Sunday was also the first day of the building excitement. Nick emailed a guy that he had met while traveling, and the safari to the serengeti is about booked! They are picking us up from Bariadi on Friday and bringing us back sunday. 3 days, 2 nights of camping in the SERENGETI! I’m pretty pumped. Oh, and its happening soon. Like, we're leaving valentine day. Lastly, as you can see, i was beyond pumped about the pineapple nick was able to find for me. i demolished it.
I also have more exciting travel news but it is all contingent on the date of the end of service conference for worldteach. Though the plans change when and to what extent, both plans involve Zanzibar and at least hike of Kilimanjaro. Exciting stuff!
Now for the school news....
- monday was just a total mess. ill keep it short but they were meeting with my students to restream them. so after waiting for them to get restreamed and then waiting for them to shuffle the desks around, i went to teach only to find two streams now instead of three. me and two other teachers were waiting to teach our own stream and i got the boot. but really, i am temporary and will never step in the way of the teachers motivation here. then i was bored and also worried that i would always be bored since i would only be teaching two streams now so i got the nerve and went to start teaching form 2. Our school had not had a form 2 math teacher... until monday. so things were going well until i got kicked out by a new teacher (i later learned that he will only be there for 2 weeks). So eventually, i get to go teach my new form 3 stream A kids. To say it was a packed house would be an understatement. There were only 96 students in there! It was pretty wild. Stream B was much more manageable with probably half as many students. So like i said, just a crazy day. But I got the okay from Muhumi to teach form 2 when the other teacher leaves and also to visit all forms when i want. He said ‘even me, that would make me happy. i want all the students to share your experience.’ it will make me happier too because that means i will get to be busier.
- another discussion about corporal punishment with Ombeni. He said ‘even me, i do not like corporal punishment.’ it was just nice to hear. and i do actually believe it. so teachers seem to get a thrill out of it and i think other just do it because thats the system the work in. Ombeni also said that he thinks that they have to use it because that is what parents use at home so that is what the students are conditioned to respond to. It was a hopeful discussion as i was trying to encourage him and tell him of the real possibility of change. even in america, it has not been gone that long.
- i only have a black pen and everyone here uses blue. so its just one more way for me to stand out. you can clearly see where i sign in each day in the teacher attendance log. i have sucked a few other teachers to the dark side though... only because i regularly have my pen available when others go missing. Ombeni tried to make me fill better though because he said that here they are always looking for exceptions because that means that you think big and people follow big minded people. So maybe they will start writing in black.. what a legacy i could leave....
- I got a whole lesson on how names work here. The first name is just picked like it is the states. the second name is your fathers first name (whether you are a boy or girl). the last name is your clan name (a clan is a group of families within a tribe). So, knowing this, it makes sense why my students asked me what my fathers name was on the first day.
- And Toga’s doctrine continues...
- His beliefs on how to be beautiful/ qualification for a beautiful women
- physical exercise/ structure (not what you wear but what your body type is)
- behavior
- voice/ tone (soft, sweet, not rough)
- walking style (its in the miss tanzania pageant so it must be important!)
- height ( > 5 feet)
- dressing style/ eye impression
- everything else
- facial expression
- eating style
- His beliefs on how to be handsom/ qualification for a handsome man
- physical appearance
- height ( > 6 feet)
- body size
- race (how you maintain your skin)
- voice
- behavior
- income
- education ( > form 4)
- social relation (how you socialize with the rest of your community)
- basically it all boiled down to me satisfying all the condition for being beautiful and him being handsome. naturally.
- i have totally started throwing in different sound effects for my thumbs up/ thumbs down game. they can hardly handle themselves. oh and i drew a smiley face on the board tuesday. forget about... laughing uncontrollably.
- Tuesday, I walked out of class just before 1 and Muhumi was outside and ready to go. So I ran inside and got my bags and was home so early! such a great treat. So, I got my workout on in the living room for a while and then we went to get some water. It was a serious problem because none of the water tanks on our school grounds had any water. That meant we went off with two five gallon buckets each in search of a well. Nick kept stopping people and asking for directions until we finally found one, right by a few houses. We were instantly surrounded by about 6 or 7 seven young children who were hilarious. Of course we couldn’t really talk to them but they were constantly smiling and laughing at us. The decent walk to the well became quite the haul on the way back when you were carrying the water. The only thing that made it more fun? The cow patties that I was making between the arches of my feet and my chacos! Nick and I dumped the water into our buckets and did it all again. It certainly wasn’t something I would want to do everyday, but it was a neat experience.
- Wednesday was just an overall great day. its seems to be a trend around here. So, Tuesday, Amber got a message at her school that we would not be going to school the next day because we would be getting introduced to all the big people in the district. That night Muhumi called and said he would be picking us up at 7:25 am if I could get Amber prepared. He picked us up, returned for Amber’s headmaster Lutima, and then we made our first stop at the district commissioners office. We waited a little for the district commissioner to arrive and then we signed our first guestbook and did our first little introductions. Lots of awkward pauses and funny questions. Repeat this two more times (at the district education office and regional education office) and throw in a few more interesting people and that was our morning. I think Nick said it pretty well the other night... welcome to Bariadi (or really most of tanzania it seems), where you can shit in the street as long as you sign the guestbook. After dropping Amber and Lutima back at Bariadi, Muhumi and I were finally on our way to school. I arrived to curious teachers, all worrying about where I was. I also arrive to 3 streams of Form 3 again. Teachers were actually teaching so i wasnt able to steal any periods which meant I only got to see stream C yesterday. However, they were hilarious. There was a huge wasp nest in the rafters above the students and so we got to talking about that. We were all laughing at my animations of getting stung and it hurting. Then we talking about the lizards, especially the colorful ones- called mjuici. One student asked me if I eat them! The whole class, including myself, just lost it! Anyways, after school, I walked around and snapped some pictures of the flowers and lizards. I was also observing religion. It was really neat. I learned that there are different groups based on the religion and students lead it each week. The singing is so sweet. I just kept walking around for a while, talking with teachers. Madame Difficult was in a religion class with the students but when that ended she came out to talk to me. She made my day! She recently traveled to Uganda to study theology and they gave her the in touch messenger by Charles Stanley. She held it like it was her most prized possession on this earth. We listened to the first two chapters of Matthew and then we skipped around to a few of his sermons. We also sang Blessed Assurance together. Students all around and I was just loving it! Eventually a few of those students came to ask me for some points for their english debate. It was serious stuff. The topic was something like manpower mobilization leads to greater globalization of the world. That turned to math questions from old form 3 midterm exams.... which were horrendous. Weird english/ wording of questions and nowhere near correctly spelled words. Anyways, we eventually made it back around 4 when school ended at 1! Just a great day!
- Thursday kept up the trend of being a harder day. I was in the workroom when all the sudden an entire stream of Form II flooded into the room. Teachers immediately went to work with their sticks and I was trapped in the back of the room. I got out as soon as I could but the sights and sounds just stuck with me. I regrouped and went to class. Unfortunately it was not just that one stream and I kept seeing stream after stream running to and from the workroom crying, girls grasping their hands. After getting my welcome into the classrooms, I asked my students in each stream if they were having a good day and each time they said no madame. and each time they said it was because teachers were pulling students out of class for being late. Little soapbox here... i know that all the students were not late. actually not even close to all of them were late. but yet they were punishing everyone. Anyways, the day started looking up from there and teaching went well. The same lady walked into the workroom with her bucket of maize on her head toward the end of the day and discipline officer bought me and Ombeni one. still just a delicious. Muhumi and I eventually left and Muhumi took me a new way home, quite a bumpy off-road course. Muhumi was pretty hilarious and when he dropped me off he said ‘we have been dancing’ , talking about the car bumping around. Later that evening, I was working on the blog life when DEO Alex came by the house. When we talked him wednesday he said he wanted our help on his ‘little project’. So at 5 we left for his house which is just right behind ours. And he showed us his little project which is quite a huge project in our opinion. He is working with 3 other people to reinvent the way to teach early primary school children. So, they have been creating new teaching materials and innovative, authentic methods of assessment. He is very innovative and creative. His goal is to create a kit with all of these materials and a user manual to sell both in and outside of Tanzania. And he has the tools to do it. He had a huge! huge! laser printer. And then a few laptops and a little saw. I am sure I will get more pictures but his goal is for us to put the right english words to his ideas. Of course we stayed for dinner since after Alex asked us he told us to ‘just say yes’. So yes we did and we got to watch some exciting tv- emmanuel.tv. At first, it was really neat. It was at a church from Nigeria and the little bit of sermon and singing we heard was really neat. And then things got crazyyyy. I like to think of it as a church turned Dr. Phil turned Jerry Springer with Sylvia Brown as a guest. The preacher - T.B.- was interviewing these families that had a family member who was maybe a witch/ wizard or a crocodile/ Marine Spirit. Then he would decide if they were guilty or innocent and deliver them. The deliverance consisted of people wandering around, dazed, falling on the ground, and sometimes throwing up. It was a riveting show to say the least!
- Friday was another crazy day and pretty much completely unexpectedly so. School was nice. I avoided the beating and the meeting during the school day and stayed in the classroom. I also brought out the camera for the students and it was great. they were beyond excited, constantly shouting ‘madame! madame!’. Then i took their picture, which they hardly ever smiled for, and then i had to show it to them each time. I was about to leave, carrying out my friday afternoon routine of walking home. Then, I was approached and asked but really told that I was going to go welcome a new baby of a past teacher at the school. So, I waited and waited and we eventually left for the school. It was me and two female and two male teachers. So, we made it to the home and were warmly welcomed into the house as always. Then, one of the teachers called the past teacher and found out he was 2 hours away. hmmmm. I think it was the older daughter of the house that took care of us but she brought us sodas and then even went to buy me a bottle of water when I told her I would just have water. An older baby, not the new baby, was brought in and we held and played with her for a while. He name was Kisukuma but it meant Lightness in english. Then, food came - rice, meat, mchicha, and some fruit. And then after that we left. This was like an hour and 45 minutes after we got there. We didn’t see the past teacher or the new baby. I thought then that I was going to be able to make the trek home but not so fast. Madame Eva invited me to her home and then to her tailor. It was about 2:30 then and I had to back at the house by 6 to go to a get together for Amber’s school. But who am I to turn these offers down? We went to her house first so she could nurse her 8 month old baby. She was so cute but also incredibly shy/ wary of me. On a random note, little babies here always seem so content. I have hardly ever heard one crying. They are always just a riding on their mothers back in their kanga sack. Anyways, we left her house a little past 4:30 and started making our way to the tailor shop where she works. We sauntered on over, eva frequently stopping and talking with others in kisukuma and then telling me to greet them. Me, the ever timely, type-a personality, was getting nervous to get back to the house by 6. Eventually, we made it to the shop where the language barrier was ever present. Eva helped me pic out a fabric and then tell the tailor what I wanted. Who know what this dress is going to look like but its all a part of the experience. I think it will be 26,000 tsh or about $16. Finally, I was able to make it home in time to wait for the car to pick us up for Amber’s party. Supposed to arrive at 6, it arrived at maybe 7:45 and took us to a hotel that was off the beaten path in town. We just hung out for a while, Amber and I enjoyed the COLD water and Nick enjoyed a few beers. We met the teachers at Bariadi and our neighbor, Oscar, sat with us. Dinner was chicken (freshly prepared by the students at Bariadi that day during school), chips and plantains, and a cabbage mix. Not the best meal ever but the chicken was pretty good. It is very tough and gamey here but a nice treat nonetheless. After dinner we had to do cheers. Amber and I had both drained our water by that time so with empty glasses we walked around and clinked glasses with everyone saying cheers and long life. A pretty great experience. Finally, around 10:30 a man came to our table and gave us the charade to go. I had never seen him before, but let’s just say that it wasn’t hard for him to find us. Also, no questions asked from our end. We don’t have a clue who you are but, sure, please take us home. Oh, and I know we don’t need to give you directions either. haha. Anyways, we made it back to our humble abode and somehow we all seemed to get a second wind. Afraid that today would be the last day of the internet I already paid for, I jumped on the computer and got to work. I was looking up the cost of flights to the various places I need to get to. And thennnnn I jumped on facebook for a minute and got a message from Wendy. To me, that gave me the invitation so I tried a facetime call. I got to talk to Wendy, Kristi, and Mardi! such a treat! Completely pooped, I got a great nights sleep!
- Saturday morning started off with the typical weekend routine. I stayed in bed and read a book. Then I got my hearty fix of peanut butter, banana, and jelly in as I have been typing up the blog. More updates on the end of service conference... May 28-29. Lots of thoughts going on about the spring break trip and big safari plans. i’ll keep you updated when the final decision is made. The only other thing on my agenda today is a workout, a little time in the sun, and stir fried rice for dinner. A typical tanzanian weekend at its finest. Oh and I though some caulk would help the bat shit problem in the main room. so home improvement 101 happened saturday too. nick was able to find some in town so we had quite the operation. I was sweeping and beating the bat shit (and rat too, lets be real) from the ceiling while nick was slathering the caulk on the ceiling with an old toothbrush. we're hopeful. pioneering at its finest.
ps. its february! today is my one month anniversary!!
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