I saw a lizard on my wall eat a bug! :)

This past week seemed to blow by really quickly!

On Sunday night last week I returned from Morogoro after staying a night in town with a friend. Sunday evening when I got back home I made homemade whole wheat bread and took the night off to relax by studying a bit of Swahili and then playing a rather unhealthy amount of minesweeper over and over again on my computer.

Monday I went to the English office and checked in with our Headmistress after she’d been gone in Dar for the weekend. We asked her if there’s anything else we can do around here…after all we each only teach about 4 hours a week and we can be of much more use beyond that! Under a deal with a non-profit company called “No PC” our school received five brand new PC’s rather run off the Linux operating system. Although they can potentially be of great use to the students and faculty here…no one knows how to use them and dare I say mostly everyone is too intimidated or too caught up in sticking to the old fashioned pen and paper method of doing things that hardly anyone has tried to learn how to use them. Thus, Madam Mtima, our Headmistress, asked that we begin holding computer classes with the students and faculty to teach them how to use the computers so they’re more technologically savvy. Sounds good to me! I never thought computer knowledge was a strong suit of mine, but lo and behold I can teach someone what a mouse, modem, and monitor are and how you can do simple things like use a word processor. It should be fun! Also Madam Mtima mentioned that the students play sports like football (soccer) and netball (similar to basketball). I’m hoping I can at least watch the students playing sports, if not join in myself. Although I’ve been running along our dirt road near home, it’d be nice to get some other physical activity in.

I taught class this past Tuesday through Thursday as usual. This week I chose to teach my students about the 12 tenses in English because a lot of them mix up when to use certain tenses when they write essays and other assignments. I taught them about the present, past, and future tenses in their simple, progressive/continuous, and perfect forms and next week I’ll finish up by teaching them about the present, past, and future perfect progressive tenses. So far the students understand the tenses all right after I explain them. I’ve made sure to really take my time in explaining them and giving a lot of examples and formulas for how to make sentences in each tense. I’m confident that by the end of next week my students will be experts on all the tenses. I’m going to give them a quiz next week on the tenses so that they really try to memorize and learn them all.

This week in class I was surprised to see three new faces that I hadn’t seen before in my class! When I first arrived to Dakawa and started teaching I was never given a class roster or attendance list, I was simple told, “This is your classroom and this is where you teach at these times...” Every time I get to class all of my students are already seated in their desks so it’s sort of hard to tell who’s in class and who’s not. Luckily the students always sit in the same places every day, though, which had made my life easier in trying to learn their names and recognize their faces. The first week I was in class I tried to do account for who was in class by having all the students write their names on classwork that I had them turn in at the end of the period. After the first week I had counted 34 students in my class…now I’m up to 37! I think that’s it though…unless some other students transfer from other schools and join my class. Fortunately I brought a roll book from home to keep track of attendance easily. So far it’s made my attendance taking much more manageable.

I’ve realized lately that as much as I want my students to practice their English for homework every night, I also have to portion out only as much homework as I can grade in a timely fashion so that by the time I can grade it all the material is still fresh in my students’ minds so when I go over the answers they’ll still know what I’m talking about! The first two weeks I gave them a homework assignment every night, albeit even if it was a small one, but thanks to my zealous instruction I’ve begun to weigh myself down with all the grading I’ve had to do. Even if I ask the students to write just 10 sentences practicing what we’ve learned, that means I have to read 35 papers of 10 sentences each! From now on I think I’ll limit homework to one or two assignments a week. I’ll see if that makes my life easier. As of now I still have about 3 homework assignments I haven’t even begun grading! More fun for this weekend, I suppose…

Thursday’s class was especially enjoyable this week. My students asked me to bring in pictures of my family and since I didn’t print any out to bring with me I was forced to bring in my laptop to show all the pictures I’d just taken from my graduation. It was quite funny because as soon as I showed my students photos of my brother they were all like “Oooooooh how old is he?!” hahahahaha. I was laughing soooo hard. They were like, “He is so handsome!”…so kudos to you, Nate! They were even referring to you in a picture that showed off your burly man untrimmed facial hair and scruffy uncut moptop on your head! When I told them you were 20 going on 21 this November some of the students perked up and were like, “Oh well he’s 20 and I’m 18…!” as if that age combination was a match made up in Heaven or something. So congrats Nate, you now have 30+ young Tanzanian women swooning over you over here and the more they think about you the less they pay attention to what I’m staying in class, haha. I’m just kidding, but ah I got a kick out of their reactions. I also showed my students pictures of my sister, my parents, my pets, my house, my road, and what the surrounding environment around where I live looks like. They all lit up when they saw my house, maybe because it was the first picture I showed them, but maybe because my house just is really pretty. When I showed them my sister they were like “Awww!” and when I showed them pictures of me with my parents they were like, “Wowwww!” and “You look like your mom! She’s very pretty” – so you scored some points with the kids as well, mom! Haha.

I have to say I got a little homesick while I was showing the pictures because I hadn’t looked at pictures of my house or my family or just my “home” in general since I got to Tanzania in June. Seeing me smiling with my family on my graduation day really made me miss how good it feels to be with family, even if they drive you to the end of your wits sometimes. Up until now I haven’t really been struck with homesickness and quite honestly I’m trying to muster up the willpower to not let it bog me down much. Of course I miss home and of course I miss my family (only a really crazy and cold hearted person might not), but I have to stay strong for my students and remind myself that my family, my home, and all the other lovely people I know will most likely be at home when I return so I just have to be patient now until I can see them again. Besides, for now I get to reap the benefits of getting to know even more new wonderful people while still constantly holding fond memories and thoughts of everyone back home in my heart!

Speaking of fond memories, I wanted to share this with you. One of my students made me a card this week and gave it to me on Wednesday afternoon. I think it is simply the sweetest, weirdest, cutest, and most welcoming card I have ever received. After my student gave this to me I was laughing and smiling for hours, totally tickled by her gesture. Because of its rather obscure and genuine nature, I wanted to share with you what my student wrote to me. I hope you get a kick out of it too. The front of the card reads, “Message: ‘True Love Never Die.’ Megan You are welcome! In Tanzania as well as Dakawa!” Then the inside of the card says, “Dear Megan, I always likes to seeing you smile, talking, walking. I may say that I likes you and love u. You have a nice voice! You are attractive! You have a nice shape! And ur Beautiful at all. You teachs well, at the first time it was not easy for me to understand you but now I am feeling better because I can understand you. You change my life some how! By showing my mistakes, I likes that! And also I like friends because always I likes to know many people and share ideas. That’s all. I love u much! From Tunosye!!!!!” Then on the back of the card she wrote, “Megan, Ma gift to you!” and she drew me a picture of a bouquet of flowers. She then asked me, “Do you like ugali chicken or rice and chicken?” and she drew pictures of ugali and chicken together and then rice and chicken together above the questions. All over each side of the card she drew very pretty and intricate designs along the. Aside from all the grammatical mistakes, which I should go over with her at some point, the card is absolutely perfect in my eyes and it made me really happy! What’s funny is that of all the students in the class I have the hardest time pronouncing this student’s name, but even though I often pronounce her name funnily she still loves me, haha. Ah, I love it. It’s awesome how the smallest acts of kindness can make you the happiest!

So here’s just a couple of random paragraphs about some interesting updates from this week:

My cell phone somehow became possessed on Thursday and my SIM card randomly stopped working and told me I was restricted from using it, hence I’m now on a mission to find a new phone and try to redeem my number from my SIM card in the process. It’s going to be a bit of a pain!

A giant cockroach about 2.5 inches long scrambled around the floor on Wednesday night and kept me company as I played an hour of mine sweeper. I guess they’re harmless so I didn’t quite mind, although admittedly I lifted my feet off the floor and got a little ab workout in the process. Somehow I was reminded of the old flick, “Beetlejuice,” too, haha. It’s not usual for us to see cockroaches, lizards about 4 inches long, moths, spiders, little beetles, or even these really ugly and dangerous giant hornets inside our house. Talk about home sweet home…but as long as they don’t end up hurting me, I’m cool with their presence because they kill mosquitoes! The other night actually I saw a small lizard on our living room wall stalk and kill a beetle and I dare say it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. When the lizard killed the beetle I was almost temped to shout, “Go team lizard,” as if the lizard and I are on the same team because I don’t want little flying beetles on my walls, either. A lot of times my housemates and I sit in the living room in the evenings and it sounds like we’re playing intermittent games of patty cake from when we were young because we smack our hands together to try and kill as many mosquitoes as we can. It’s become a bit of a game and our only real form of late night entertainment, since our TV is out of commission.

On that note, our satellite dish still has yet to get fixed! Apparently there’s a broken cable or something that we need to replace for it to work again. We had a working television the first night we arrived at home and were “fortunate” enough to catch an awful 1970s American movie that night about this woman who had a 10 year long affair with an uncommitted married man before she decided to leave him when she finally figured out that he would never leave his wife to completely be with her. Let me tell you, it was oh so riveting and probably one of the most confusing movies I’ve ever seen. It cracked me up that a movie with such a ridiculous and indecipherable plot line was being shown on Tanzanian television where most people’s first language isn’t even English. Way to entertain, or confuse, most of your population, TZ, haha…and also to give a really whacky perception of what American movies are like. The woman had a mullet after all, for crying out loud. Most women in America today wouldn’t get caught dead with a mullet! Haha. All in all, we’re still trying to grasp someone’s attention long enough here to remind him or her of our need for a new cable so he or she will do something about it. If we knew where to get a new cable we would, but for now we’ll continue to be squatting ducks without a working television until someone comes to our rescue. I say “rescue” only because we’re in such a rural part of Tanzania that whenever we tell someone we don’t have a working television we usually get a gasp in response followed by a concerned, “What do you do all day!? Aren’t you bored!? Eish, pole sana (I’m very sorry!)” as if not having a working T.V. is a tragedy. Really, though, if someone doesn’t come fix it soon I might have a mini breakdown from missing my Bongo Flava (Tanzanian hip hop music genre) music videos! Haha. But really, I really do love them!

I’ve realized I need to be really methodical about when I wash clothes and hang them out to dry on the line in front of our house because when our neighbors sweep up the leaves in their backyard and burn them, usually in the afternoons, all the smoke suffocates the clean air and are drying clothes soak up the smoke-saturated air. Hence, your once clean and laundry soap-smelling clothes are clean and aromatic no more! It’s almost become somewhat of a game for me. After I’ve washed my clothes and hung them out to dry and I can see a small pile of burning leaves in our shared back yard I jolt out the door and awkwardly swipe my damp clothes off the line and put them in a bucket to sit until the smoke dissipates and I can hang them up again on the line once the air becomes clean. This strategy might seem a little drastic, but the last time I washed my bed sheets they got smothered in smoke from burning leaves for over an hour so by the time I brought them in and tried to put them on my bed my room smelt like a giant fire pit. Even though they were clean in theory the smell was too much for me to handle so I slept without sheets that night and rewashed them the following day. If you knew how much of a pain it is to wash huge queen size sheets by hand and somehow wring out all of the soapy water out of them, I think you’d run out to the line and grab your things off of it temporarily too whenever your neighbor starts burning leaves nearby! It may seem trivial, but the smell of fresh and clean sheets is enough to give me a great night’s sleep on its own. Haha.

This weekend my housemates and I have decided to stay overnight in Morogoro for one night so that we can make a bunch of outstanding purchases for our house. We still need to get a couple rugs for our floors because some of our floors don’t have the fancy fake-tile linoleum and they’re just exposed concrete. We’re also going to get a shelf for our food in the kitchen. Until now we’ve stuck our food in a box on the floor in the pantry because it doesn’t have shelves and we’ve also piled as much food as we could on top of the fridge, but a shelf would be really nice. We’re also going to go on a hunt for mirrors for our rooms. Since we’re teachers it’s important that we look at least somewhat presentable for our students and until now my little 3 inch by 3 inch vanity mirror isn’t quite cutting it, haha. I’m not ashamed to say, also, that we’re just self-obsessed Americans, too, and that we like to look at ourselves every once in a while. A girl’s gotta make sure she looks good! Haha. I think personally I might also buy myself a shelving unit for my room as well because everything that can’t fit on my bedside table or in my wardrobe has been shoved into my smallest suitcase and left to sit on the floor until I figure out what to do with it. It’d be nice to put my suitcases away for good, especially since I’ll actually be living here for a year. I might also invest in a bedside light that I can put on my nightstand because the only overhead light I have in my room in a fluorescent light, which is quite harsh on my eyes in the evenings. It does help to wake me up early in the morning though, so I think I’ll still use it then.

So I’ll admit that for most of this post I’ve been rambling about rather important things, albeit they’re all relevant to my life. You might be wondering how I’ve possibly managed to write nearly five pages in Word about literally nothing that’s been going on. Well, if you consider my knack for procrastination (I really should be grading right now…) and also the fact that we don’t have a TV or any other real form of entertainment, that leaves a ton of time to fill up doing something else. Since I’ve always liked writing, I figure I should just pass the time by going on and on about the many details of my life here. I just hope I haven’t bored you too much! All in all, thanks for reading!