Good News Again

Hello all,
Sorry about how our last post didn't actually post. We tried it a few times and it never seemed to go through but apparently just the title did. Oh well...anyways, thank you Jamie for putting what the news was. So as we meant to say last time, we are coming home for Christmas! We are extremely excited and on the 22nd of this month Heather will officially start her 50 day count down. We will be in Michigan from the 12th of December until the 3rd of January. We are so excited to see everyone! Please inform us of any dates that may work out for us to meet up with you.
In other news, things are going well here. We've started teaching English classes on Mondays and Wednesdays. It started with 3 men and 2 women and it's been steadily growing. Last class I had about 5 men and 10 boys and Heather had about the same number of women and girls. We're going to start splitting up adult and children classes because when asking an adult if they mind learning with the children he said he would rather not because most of the younger ones know English better than the adults and will laugh at them when they try to speak. So we don't want any of those mean kids teasing their parents. It's been a lot of fun so far and it has helped our Kaonde speaking because since most know so little English you have to translate for them a lot.
Also, we've been working on trying to get special education classes either in our area or find out if we can send the children to a school that can accommodate them. It's so sad how here most of these children are totally neglected. And the hardest thing is that even when opportunities are available most parents will not send their children because it is embarassing for them and they think that children with hearing, mental, or any other impairment simply can't learn.
This past week, we attended our first funeral here in Zambia. It was a very sad situation and the lady was so sweet. And also, she was one of the two that we were able to get a wheel chair for. She passed away only two weeks after receiving the chair. Now that she's no longer having to deal with leporasy we know she's far better off but will still wish that there was more that we could have done for her.
We have a few other projects going on as well like trying to get mosquito nets in the village before the rainy season starts and hopefully introducing some cattle into the village. In closing, there is a neat incident that I think it is important to share. A few days ago, Heather actually ran over a chicken with her bicycle. We were riding down a hill together and it was in the middle of the rode so I decided to ride right at it. Since Heather and I were side by side this probably wasn't a good idea because I scared it so it ran right into Heather and she hit it nice and square with her back tire. It probably lived??

Okay well we love and miss you all and are literally counting the days until we see you!
The Castles