A New Year

[written 1-19-12]

Well it's a new year and the start of a new school year here at Wilima Secondary School. The school opened on the 9th, but I quickly learned that there is a difference between school opening and classes actually starting. The first week mostly consisted of students slowly filtering into the dorms and doing cleaning and groundkeeping around the school, which was nice because everything looks very nice and clean now, as opposed to the jungle-like tall grass and weeds that engulfed the school over break. But now with everything clean and soo green all over, it really is a sight to see.

I ended up getting the classes I wanted to teach this year: Form IV Math and Form II Physics. They are the two classes that have their national exams at the end of the year, so I'm very happy to be able to try and get them well-prepared for those. I started teaching for real on Monday. I think most of the Form II's have gotten to school by now, but still probably only half of the Form IV's. It's typical apparently for the students to trickle in over the first few weeks after a long break, especially at a private boarding school like mine, where students are coming from farther away. So I'm trying not to go too fast right now so the late-comers don't get whammy-ed too badly. We're doing Coordinate Geometry in Math and Static Electricity in Physics. I've been having some fun making different things to use as teaching aids. So far I've got a giant rice bag for a coordinate plane, a couple geoboards (slabs of wood with a grid of nails), and some other "works-in-progress" (aka failures) for different physics demos. It is cool though, some Peace Corps Volunteers over the last few years have started this Hands-On-Science program, with all kinds of lesson ideas using simple easy-to-find resources around the country. It definitely helps for the students to be able to see and touch things, rather than just sitting through lectures. And it keeps their attention- they sure loved watching me rub balloons on my head.

I also decided to open up a School Store of sorts for my Form IV students. They get points for coming to class, doing homework, participating in class, doing extra practice problems, and things like that. Then they can use them to buy notebooks, pens, rulers, candy, even paper cranes! I considered using cranes as the currency, but even at full capacity I don't think I could make enough for that. But hopefully I'll get some students to be my apprentices and see how many we can make as a class, maybe even make it a competition. But the big money prizes are things like soccer jerseys and balls. And the top 10 or so from each week will get to use the computers in the evening, so that will hopefully be a big enough motivation for them.

Speaking of computers, there has been a bit of an issue with them lately. I guess they were left plugged in over break when a big lightning storm hit and knocked out the generator, and it ended up frying a few of the chargers. I took them to a fundi (repair man-man-man-man...) last weekend, but I don't have too much optimism for getting them fixed soon. So we're down to 3 or 4 right now that can actually run, which makes it difficult to please the 15 teachers and 500 students, all of whom want a chance to play with them every day. But it's still better than nothing, and with my new typing and geography games, they will hopefully get something useful out of their computer time.

The other thing I'm focusing on now is trying to get a FEMA Club (Life Skills group) started at my school. A lot of other schools have them- it's basically just a club to teach about different life skills like communication, decision-making, relationships, and about diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria. Our first meeting is tomorrow (Friday). I already have a few older students who are interested in leading it, which is great because it has to be led by them if it's going to continue after I leave I feel like. We'll do a True/False type game to talk about some facts and myths about HIV/AIDS.

Aside from that, my free time has been occupied by making Scrabble boards, shotty bamboo furniture for my house, watching the full Star Wars collection (now moved on to Indiana Jones), and reading/listening to some books Christine sent me for Christmas. I got the last straggling Christmas packages in town last weekend, which contained gifts and some tasty, tasty homemade Christmas cookies, so I busted out the Christmas movies one more time and treated myself to Christmas 2.0 on Sunday. Thanks guys!!
I got some passion fruits in town as well, and made some awesome fruit salad with mangos and pineapple. I don't think I'd ever seen passion fruit before, except the juice, but they're pretty dang good. A couple of the avocado trees at school are starting to produce, which is very exciting. I've been closely monitoring the one in my back yard - just tiny buds now, but that won't stop me from checking up on their progress every day...
I hope everyone is braving the winter back home, assuming the snow has started by now. It's still surprisingly cold at my school because of the daily rainstorms, but I like it, it reminds me of home.

Til next time, love and miss you all, and here is the solution to last post's swahili joke that you've all been racking your minds over for the past few weeks:

Recap:
dog = mbwa [MMM-bwah]
Q: What is a Tanzanian dog's favorite breakfast food?
Answer: Mbwa-ffles!

Happy Holidays!!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! [Helia Christmas na Helia Mwaka Mpya!] I hope you all had a nice, peaceful, happy holiday season. Mine was different for sure, but much better than I ever could have expected for a Tanzanian holiday. After my IST travels, I went back to my site for about a week before going to Tukuyu for Christmas. It was really nice to have some quiet time after alot of travelling. My school was pretty empty with most of the students gone for break, but it gave me time to do some running, fashion some Christmas presents and decorate my house, thanks to all of the awesome Christmas decorations I got sent from home. My house was pretty well decked out with solar and battery powered Christmas lights, a mini tree, and even a creepy hanging snowman of Christine's from back in the day. Before I got back, there was apparently a big storm and lighting struck the school's generator, so there was no power most of the time I was there. Aside from the mild disappointment of not being able to watch Christmas movie marathons, it was actually really nice to just sit by candlelight in the evenings and go to bed early.

The week before Christmas I headed to Tukuyu where Hannah lives, and there were about 11 of us meeting up at different times for Christmas. There were already some very impressive decorations up at the house, but I brought all of my contributions as well and it really was amazing how Christmas-y we got it to look. We even went out tree-hunting, since there are a lot of pine trees in that area. After passing on a couple very promising ones because they happened to be in people's back yards (whammy), we finally found the perfect Christmas branch for our living room, and yes it was bigger than a Charlie Brown tree. ***Joke setup: The Swahili word for tree is "mti" [MMM-tee]*** So we decided to name her Mti-na Turner, and got her to stand up in a cut-off water bottle in a bin filled with dirt. We decorated it with solar Christmas lights, popcorn garland, lots of ornaments, and I made a giant Christmas crane to put on the top in lieu of a star. It was great.
I was very happy that several of my own personal Christmas traditions were still able to come true. Every year at home we like to go out to Olive Garden on Christmas Eve for dinner. This year we made this delicious "pizza soup" which should totally be added to the Olive Garden menu, and also had salad and bread - pretty close if you ask me! And we all watched Polar Express before bed, though we were all missing some of the classic cartoon and animated shows. Christmas morning we had cinnamon rolls with colored frosting, which is also one of my favorite Bonomo traditions, along with a giant fruit salad and breakfast casserole. Our Christmas dinner included a big steak pot roast, garlic mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing, honey carrots, and of course, mac and cheese. A great success for a Tanzanian Christmas dinner!

We also had a few new traditions-in-the-making that I can very much see catching on for years to come back home. On Christmas Eve we made sugar cookies and frosted / painted them with toothpicks to make some really cool shapes and designs, including Christmas giraffes. Another great new tradition was the introduction of the Christmas tent in Hannah's living room. I brought my 2-person tent in order to avoid the mosquitos at night, and so we set it up inside and strung Christmas lights along the top and crammed 3-4 people inside. It was a little warm and certainly got interesting after chili night....but still worth doing again!
Tanzanians don't really do too much special for Christmas, aside from some travelling and all going to church. But since it fell on a Sunday this year, it really wasn't too different from normal. Some of the small stationery stores turn into mini Christmas shops and I did see some fake trees and other decorations being sold. And it was nice not having to worry about stores being closed on Christmas morning for those last-minute cooking items.

Aside from pretty constant cooking and eating, there wasn't a whole lot going on around Christmas other than just relaxing and such. The day after Christmas we went to another volunteer's house nearby for a big spaghetti lunch, and there were lots of people from all the other classes of volunteers. We stayed in Tukuyu until the middle of the next week, and then a few people left to go home or other places for New Year's, and the rest of us went to Matema Beach on lake Malawi, which was just a few hours away. To get there faster, we got a private taxi to drive us to the beach, and on the way there we made a stop for gas on the side of the road, where usually people will come up to the car to try and sell different foods and things, especially for a car full of foreigners. But this time a guy came up with a little baby monkey wrapped around his arm and tried to sell it to us. It was actually a very reasonable price and probably would have saved the monkey from a lot of abuse to take it off of their hands, but one of us was just too concerned about the certainty of attracting many diseases and talked us out of buying it. But I got to hold it for a little bit and was petting him when he gave me a nice little going-away present on my shirt. I guess I scared the poop out of him.

Matema was a lot of fun, and again there were lots of volunteers there that I hadn't seen ever or in a very long time. The first day we were a little unprepared for the power of the beach equator sun and all got torched with sunburn. But we got to go on a really nice hike to this giant waterfall where there's a big pool and the water is ice cold. You can even climb up on a rock and sit under the falls and jump off into the pool. I brought the Christmas tent with and set it up on the beach but only ended up sleeping in it one night. It was really cool because it was during a lighting storm (no rain luckily) and it was neat to see the lightning flashes above while going to sleep. The beach also had some fantastic sunrise and sunset views that I will have to post pictures of soon. New Year's Eve was actually the birthday of someone in our group, so we had a double celebration and made a guitar pinata out of newspaper. And at midnight everyone went for a celebratory swim in the lake.

It was also great because I was able to skype several times with family and friends at Matema. I was even able to join in our first-ever successful trans-continental Game Night with my sisters and cousins back home. We found some good games that could be played over skype and I got to introduce a couple new participants on the Tanzanian end. Next step is outer space game night.

I'm excited to be going back to my house now to get ready for the next year of school. Soon we will have a meeting to plan for classes and scheduling next year. I'm hoping to teach Form IV Math, so that I can keep my same students from last year and help them prepare for their national exams, and I also want to add on Form I or II Physics in addition to the evening computer classes continuing from last year for students and teachers. It will be good to have the class for a full year now, as opposed to awkwardly coming in in the middle of the semester last year.

Many things to be thankful for and to look forward to this new year. Some current goals include climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and having my family come to visit. I will be doing all I can to help make them come true. I hope everyone else has enjoyed the holidays and is looking forward to an exciting year ahead as well!

P.S. If you'd like more terrible Swahili pun jokes, I'll try to keep you satisfied, but first we will need some crash-course vocab.

Example:
short = fupi [FOO-pee]
Q: What is a short Tanzanian's favorite form of martial arts?
Answer: Kung Fu-pi!

New:
dog = mbwa [MMM-bwah]
Q: What is a Tanzanian dog's favorite breakfast food?
Answer: Coming next post...

Miaka Hamsini (50 Years)

Friday (Dec. 9) marked the 50th anniversary of Tanzania's independence. This is quite the year for we PCVs because it's also the 50th year for PC Tanzania. Apparently there was a giant celebration in Dar on Saturday with all of the living previous presidents. Congrats to Tanzania! The newspapers pointed to corruption and poverty as being the biggest problems still facing the country today. I don't know too much about the political system here yet, but from what I've heard the current party in power (CCM) has pretty much remained in power since independence. I heard that in the last election there was a record number of votes for alternative parties, so hopefully the peoples' voices can be heard if they are looking for a change.

Like I mentioned last time, we got to meet with a Peace Corps volunteer who served in Tanzania back in 1961, so he was part of the first ever group of Peace Corps. The guy we met was named Tom, and his partner from the same group (named Jerry, coincidentally enough) was supposed to come but couldn't make it. Still it was great to talk with him. He studied civil engineering in school and actually served before his senior year of college. In TZ he was working in Morogoro, making the road that goes to Dar, which has to be one of the most frequently traveled roads in the country today. We watched an NBC video from the 60's that was made of the first class of PCVs. It was kind of funny seeing the training that they went through - it was more of a boot camp than anything else. They did obstacle courses and intense physical training as well as language and culture study. I think it would be cool if we still had some of that today, but things have definitely changed a lot over 50 years. A lot of the rural areas of the country we saw in the video though really didn't look different at all from some of the places I've been. There definitely are plenty of places that are still as poor as they were 50 years ago.

Also last week we got to meet with our new Country Director, Elizabeth, or EB as she likes to be called. She told us about her time in Tanzania (she lived with a group of the famous Maasai tribe around the central part of the country for a few years) and as a Country Director in Uganda. She is very nice and still remembers alot of Kiswahili. Andrea is now gone to Nepal, and was very sad to leave us. She blamed us though for her leaving because she said the Peace Corps Director was very impressed when he came to visit us back in June, and that encouraged him to have her start the new Nepal program.

The rest of training went well - we got a lot of good resources for starting different student clubs at our schools, for education about HIV/AIDS, malaria, and general life skills. I also got a lot of good computer teaching tools like typing practice games and geography puzzles that will be very helpful for my teachers and students back at school. I also got some pointers from another volunteer on new origami things to make with my post-it notes, though the cranes are still my favorite by far. And of course our IST Prom was a huge success. The theme was "socks on hands" (don't ask...) and we had our own 90's music dance party at Dragonaire's, which many locals ended up joining. A few of us had been growing out our beards for IST, and Justin and I decided to get creative with ours. I'll leave it to you all to see the pictures for yourself, but someone suggested that I looked like a long-lost third Mario brother (named Guisseppe, of course), which I was happy to accept. But I couldn't really live with that for more than one day, so now it's back to square one. Maybe we will see who can grow theirs until Mid-service conference next Fall...

After IST I got to spend some time with my host family in Morogoro. They are all doing well, and I told my one host sister that her letter to America was received by Christine and that she would get one back soon, and she was so excited. I'm sure it was in very good English too, all of those kids speak amazingly well for their age. But my baba invited me to go with him to visit his family in Moshi, so we took a trip there for a couple days, and oh man, was it beautiful. They live right at one of the main gates to Kilimanjaro National Park, so you can see the mountain from their yard! We went to the park to look around, and it was great. He also has a lot of friends who are hiking guides, and they offered for me to come back next year and that I could use them to hike the mountain, without getting ripped off like most tourists. So I'm really excited about that and extremely lucky to have such an awesome baba!

It will be nice to have some quiet time back at my site after doing a lot of traveling. Christmas will be fun though, since I'm sure it will be a big group of us getting together. Hope everyone is doing well with their Christmas shopping and enjoying the snow if you have it. I've found some pretty hilarious Christmas decorations at random stores here that should go well with our Charlie Brown tree. My goal now is to translate The Night Before Christmas to read on Christmas Eve. Look for it coming soon and welcome to read both versions yourself if you'd like a little Tanzanian zest added to your holiday celebrations.

Back to the Drawing Board (or Flip-Chart Paper)

It's now been over 3 months since we got to our sites, which means it is time for our In-Service Training, or IST. It's been going on all this week and will continue half of next week too. So we are back at Morogoro where we did our first 10 weeks of training. It's strange to be back in town and to see everyone again, it's kind of like we never even left. And awesome to all be reunited and talk about our sites and everything. It does also mean going back to the very long days of training sessions, but many of them are more relevant I think, since we now actually know what it's like at our schools and can apply what we're learning to our own communities. Also our counterparts are here with us, which makes it alot more useful. We had to pick a person to be a counterpart who we thought would be a good person to help us transition into our schools and also be able to help with whatever secondary projects we want to do. Mine is another math teacher at my school named Kassian, and he is awesome. He is one of the few people I've met who I would say always seems to say things that make sense, and he was also the counterpart for the volunteer before me, so he knows alot about American Volunteers.

The training has been going well so far. We've learned more about how to write grants, talked about teaching techniques we've been using, and also had a session discussing corporal punishment with the counterparts, which was very interesting. It is legal here to implement, with certain limitations, though unfortunately at alot of schools those limits aren't really enforced. Teachers are allowed to hit students, typically with a long, thin bamboo stick, but it is only supposed to be for severe cases, and it shouldn't be more than 4 times, and they are supposed to keep records of every time they do it, along with a bunch of other things. My school actually does seem to honor the part about not giving out more than 4 at a time, but I've heard of other schools that really get carried away with it.  The thing is, most teachers remember getting hit when they were growing up and in school, and so it is the natural tendency to continue it themselves. Some think it is the only way to really get the students to stop misbehaving (even though it doesn't...), and then there are a few who just seem to get enjoyment out of the power it gives them over the students. Like I said, I actually think it is relatively tame at my school compared to others, but it should not be happening at all, I think. So that was a good thing to discuss with the counterparts.

In the meantime, another very important part of IST is a new tradition that was started by last year's group of volunteers, which is the IST prom. There is a really nice restaurant called Dragonaire's right by our training center, and they said we could have it there again this year, so that will be later on tonight. Of course the hope is that it will all be a joke - we drew names out of a shoe for prom dates and the theme is to do all 90's music, so it should be a great hit. And naturally another great opportunity to use my oragne suit, so keep an eye out for more good pictures soon!

Tomorrow we have the day off, and there are some really cool visitors who will be stopping by to talk to us. Apparently some of the volunteers from the first ever education class of PC Tanzania (50 years ago I believe) are back in the country and are coming to our training center to see us, which is awesome! One of them was even the first African American Peace Corps Volunteer ever! We have gotten so lucky, with meeting the Director Aaron Williams during training and now this. It will be really interesting to hear how Peace Corps has changed over the last 50 years. Also on Monday we will meet our new Country Director and say goodbye to Andrea, who is leaving to start up a new Peace Corps program in Nepal.

In other news, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Ours was actually not too far off from what it's like back home - we had turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and other Thanksgiving classics like mac and cheese and guacamole. I was in charge of the guac and, since they were so cheap, brought 50 with me to the dinner. We ended up mixing it in a 20 liter bucket, which it filled about half way with guacamole - it was a sight to behold. I decided to use it as the gravy and pour it over everything on my plate. There's a tradition to bring back home!

Looking forward to Christmas, even though it doesn't feel like it should be coming at all. I would appreciate any care packages of snow that anyone might be able to send to get me more in the spirit. But I'm trying to play the same 10 Christmas songs as constantly as possible to imitate listening to the radio stations back home. I'm not completely sure where I'll be for actual Christmas, but hopefully able to get together with other volunteers. I will definitely try to share some international Christmas culture with the locals, though - namely playing Dominic the Donkey for them.

Always missing everyone at home, especially around the holidays, but thank you so much to everyone who has been sending letters and other things. I got an amazing package a few weeks ago that pretty much made my life, so for those who were a part of that, THANK YOU! I do have christmas presents to send home, but I'm not sure yet if it will cost hundreds of dollars just to send a package home, so please don't be offended if it is late (a little late, or 2 years late...) but they will make it eventually!

Swahili guacamole recipe:

maparachichi (avocados)
nyanya (tomatoes)
vitunguu (onions)
limau (lemon)
chumvi (salt)

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?

A Few Weeks In...

Things have been going smoothly the first few weeks at site. It’s nice to start getting into a groove, though I haven’t really had a typical routine since the school had the Form 4 graduation last week, now midterm exams, and next week will be break. I only taught one day, and it was just a review for the midterm. I made the exam for my Form 3 math class, without really knowing what format or material to use since I just got here. But I have a book of all old NECTA exam problems (the big and really only important test for all 4 years of school), so I just pulled ones out of there and used the same format and all. After seeing some of the other teachers’ tests now, I realized that it is extremely long and will probably be very difficult. But I think it will still be good experience for them to get used to what the NECTA will be like. I think most of the time school exams are a lot easier than the national exams, and then the students are caught off-guard when they take them.

Most kids in Tanzania don’t like math and think it is too difficult even before really trying. There was a mock NECTA exam earlier in the year at my school and of 120 Form 2 students, 18 passed the math section (you only need a 21% to pass), so there’s plenty of improvement that can be made! Of course there are some who are exceptions. We had a little review session the other night with some of the kids who like math, one of which has apparently earned the title of “King of Mathematics.” I must say he is worthy. It was really nice and refreshing to see the students that really want to learn. Sometimes in a classroom of 60 students, maybe half of which can understand half of what you’re saying in English, it can be a bit discouraging. But I know I can’t teach to have them all master the material or we wouldn’t get through anything.

It’s interesting because there are a lot of older students here than I had at my internship school. Some students, if they don’t do as well as they’d like on the exams, will repeat Forms 3 and 4 to try and score higher. So some of my students are as old or older than me!

Last Friday was the Form 4 graduation (they graduate early to prepare for exams in October, the rest have class until Dec). It was a really big ceremony, a bunch of parents came in from all over the country. The students made and performed all their own songs and dances and comedy skits, it was much more fun than I remember my high school graduation being. Afterward there was a dance in the big dining hall building. There are a few things that apparently are just immune to cultural differences, and high school dances are one of them. Brought back memories…although I have to say there are some fancy dance moves that I’ve never seen in America. And I was once again disappointed at the lack of disco music on the playlist.

I’ve been cleaning up and fixing up my house quite a bit. Tried to fashion a closet out of string and a mosquito net, but it came crashing down before long. I did make a nice tool rack on the back of my kitchen door, and still plan to try and build some furniture at some point. I’m paying a neighbor to cook rice and beans for me everyday, but also have an impressive streak going of consecutive days having made guacamole – maybe there’s a Guinness record to be broken. I haven’t gotten tired of eating the same food all the time yet. Credit that to my secret ingredient- chili sauce- that makes everything 10x better. I don’t know what they do differently to it here, but they certainly got that one right.

I also just bought some seeds to try and grow tomatoes and cabbage in the little fenced garden next to my house. Someone used it at some point in the past, but not recently, so I’m gonna try and revive it. You have to plan it right though usually because there are rainy and dry seasons which dictate how well things grow. We’re in the dry season now (today I felt a slight drizzle for the first time since coming) but I think it will be ending soon. I can’t wait, plus then all the hills around me will be that much more green and beautiful! They just did a controlled burn of the corn fields behind my house yesterday, and the wind blew all the ash into my courtyard so it looked like a volcano had just erupted.

It’s still strange to think about spending 2 years here at site, but I know the time will fly by, especially when I start teaching full-time. I’m really glad we have a very good staff of teachers at the school, they are all easy to get along with and seem like they care about their jobs a lot. We’ll see how they react when I show up to teach in my orange suit…then I’ll know if they can be my friends.