wars (the one with blue milk) was filmed, what the roach motels (roaches included) were like when we stayed out for a night, and many neat Roman ruins including an amphitheater and a temple. I particularly liked the Roman ruins, some of the architecture was very impressive. A small country, we toured a majority of it, but still definitely worth coming to.

Arrived in tunis

Took my first step on Africa this morning, making it the fifth continent I've been to, which is definetly awesome. I'm not really sure what to expect, but we've been told that women aren't supposed to smile, expose their shoulders or move within a foot of a man, otherwise it will be considered sexual advances and the men here are apparently very agressive. The sail over wasn't especially eventful, but Mr. Cleland started a team chess ladder and the competition is pretty intense.