The following is a portion of the life story we asked George to write after he spent an afternoon with us, sharing about his life. He’d written five pages about his younger years, but wanted to do a rewrite. He’s now graduated and gone, so we may never see those pages. You would have enjoyed the story of his young life. He was/is much smaller than others in his family due to childhood sickness. This explains some of the medical visits and superstitions referred to in the writing below. As a young boy, his father thought him too small to go to school, so he went to elementary school in secret, sneaking away from his cow herding responsibilities. He used the core of batteries for pencils and stole single pages from the back of his siblings’ notebooks in order to do his assignments. Unable to read, he listened to the other students read, memorized the text, and pretended to read when called upon to take his turn. He was befriended by the school master when the teachers observed his potential. The following is the more recent history, much of which we have experienced with him. For the most part, you can enjoy the broken English skills of our students in these updates. Edit helps are in parenthesis.
Your Hands & Feet in Tanzania,
Gary & Joanne
(Editor's note: George’s article was forwarded as typewritten words in an e-mail, with edit helps by Gary & Joanne that are in parenthesis. It is unknown if George typed the article himself, dictated as it was typed, or written on paper and later typed out by Gary or Joanne. Assuming the latter, while maintaining it as unedited, for visual impact I took the liberty to change the font to simulate handwritten words and to display it on tablet paper images to better replicate what George's original article may have looked like.)
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