Communicating with Our Childrens Schools

We are working with our schools to get homework assignments scanned and e-mailed to us while we are gone. While in Africa we will be home schooling our children with those materials.

Jessica may have an opportunity to attend some of the schools that Africaid helps support. She would probably be a huge distraction to the girls who attend these schools, who are usually brought in from different regions of Tanzania supported by scholarships that are provided by westernized nations.

We also will be visiting the International School of Arusha where, if we were to come for an extended period of 6 months or more in the future, we would probably have our children attend. There are 250 kids from 45 countries when I last visited in 2002.

We will be setting up both Wilmot, where Mackie and Zoe attend, and Evergreen Country Day School , where Stephen and Jessica go to school, with video conference capabilities so that we can visit our schools virtually from Africa. We will be using Skype software for this purpose. We've been warned that the bandwidth is nowhere near sufficient for this purpose but we can hope!

While Evergreen Country Day is fine with the older kids leaving the public school has an interesting way of tracking attendence for us. As long as we e-mail every weekday that will count as attendence...pretty cool!