Friday, February 11, 2011

Every Day Is a Roller Coaster When You Live in Tanzania

Written Thursday, February 10, 2011

I had a really up and down kind of day today. My day started off well. I drank coffee for the first time in ages and got a pretty good buzz off of it this morning. I taught my first class. Class went fairly well. Students participated a lot and really understood the lesson. I used colored chalk for the first time and it dyed my hands green and blue. I looked like a frog when I left class, haha. I washed off my hands and went to the staff room.

In the staff room I spent time with a fellow teacher of mine named Maryam. She is very nice. She taught me Swahili for about half an hour and schooled me on some really important stuff. Since I arrived in Tanzania, every time somebody told me a really high price for something, I would say “Chizi sana,” which I thought just meant, “That’s a ridiculous price.” I came to find out today that when you say “Chizi sana” to someone it’s actually a huge insult to that person and is taken to mean that you’re calling him or her mentally disabled. Oops…me saying that in the past might’ve caused some epic misunderstandings. I learned a more polite way to say that a price is absurd instead. I also get random men on the streets here calling me “Mchumba” a lot, which means “wife.” As a matter of principle, I always want to call back to them, “I’m not your wife.” Maryam taught me how to say that today too, which will surely come in handy. After my mini Swahili lesson I was in a good mood because I was making good connections with my colleagues and really felt like part of the staff. It’s nice to feel included in the staff here finally, especially since in the past I’ve often felt shut out from staff bonding by default because every speaks fluent Swahili faster than I can process. In the staff room I even shared basil tortilla chips I had made the previous night and brought for lunch with the other staff members, who seemed to enjoy them. After hanging around the staff room for a while I had some time to kill before my last class (the last periods of the day), so I walked to town with Maryam.

While in town I went to the Oasis Hotel where I use wireless Internet. I’ve been there every single day for the last week since I figured out how to connect to the free wireless server rather than having to pay for the one I’ve been using since I moved to Morogoro in September. While at Oasis I experienced a weird shift in mood. I got to talk to my sister online, which was comforting, but it also tugged on my heart strings a lot. I never realize how much I miss my family until I get to talk to them. I also felt a little anxious at Oasis after checking my email. Since I applied to a job on Monday, I’ve been anxiously awaiting an email reply from the employers about possibly getting an interview for the position. I know it’s only been about four days since I submitted my application, but I’m really excited to hear back. Adding to my anxiety was the fact that I finally got an email reply from a Career Counselor at my old college which I was expecting to receive on Monday instead, which gave me feedback on my resume and cover letter that I ended up submitting to the job on Monday. Even though I edited my resume and cover letter and had multiple people look over them, in retrospect I wish I had waited a few more days to get that feedback first. After seeing that feedback, I’m now more anxious about not hearing back from the employers. As I was stressing about that job opportunity, I also started wondering what it is I really want to do after WorldTeach ends. Do I really want to move back to America and work in Boston and live with my friends? Do I want to stay in Tanzania and explore opportunities to live in Dar es Salaam, where I’ve wanted to live for a while now? Do I want to get a job that will allow me to be moving around and traveling all the time? I really don’t know what I want. I feel like the different parts of who I am are telling me to go in different directions all at the same time and I can’t make up my mind about which direction I want to choose yet. I wish someone could almost make the choice for me, even though I know I ultimately have to make that decision on my own. For the hour and a half that I was at Oasis I browsed jobs in Dar es Salaam and tried to find information about different NGOs that operate in the area that I might be able to work for. I left Oasis feeling a bit overwhelmed and torn.

As I walked back to campus for my last class, I had a really unsettling confrontation with a Tanzanian man. As I was walking, he approached me from behind, walking faster and faster until he caught up with me. He was shoved up against me, almost close enough to brush shoulders with me, which made me really uncomfortable. Although I’m used to having men cat call me and try to get my attention here, especially wanting to talk to me, I felt a certain degree of uneasiness about this man in particular. He kept saying really quickly, “Salama?” as in “Are you peaceful?” I said yes and tried to ignore him so he would take the hint that I wasn’t interested in talking to him. Unfortunately he began getting more aggressive with me and almost pushing into me said over and over again, “I love you. I love you…” I felt like he was going to attack me based on his uneasy tone of voice. Since I had my computer with me, I wanted to avoid an attack as much as possible. It’s very rare that I ever feel threatened by men here. Most of the time I just feel annoyed, but this time, on high alert, I immediately turned around while this guy was mid-sentence and found comfort in the fact that there was another young Tanzanian guy walking behind us about 15 feet away. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around, walked toward the guy and said, “Naomba msaada,” to him, which means, “I would like help.” I asked him if he would walk with me for the rest of my route to school. He could see how nervous I was and agreed. He walked alongside me for the last five minutes to school, while the man who’d tried to talk to me before followed right behind our heels continuing to get my attention until I reached school. As soon as I reached the campus I let out a huge sigh of relief that nothing had happened and thanked the guy who had escorted me.

When I returned to school I found some of my male students sitting outside the classroom. They noticed that I looked frazzled and asked if I was okay. I told them that some random man had been harassing and following me on my walk back to school from town. One of my students sweetly asked me if I wanted him to go find him and beat him up. Haha. Little kids are charming sometimes, even though that student is pint-sized compared to the man he would’ve been up against. I politely declined his offer with a slight laugh. Noticing that there weren’t any girls around, I asked the boys where they were. They told me that all of the girls in their class had gone to the main campus (I’ve been teaching at the other school campus this week where the older students usually study because they’re taking their national exams this week at the main campus where I usually teach my students). The boys told me that all of the girls were required to go to the main campus to get an annual pregnancy test that is required by the school. I was a bit taken aback because surely if the school makes the effort to invest in enough pregnancy tests for about 500 girls then there must be a rather high probably that at least some of them are pregnant. All of my students are definitely no older than 15 years old, so it was a bit devastating to hear this. I think it’s a positive thing that the school is trying to make sure the girls are tracking their pregnancy status, but the fact that the school offers no support or counseling for them after they receive their test results really frustrates me. I can’t imagine being that young and finding out that I’m pregnant at school, only to find out that the school won’t provide other resources for me to take care of myself. Not to say it’s the school’s responsibility per say to take more responsibility for girls’ pregnancies, but I would think that if the school was going to put in the initial effort to test the girls that it would also think about treatment options for the girls after they find out their results… It further irks me that there seems to be all this accountability forced on girls partaking in sexual behavior here by making them take pregnancy tests when half the reason any of them would end up pregnant in the first place would be because a guy got them pregnant. It seems unfair that the girls are rushed off for pregnancy tests, forced to face the results alone, while all of the guys on campus treat that amount of time as just another free period. It seems to me that if Tanzania wanted to decrease rates of teen pregnancy then it would address both parties involved in teen pregnancy – that is, girls and boys. Why not use the time in which it takes girls to get tested during school to have someone educate and talk to the boys about responsible sexual behavior and the risks of pregnancy and getting sexually transmitted infections/diseases? Even if the boys were mostly disenchanted about having a session like this, at least Tanzania could’ve said that it tried to educate its children to become more sexually responsible…

Anyway, while I was processing all of these thoughts in my head, my female students started turning back up onto campus, most of whom seemed to be acting normally so I was somewhat relieved. As they returned I entered my classroom and prepared to teach my lesson. My last class went well and picked up my mood quite a bit. As part of the lesson I chose students from the class to write sentences on the chalkboard that practiced the grammar I had just taught them. When they do that I usually have them read their sentences to the class and then I repeat them, louder, and make any necessary corrections. Knowing this, the students purposefully wrote Swahili names that are particularly hard for a non-native Swahili speaker, like myself, to pronounce. I swear one of the names had almost 10 syllables! It was fun trying to pronounce the names for the class though. I said them slowly and delicately, trying to pronounce them as accurately as possible. I was more than willing to try because it gave my students an opportunity to see me struggle with the language in which they’re most comfortable with, whereas it’s usually the opposite circumstances. I think it built up their confidence knowing that, even as their teacher, I also struggle to learn a new language, just as they sometimes struggle to learn and pronounce new English words. It taught me a degree of humility about teaching a second language, which I greatly appreciate. I believe it’s always good when your students can see you as just as much of a student as they are sometimes. It reminds them that the learning process never ends and that even adults whom that they look up to face similar challenges they experience when learning another language. The rest of the class went smoothly and I headed home after class ended.

On my way home I noticed that I couldn’t see clearly out of my left eye. When I got home I realized, unfortunately, that I just got my third case of pink eye since arriving in Tanzania eight months ago. For someone who’s never had pink eye in her life until coming to Tanzania this year, getting it three times in eight months is quite alarming, at least to me. I immediately took out my contacts and threw on my nerd gear (what I call my glasses), a bit discouraged. Although I absolutely enjoy running on my road almost every day after school, the incredibly dry and dusty road continuously gives me problems with my eyes. In a way, although it will be gloomy most of the time, I can’t wait for the rainy season to start so that the dust gets packed down and stays out of my eyes, especially when people driving dangerously fast who whoosh by me while I’m running. That’s the worst – when a torrential cloud of dust flies into my face at high speeds after a car’s just got zooming past me. May I just say, let it rain, let it rain, let it rain…

When I got home today I made heart-shaped sugar cookies in preparation for the up-and-coming Valentines Day party my housemate and I are hosting at our house this weekend for our fellow WorldTeach volunteers and some of our other friends. The last time we hosted a party for our WorldTeach pals was for Halloween. We made a bunch of crazy decorations, such as spiders made out of black trash bags and paper chain ghosts and pumpkins, and hung they up all over our living room walls. It’s been three months since that party and we still have those decorations up on the walls. In spirit of our Valentines Day festivities, my housemate and I are going to make V-Day-themed decorations to replace our old spooky ones. Hopefully we’re all feeling the love by the time the party rolls around this Saturday. Since there aren’t many things to do in Morogoro, it’s fun to have everyone come together once in a while to celebrate while we’re still all together in Tanzania. This could very well be our last holiday-themed party before we all live in either May or June.

For dinner tonight we made homemade pizza. I made the dough and we topped it off with a ton of veggies and lots of cheese. The pizza was absolutely delicious! After dinner we watched the movie from the 1990s called, “What About Bob?” starring Bill Murray. It was really funny and helped to keep my mood elevated for the rest of the night. While we were watching the movie the electricity went out, but it fortunately came back on when we were brushing out teeth before bed.

I’ve been having the worst time trying to fall asleep tonight, hence why I chose to write this now. My mind is racing with too many thoughts and I can’t process them all. I’m busy thinking about my future career and what I’m going to do after when I finish volunteering for WorldTeach. I can hear our neighbors outside rustling around filling buckets with the water from their outdoor tap. Since there’s a water shortage on our school campus, our school controls when water is available from our taps. For some ridiculous reason, someone decided to only make water available between midnight and 2am every few nights. Why they couldn’t make water available to us during normal daylight hours so we wouldn’t have to lose sleep over getting water is beyond me…perhaps they think we’re less likely to use up as much water as we please if water only flows in the wee hours of the night. It’s a clever way to try to conserve the water supply, but it doesn’t make it any easier for us to get by. Our house’s outdoor tap is usually quite fickle and even when water is literally rushing out of our neighbors’ taps ours only offers a weak trickle. I went outside a few minutes ago to turn our tap on and put a bucket under it to wait and listen for flowing water. It just came on now, but when I went outside to check the level of flow, there was only a weak stream of water coming out of the spout, which is disappointing to say the least. Since I’ve been writing this I’ve gone to check the water three more times and the bucket is still only about 3 inches full of water after all this time. Now that I’m tired, I decided to postpone my effort to get water. I just turned off the faucet and took the bucket inside. I suppose I’ll try again to collect water tomorrow night. For now, I’ll try again to sleep. Hopefully my thoughts will dissipate and my mind will be at peace enough to fall asleep.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

January Recap

WHERE DID JANUARY GO?

I can’t believe January is over and we’re already into the second month of the New Year. In all honesty, January seems like a total blur to me. I don’t know where January went!...As in, I’m not really sure what it is that I did in January that took up all of my time. I was in Dar for the first week of January living out the last whim of my holiday break. I attended a stellar New Years Party and spent a lot of time with Tanzanian friends of mine before coming back to Morogoro.

THE CHANGED ENVIRONMENT

I’ll admit that before I came back to Morogoro after my holiday you could say that I was a little more than anxious about coming back “home.” Before I’d left we’d been going on our fourth straight month without running water and everything was dead and dusty as all get out. Yet, once I made it back to Morogoro by the second week of January I was unexpectedly gloriously happy to return. I was absolutely floored by how beautiful it became almost overnight that it made it so easy to readjust. While I’d been away on holiday for five weeks in Dar and Zanzibar it seemed like a big wooly green monster had completely attacked Morogoro and left traces of greenery everywhere in its path. Absolutely everything that was brown and dead before I left had tripled in size and turned to shades of rich emerald and forest green when I returned. My entire front yard looked like an overgrown jungle, which as awesome at first, until my over-heightened sense of fear of accidentally stepping on hiding/possibly highly poisonous snakes got the best of me and I asked some students on the school campus to slash the grass down. Even without an overgrown lawn, Morogoro still looks rich with life. The bushes and trees have grown to their full potential and tons of fuchsia and bright yellow flowers have overpopulated the previously bare bushes surrounding our house. My 25-minute walks to school these days are now chocked full with images that now hold a level of life and vitality that I’ve never before seen in Morogoro. Even the people around Morogoro seem more vivacious and energized since I got back.

THE WATER FIASCO

Perhaps the biggest change I noticed when I got back to Morogoro, which might have single-handedly been responsible for most people’s mood boosts and the change in environment was that water had returned! In the weeks that I’d been gone there had FINALLY been rain showers in the mornings and evenings that restocked the water supply for our community and brought all of the foliage in our area to life. On my walks to school I was pleased to see water flowing in big lustrous gulps out of faucets I’d never before seen water coming out of in all my months living in Morogoro. I swear every the children were jumpier because of the renewed source of life. The things that had previously begun to irk me before I left for my holiday, such as little kids screaming “Mzungu” at me, didn’t seem to phase me at all this time around. Apparently the cure I needed for my adjustment to the community was just a little water running through Morogoro’s veins.

The joy of the replenishment of water was unfortunately short lived, however. Not all good things can last, of course. After having running water for a mere week-and-a-half at home, the evil water company disconnected our water pipes. In truth, my housemate and I had purposefully neglected to pay our water bills from September-December of last year because we didn’t have any water at all during those four months. We figured why should we have to pay for water service that we weren’t receiving…especially when the biggest threat the company could pose to us for not paying was to shut off our water supply that wasn’t even providing us with water in the first place. They wouldn’t be able to take away water that wasn’t already there. Well, our methods caught up with us in the end, unfortunately. Once we finally had running water again, we got what was coming to us.

As soon as they shut off our water I went directly down to the office (called Moruwasa) and complained that they turn our water service back on. They told me in order for them to turn our water back on I would have to pay our outstanding bills over the last four months. I said I was unwilling to pay for months of water that our house didn’t have and claimed that I should be excused from paying said amounts as such. Moruwasa’s response was that I should write a letter of complaint to the General Manager to see what the company could do for me. I wrote the letter on a Tuesday and was told to come back to the office on Thursday to see what the manager had said to my request.

When I went back on Thursday I was disappointed to find that the manager hadn’t even looked at my letter yet…apparently he spends about as much time out of the Moruwasa office as President George W. Bush Jr. did when he was in office, haha. I exchanged phone numbers with the man who had tried to console me that day and continued to bother him just about every day until the following Wednesday when I went into the office again.

This time I came armed with backup. I had asked Mr. Milango, the Deputy Headmaster of our school’s campus, to escort me to the office and help settle this dispute. Even if he couldn’t do anything about the amount of the bills, I at least figured that he could hasten the process of getting us water again since he’s fluent in Swahili and I’m not (even though almost everyone at the office spoke good English with me when I went by myself, I still felt like my argument would hold more weight with them if I had a native Tanzanian backing up my claims). When Mr. Milango and I went to the office we were disappointed to find that the General Manager had denied my request to be excused from paying the past due bills since, according to him, the amounts that we had been charged were the minimum amounts the company charges for services (e.g. using their meters) each month.

I was hugely disappointed and frustrated by his response, yet a ray of sunshine hit me when Mr. Milango discovered after looking at our water bills for November and December that the company had actually been mistakenly charging us double the amount that we owed each month for their water service ever since we moved into our house in July 2010. The General Manager hadn’t noticed this, of course. As it turns out, when the school campus decided to install personalized water meters to each of the teacher houses in the months before we arrived, the Moruwasa company had tagged our house at the institutional rate (which our host school pays) when it should have been tagged at the domestic rate (half the price of the institutional rate). When we pointed this out to Moruwasa during our visit, I asked if I could pay the adjusted balance. However, the lady we were talking to said I would have to write another letter to the General Manager requesting permission to do so before I could pay and they would turn my water back on. After not having water for eight days already, my housemate and I had exhausted our stored water supply and we were desperate to get our water service back as fast as possible. Since it took over a week for the General Manager to look at my last letter, I pleaded with the lady we were talking to to just let me pay the adjusted amount so the company would turn our water back on. She absolutely refused until, by some ironic grace of God, the man who had initially installed the water meter at our house (who had been silently listening to our conversation until now) vouched for me that the meter was for domestic use. Trumped, the woman let down her guard and conceded to adjust my bill. I was ecstatic…until I tried to finally pay and get out of there…the office where I needed to pay my bill had already closed by the time we finished arguing. Of course!

I rode home in the car with Mr. Milango with our campus driver completely exhausted and defeated. I had to return to Moruwasa the following day to pay the bill. I arrived at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning to swiftly pay my bill. For once the company stayed true to its word and sent someone to reconnect our water a few hours later. Yet, perhaps the most unfortunate thing from this whole fiasco was that by the time they reconnected our water…our water source had run dry…AGAIN! So, I’d gone through all that trouble to regain service that had once again disappeared. I guess you really don’t get what you pay for over here, ugh!

From last Thursday to Sunday my housemate and I struggled to survive without a drop of water. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to take a shower more badly in my entire life as I did during those last few days. I even made a desperate visit to our neighbors on Saturday to get one bucket of water so I could bathe. Fortunately I was given a bucket to console my frets. Now, since our pipes have been reconnected my housemate and I decided to leave our tap outside turned on so that incase water was available we would be able to hear it and collect water. In the past, when water had been scarce on campus, the only time when water was available was during the late hours of the night around 12:30am or 1:00am.

After heading to bed early on Sunday night to get a good night’s rest for teaching on Monday, my housemate woke me up at 1:00am to tell me that water was finally flowing out of our faucet outside! We were so exhilarated to finally have water that we proceeded to fill up 25 20-Litre jugs, 3 buckets, and one giant bucket with water until almost 2:00am. Hopefully even if the running water we once had doesn’t come back, we’ll be comfortable for a while living off of our buckets! Even though I was exhausted for school on Monday morning, it was so worth losing 45 minutes of sleep to collect all the water.

TEACHING

I should probably update you about what it is that I’m actually supposed to be doing here…which is teaching. In truth, the last three weeks of January that I was back in Morogoro I hardly taught!

The first week I was back we only had one staff meeting at school the entire week to determine a bunch of important stuff for the upcoming new academic year. Unfortunately, what turned into a 5-hour meeting was conducted completely in Swahili. Needlesstosay I was completely lost the whole time about what everyone was talking about. The Headmaster of the school ran the meeting and seemed to be asking his staff for feedback on different issues the school had had the previous year. I wish I would’ve known what they were talking about so I could’ve participated a bit. I left that meeting feeling a little more than overwhelmed and sort of excluded from the whole school agenda, but now it’s up to me to seek the Headmaster our on my own time to hear the English version on the lowdown I missed out on.

The second week of school I was sick for the first three days. Since my teaching schedule is front-loaded every week, I only had 6 periods to teach between Thursday and Friday when I was back at school (and healthy) again. Since I didn’t want to have two of my classes ahead of the other two, I decided to just do some fun activities in class to fill up my class time.

I chose to save the really important stuff I needed to cover for the following week. That is…until I found out the following Monday morning that there would be no classes the whole week. I found this out abruptly after I’d walked onto campus that morning. All I could see were swarms of students in little groups socializing and standing around not doing much. I ran into two of my colleagues, confused, and asked them why all the students were outside the classrooms. They informed me that all classes had been cancelled for the week because the students had to perform “cleanliness” instead to prepare the campus for the Form 6 (senior) graduation that was taking place on Thursday. I just had to laugh at not being able to have class…again…and started wondering when I would actually be able to kick off teaching this year’s syllabus to my students! Maybe better luck next year, haha. No, just kidding, but still.

And you know what’s funny and ironic about the Tanzanian school system – especially having to do with the fact that students barely have class because cleaning and aesthetics rank higher in priority than going to class and learning – is that every Tanzanian school I’ve ever been to here has confused the phrase “doing cleanliness” with the simple English word “cleaning.” You’d think that Tanzanians’ misunderstanding of this English concept might actually inspire them to have their students spend more time in school learning proper English as opposed to wasting time stirring leaves around outside, but things just don’t work out the way you’d logically think they should here sometimes. This is Tanzania, after all. Sometimes there’s no other reason for why things are the way they are here other than that’s the way things have always been.

Unfortunately since I was fritzing around with the Moruwasa company on Thursday last week, I was unable to attend the graduation. I’m actually bummed I didn’t get to go, but I heard from my students this week that it was a really nice procession. If there’s one thing Tanzanians know how to do really well, it’s to throw massive and over-the-top parties with so many frilly decorations your head doesn’t stop spinning until after you leave. They are an incredibly good time though! There are always lots of people dancing, cheering, and giving speeches to honor the good times. I’m surely going to miss Tanzanian-style celebrations once I leave here in June. And while you might’ve assumed that classes would’ve resumed by last Friday after the graduation, wrong again. The day was instead devoted to a huge party, or disco as parties are called here, which all of the students at school attended. Although I was curious what such a disco at my school would look like, I purposefully neglected to go. Earlier that week when I had run into some of my students “performing cleanliness” (AKA just standing around) on campus, a few of my students had made special efforts to ask me if I was planning on going to the disco on Friday. Although I wouldn’t usually think much of my students asking me to attend, it seemed that all my male students in particular were asking me if I was going. Weary of perhaps having things turn awkward on Friday if I’d gone and danced in front of my students, or vice versa, I decided against going. Later on this week when I asked my students how the disco had gone they said that a lot of fights broken out between students, probably because of typical boy/girl issues that consume most high school aged students. In retrospect, then, it’s probably better that I didn’t go. I’m not sure how much authority I would’ve had trying to chaperone in the first place.

When I went to school this Monday I was relieved and excited to finally start off a fresh full week of classes! Now that I’ve been teaching for a couple days, I’ve realized that I missed teaching a lot more than I’d expected I did. Although it’s still quite challenging trying to get all 50 of my students in each of my four classes to listen to me for an entire 80-minute period, my classes have been going well. All of my students are familiarized with me at this point and really enjoy the lessons I prepare for them. I try to make my classes as interactive and engaging as possible to stimulate my students’ minds, especially since I know most of the time my students just get to passively sit and listen to their other teachers lecture for full periods. The Tanzanian educational system glorifies lecturing as the ideal way of teaching students what they need to know. Coming out of American education, I prefer to take a more hands-on and messy approach. For as long as I’ve been at Morogoro Secondary my students have been positively responding to my style of teaching, so I’m going to continue to try to keep things lively and engaging for the rest of the time that I teach in Tanzania.

Perhaps the coolest makeover my teaching career in Tanzania has undergone this new academic year is that my students have asked me to be the Chair of a new English Club that they’ve started. Every Monday after school ends at 2:30pm I meet with a mixture of students from all four of my classes for the club. The students chose to call the club, “The Union of Students in Worlds.” I think it’s a pretty nifty and inspiring name. When I met with the students for our initial meeting two weeks ago they told me a range of topics they’d like to cover during our meetings for the rest of the year. Their interests ranged from learning more information about diseases and health issues pertinent to Tanzania to how they can connect with other students from nearby schools about issues that are important to them. They also want to plan how they can help orphans and help change the Tanzanian environment for the betterment of all kinds of people. I know they’re rather naïve and idealistic, but in truth I feel absolutely blessed to have such courageous and outstanding students who really want to make a difference. Really, I’m almost blushing our of pride now because of how ambitious they are. These are the students who are going to change the face of Tanzania for the future. I’m so privileged and happy to be a part of their early creative-thinking process for how they’ll bring about change.

For our first official meeting this past Monday, I brought in copies of a book I’d been given upon my time of arrival in Tanzania. The book was complied by a Tanzanian organization that interviewed young adult Tanzanians in 2008 about how their lives had been affected by HIV and AIDS. The book is a compilation of six different stories based on people’s stories, which are translated into both Kiswahili and English. I had the students take turns reading aloud the English version of the first story during the meeting and then went over what the students had learned from the story. Overall the meeting went really well and all the students enjoyed reading the story. I had nearly a dozen students after the meeting ask if they could borrow copies of the book so that they could finish reading the book at home. In fear of losing all my copies if I let my students take them home, I told them I would bring them to our meeting again next week instead so we could continue where we left off. When I leave Tanzania I plan to leave the books with the school so that other students will have opportunities to read them and learn truthful and up-to-date information about HIV/AIDS in Tanzania.

Those are all the updates I have to share with you now. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more information about what I’ve been up to. Thanks SO MUCH for reading!