Halloween Njema!

Happy Halloween everyone! I haven’t had much success trying to explain the concept to people here. Somehow the notion of dressing up like weird-o’s, knocking on people’s doors and getting candy misses something in translation. But at least they’re kind enough not to laugh in my face about it. I’m celebrating today by watching the Simpsons Halloween specials that I have on my computer. We did have a Halloween party in town this weekend, which was a lot of fun. I love that all the big towns are essentially giant thrift stores. I found a pretty amazing (albeit very small sized) burgundy suit, so I couldn’t resist the temptation to go as Ron Burgundy, even though it was my costume last year as well. Though technically because of the beard, I was the “Milk was a bad choice” version, so there was a distinction. And the milk carton was indeed part of the costume. Hope everyone’s enjoying the holiday back home!

I’ve begun teaching computers in the evenings with the few laptops that the school has. They need electricity since the batteries are pretty crummy, so it’s usually from 7 to about 830. Trying to do Mondays and Tuesdays with the older students and Wednesdays and Thursdays with the teachers. Hopefully a good number of the teachers can get competent enough to continue teaching students after I leave. Some of them are actually pretty good already and have computers of their own.  Then there are others who don’t know how to turn them on, so it’s a wide range of abilities. I’m trying to leave it up to them in terms of choosing what to learn. Word and Excel are the most commonly used, and web browsers, even though there is no internet for them to use here. Soon I’d like to have some of the students maybe write emails that I can send to some of Sarah’s students in San Fran. We are doing a snail-mail correspondence thing too, but that could give them more practice with their typing and English skills. Or if anyone else wants to start exchanging emails with Tanzanian students, let me know! They all seem very excited about communicating with Americans.

We had our monthly tests last week for October. Every month there is either a monthly test, midterm, or annual test. These ones are shorter though (about an hour long). I made mine on Accounts, which is the subject I’ve been teaching since starting. It was the first real good feedback I’ve gotten on how well the students are understanding me. Of my two classes, one seems to be catching on a lot quicker, so I know that I need to have slightly different paces for each class. Overall they were better scores than my first test, so that was encouraging. I’m going to have to miss the end of the school year to go to my IST Peace Corps training at the end of November, so I’m also trying to prepare notes for the topics that I won’t be able to teach them.

Starting to get warmer here, my site is still cooler since it is up in the mountains, but definitely still hot in the afternoons. It’s only going to get warmer though, especially back in Morogoro where our training is. I’m dreaming of a sweaty Christmas… I heard there has already been some major snow around the East coast. Ridiculous. I will miss snow for sure, but not as much as I saw last winter, and not the whole digging the car out every morning business. The rains that were here a few weeks ago were apparently short-lived. It has been pretty dry for a while now, but the real rainy season will start up within a month or so I believe.

I just found out today that we will be getting a new Country Director for Peace Corps Tanzania in December. The current CD, Andrea, is taking a new Peace Corps position, though can’t say what it is quite yet (must be pretty important). From what I got to know of her in the few months I’ve been here, she has been extremely nice, and I’ve heard very good things from the other volunteers, so I’m sure she will be greatly missed. But the new woman has apparently done a lot of service in Tanzania and several other countries around Africa, and was actually the Country Director in Uganda for 5 years, so I’m sure she is a good replacement.

And now here’s some fun Halloween Kiswahili vocab:

Ghost: pepo

Witch: mchawi

Candy: pipi (Longstocking)

Pumpkin: boga

Bat: popo*

*interesting side note- there is a legitimate legend in Tanzania of a giant bat/person/thing (I guess it makes sense to call him batman) who goes around sexually assaulting men, and the only way to keep him away is to pass on the story about him to someone else. So here’s to me dodging that bullet!

10-13 Update

Sorry it’s been awhile since the last blog post. I guess it happens with everything-at first everything is new and different and needs to be talked about, but eventually you get into deeper and deeper grooves and there’s less new things to say…But luckily that’s not the case here yet!

The rain has definitely begun. I heard the rainy season isn’t supposed to be until late November, so this must be strange. Hopefully it doesn’t continue all the way til then. Though it will make all the hills around me more green and awesome to look at. But it’s also dangerous for the farmers because the bean crops haven’t been harvested yet and apparently they can’t take too much water. There’s a lot of bean fields right by the school, but it sounds like they’re doing ok for now. It is pretty cool to sit out on my porch while it’s raining, very peaceful.

I’ve been continuing what I’m sure will be a 2-year-long attempt to “clean” my house / renovate with cool new things. I started painting my porch (the day before it started raining, of course) and will probably do the inside at some point, bright pink as you would have guessed. The other day I was scrubbing down my choo (bathroom) and there were a bunch of little black things in one corner. I thought it was just dirt or something, but after mopping them up found out that they were in fact dead flies. I only wish the crazy woman from Dairy Palace could have been here then…”Well actually, yes, those are dead flies in the corner, thank you for noticing.”

Teaching is going pretty well. I’m teaching Accounts now, which is a relatively new topic to the syllabus but gets on the national exams every year, so it’s good to have that as a motivator for the students. It’s interesting because a lot of them are very good at doing calculations and using formulas, but trying to turn some real-life scenario into math just boggles their minds. If I say, “I have 50 bottle caps and then sell 20 of them…” most of them want to multiply the numbers for some reason. I thinks it’s just the way they were taught growing up that the connection hasn’t really been made to see math in everyday things. Maybe that’s part of the reason they don’t like it so much.

Tomorrow is a Tanzanian holiday, Julius Nyerere Day, to honor the day he died in 1999. He was the first President of Tanzania, when they gained their independence in 1961. He’s pretty much the most well-respected historical figure here, I would say, and I can see why. I have a book at my house of a bunch of his old speeches and he really was a great leader, and helped the country gain its independence peacefully. I encourage anyone to learn a little more about him and celebrate the holiday with me and the rest of Tanzania!

So no school tomorrow, but I think one of the nearby Secondary schools is going to come here to play football. I didn’t realize they have many inter-school matches, but it should be fun, especially if it keeps raining. Maybe I can even get in on the game-I’ve been meaning to humiliate myself more often.

It’s amazing what awesome finds you can have, strolling around random clothes markets. I was in town last weekend and bought a brand new authentic Reggie Wayne Super Bowl jersey for about 8 dollars US. It’s too bad people are bigger eBay wizzes here, or they could make bank on things like that for sure by selling to the US, though I’m sure most have no idea what things are really valuable in the states. I’m still on the lookout for an old donated shirt from the losers of some championship that got printed up in case they won- I hear they always ship those to Africa. Nothing would make me happier than to buy a Patriots perfect season shirt to bring back home and mock all of the die-hard fans.

I’ve been doing more experimenting with cooking, also. This week I made…wait for it….deep-fried guacamole nuggets. In my defense, the idea was encouraged by a friend, and also in my defense, they were delicious. And like every other food I can imagine, they go well with guacamole. I also made this upside-down pineapple cake, which is in the Peace Corps cookbook they gave us. Oh man, so tasty. As you can tell, I’ve been on a very strict diet.

That’s about all the new stuff I can think of now. We have our in-service training (IST) back in Morogoro the week after Thanksgiving, which is frighteningly closer than I feel it should be. Looking forward to seeing everyone from training again there.

Keep passing on the news from home! I’m assuming it’s turned into Bizzarro World, based solely on the fact that I heard the Lions are undefeated.

And the sage Swahili proverb of the week…

“Mke ni nguo, mgomba kupalilia.”

“A wife is clothes, a banana tree is weeding.”

Who says things get lost translation?