Puppies, Pills and P-hysics (Part 1 of 3)

A few weeks after starting the new term at Wilima, I decided to make my first stop as a travelling science man at Belle’s site, Mwatisi Secondary School in Tukuyu, near the town of Mbeya. Loading up the science wagon (backpack) with the necessary provisions, I hit the old dusty trail (crater-laden dirt road). But along the way, sickness struck in the form of some kind of tonsillitis / mono virus – I’m still not totally sure which one it was. The timing was convenient enough, since I was spending the week at Belle’s site anyways, and that made it much easier to recover and maintain a steady overdose of Advil. What also made things much more tolerable was that Belle had just inherited an 8-week old puppy from a nearby Volunteer’s recent puppy surplus, so Apollo was able to keep me in as high of spirits as possible as he struggled to adapt to new concepts of indoor bladder control and not being constantly smothered with attention.

Having tonsillitis / mono in Tanzania while sleeping with a puppy every night – is there any better way to define juxtaposition?

Luckily, by the end of the week I was feeling a little better, and so the science competition was able to continue as planned. Once again, science wins the day. It was slightly more difficult to do a weekend event at Mwatisi, since it is a day school, and most of the students do not come in on the weekends. But at least half of those who were expected to show up came within 3 hours of the stated starting time (pretty darned good by TZ standards), so everything worked out great. We were able to use several of the activities that I have done in the past, and saw some new and interesting ideas from the Form III students. They were all really excited to participate, especially when we handed out prizes of colored pencils and USAID-provided school supply pouches. At a school whose only 2 science teachers over the last 3+ years have been Peace Corps Volunteers, it was pretty cool to see the students getting so excited about doing science activities. And the school headmaster and some other Tanzanian teachers were there observing most of the time as well, and really seemed to appreciate and get into the events themselves.

So for me, it was back to Wilima, but only for a few days, since the following week would be the Shika na Mikono (hands-on science) group’s turn to lead training sessions at the new Peace Corps Volunteers’ pre-service training…