Joshua's Birthday

We celebrated Joshua's Birthday in style at an annual Fourt of July bash at the US embassy. It was bittersweet because we are also saying goodbye to three fantastic Peace Corps staff members whom have received scholarships to study abroad, and four great Peace Corps volunteers who completed their service in country last week. They will all be missed, and it was an enjoyable way to say goodbye.

Joshua and I have been busy this summer at our clinics and starting a club in our neighborhood. The club has been a lot of fun. We meet every week with the kids in our neighborhood and do a health-related art activity or game. They seem to love it... and we do too :^)

The weather has become much more hot since mid-June. Temps are over 100 almost every day. We find relief from the heat in the cool canal that runs through the park close to our house. It is usually full of neigborhood kids that swim all day now that they do not have school. On hot days after work we swim for awhile as well-- we are grateful to have water in the desert, but we have read that it is at the expense of the Amu Darya, and the Aral Sea which are drying-up as a result of all the heavy irrigation in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It is a complex issue-- and very concerning environmentally. The canal is as thick as chocolate milk with silt from the desert--- we usually look pretty dirty when we get done swimming (we never go in above our chest :^)).

For Joshua's birthday I bought a couple of old tire tubes and we have even gone tubing down our canal *lol*. When you live in a flat desert-wasteland, you find ways to make life a little fun. Our neigborhood kids think it is pretty funny... they informed us that "tubes are for little kids who don't know how to swim." We told them that they make fun toys for "old people" too :^)

We miss you all so much! Sorry for the less frequent posting, we know longer have access to our blog from our city, so we can only post new entries when we are visiting the the Peace Corps office in the capital.