I just spent my first week in my new home of Morogoro and life seems to be going quite fine so far. Since I’m still not teaching yet, I’ve found other ways to preoccupy myself for the rest of my vacation. Surprisingly, I’ve kept rather busy. I’ve walked to town and back every day since I’ve been here to do quick errands, buy groceries and other household items, and to use the Internet. One interesting errand I had to go on this past week was paying our electricity bill at a place called Tanesco. At first I had no idea where the place was in town, but by the time I found it after asking four different people along the way I’d walked over an hour just getting there! Tanesco was utterly packed with people who were crammed up against each other waiting for the only teller who was working then to pay their bills. I walked in with my bill and money in my hand and silently stood behind a group of three old men who were waiting to the side of the longer line. After about twenty minutes of standing idly I asked them if they were waiting and I showed them my bill and they pointed to the end of the other line. Great. I moved to the end of the other line just as two new tellers opened their windows, yet as I found out a little later, they weren’t accepting my kind of bill so I had to wait until getting to the last teller in the line who’d been there since I arrived. After a lot of confusion trying to pay at those first two windows I awkwardly rejoined the line slightly behind where I’d been waiting before. Almost instantly an older man behind me tapped me on the shoulder and pointed for me to go to the end of the line. At this point my patience was running out…I’d already waited more than 45 minutes just to figure out that I could only pay my bill in one spot. I tried to babble out in Swahili that I’d been waiting for almost an hour already and I had been ahead in line before, actually. The man and a few others around him laughed and told me to move and I simply said, “Hapana” (“No”). Sometimes you just have to hold your ground. I wasn’t trying to be some White ass hole who was trying to cut everyone – I was tired of waiting just like everyone else and I actually had been waiting longer than them! Finally the guy behind me let up and I was able to keep my spot in line. After another half an hour of shuffling in a line that didn’t really seem to be moving, I approached the counter with my bill and handed over my money. After swiftly stamping everyone else’s bills, the teller took one look at my bill and said, “Subiri” (“Wait”). Of course…wait! Haha. I stood off to the side with a defeated look on my face while a man behind the counter went to reprint my bill. As I was waiting, I immediately thought, “Yup, I’m definitely in a third world country!” I caught myself longing for the simple electronic bill pay at that moment that you can do with one click of a mouse on your computer back home in the States. No lines, no waiting, no questioning, just fast and simple. Sometimes I miss America. Ayayay. Anyway, the man finally came back with my bill and after stamping it and typing a bunch of info into her computer, the teller finally handed me back my change a new receipt for the bill! I was so happy to leave after being there for an hour and a half that I released a huge sigh as I walked out the door. By the time I left the line had gotten even worse. There was a guard standing at the entrance to Tanesco preventing people from going into the building, which was still massively overcrowded. As I walked back in the direction of town I passed by a long line of people who were waiting outside the door to Tanesco, eager to make their way into the building. At least I’d made it into the door when I got there…but I think I’ll have Becky pay the next bill for us, haha. I’d like to think I have a great deal of patience and understanding when it comes to being here in TZ, in fact I enjoy mostly everything here, even if it is different from America. Yet, I have to say, after all that, I really miss the way I used to pay my bills in America!
On the upside, I have to say it’s really great living in town and having everything I need be only a half an hour’s walk away. One thing that’s really amped up my mood since I moved is running in the area I live in. Although I’ve slightly destroyed my feet in the process because the ground is so harsh, running here versus Dakawa has been really enjoyable. I get to run to the backdrop of the Uluguru Mountains right behind me rather than just running in open savanna. Not only is the view spectacular but, thanks to the mountains, the weather is also cooler here and hence nicer to run in. During the day it gets extremely hot still, but during the mornings it’s sometimes cool enough to even put on a sweater! The summer hot season is fast approaching though so I’m going to try to do all the running I can before it gets unbearably hot. Aside from that, this week was rather relaxed. I settled into my new room, cleaned and decorated the house, and allowed myself to chill out for a while. Becky and I have been getting in a routine where we cook dinner together every night and then watch a movie in the evenings before going to bed. We made the best vegetarian fajitas I’ve ever had in my life – especially thanks to the abundance of fresh ingredients we have available to us right down our road.
This weekend Becky went to Dar es Salaam with some of the other volunteers and I decided to stay in Morogoro for the weekend and continue to get settled. During the day on Friday I went to the used clothes market again by myself this time and mulled around for a while. I found some cheap deals and went home with a couple of new outfits for work. I made myself dinner that evening and watched some episodes of Family Guy, complements of Becky’s awesome DVD collection. Unfortunately right after I’d eaten dinner the power went out! I felt like I was a girl scout who’d all of a sudden been abandoned in a lone cabin without electricity or running water for the weekend, haha. I’ve been getting used to the lack of running water, but combine that with a lack of power late at night and it’s even more of a pain than usual. It was a bit freaky being alone when the power went out, mainly because all the doors in our house slam open and closed all the time because of the wind…and the wind was whipping like crazy outside. Luckily I lit some candles so I could maneuver my way around the house and called it an early night since my computer’s battery ran out. The power didn’t actually come back on until noon on Saturday, but by then I was on my way to town to finally skype with my parents! We haven’t heard each other’s voices since I arrived in TZ all the way back in June! It was wonderful to catch up and be able to tell each other in real time what’s been going on. On Saturday night I was blessed to have power the whole night and I relaxed and watched “Death at a Funeral” and “Wedding Crashers” and went to bed. It’s nice to do things like that like I would do at home – to just watch a movie on the weekend and crash. Doing things like I would do at home here make me feel more at home and at ease, which I am sure is the same for most of us. On Sunday I went into a really cleaning stint and I mustered up the energy to collect 8 full large jugs of water from the working faucet on campus. I went to the market in town to get vegetables for our meals this week and by the time I got home I was so exhausted I could barely move!
It’s funny how even if I only do a few things in a day here I’m so tired at the end of the night that I can barely make it past 10:30pm without falling asleep. One thing you get used to here is African time, in that you should allow yourself at least an hour’s break from any “strenuous” activity that may only take three hours or so. Even when I’m walking to town people will say, “Oh, you’re doing exercise!” even though walking to town just makes the most (and cheapest) sense to me like it would at home. I don’t consider it exercise, but here even walking is considered work for most people. They’re partially right…due to the rugged conditions of the red clay, dusty and rocky roads here it is quite a workout going to and from town by foot. The funny thing is that even when you’re just walking normally people will call out to you “Pole” as in “Sorry for your work.” Especially when you see someone who is carrying or pulling a large load on the street, you’re supposed to tell them “Pole Kazi” (“Sorry for your work”) as a way of recognizing how hard they’re working. It’s quite a different perspective than what a lot of people in the Northeast in America tend to think. When people are doing work there it’s considered really prestigious and productive, like they’re earning a right to live. Yet, here, working is considered more of a pain and like it’s something one has to do to get by. You might not agree, but that’s just my perspective.
Right now I’m on break from teaching. There’s a break from mid-September to mid-October for the high school level I’ve been teaching at. This week my boss is coming to Morogoro to try to set me up with another teaching position for the rest of the year. She wants me to teach at the Morogoro Secondary School, which is just a short walk from where I live. I might be teaching middle school there instead of high school, which will be really different. The Tanzanian education system is set up so that students go through Standard 1-7 learning only in Kiswahili. Standard 1-7 is like Elementary School education in the States. After Standard 7 students have to take an exam to enter into Middle School, which is called O-Level education. O-level lasts from Form 1-4 and is conducted completely in English. Hence Form 1 is pretty much the first year that Tanzanian students really start learning English. I’ll most likely teach a level between Form 1 and Form 4 at the Morogoro Secondary School if all goes well. After completing O-level and taking a Form 4 exam, students are placed into a school for their A-Level education, which is basically like American high school. A-Level is composed of Form 5 and Form 6. Before at Dakawa I was teaching Form 5. It was really tough teaching Form 5 because at the end of Form 6 students have to take another final exam that will determine whether or not they get into university or not. It’s a huge deal breaker if they don’t do well on their exams, so a lot of the time teachers are forced to teach just to the exam so that students are able to do well. Even my students who had just begun their Form 5 education were already stressing about knowing things for the exam at the end of Form 6. It put a lot of pressure on me to not teach them anything that wasn’t on the exam. I managed to strike a good balance, but still it was a hard task. If I teach O-Level, especially Form 1 or Form 2, my job will be much more relaxed and I’ll have more of an opportunity to set the groundwork for English structure and grammar that will help my students in their futures. A lot of my former Form 5 students had picked up a lot of bad habits from their past English teachers who didn’t know proper English. For example, they would say, “We are five in our family” instead of “There are five people in my family.” Once students get up to Form 5 and they’ve been told that what they’ve been saying is right, it’s really hard to undo grammatical mistakes like that. That’s why I’m so excited to teach the younger students in Forms 1 and 2 maybe. I’ll have great room for creativity too, since I won’t be teaching to such an important exam, you know?
On Monday last week Becky came home with some really good news. She’s been volunteering to teach at a school down the road that teaches beginning English to students who are about to enter Form 1. She said that a Headmaster from a nearby secondary school came to meet her and invited her to teach at his school, the Yespa Secondary School. Since Becky is already so busy teaching at two different schools, she told him I might be able to take the position as the school’s English teacher instead. On Wednesday Becky and I went to Yespa to check it out and meet with the Headmaster. Getting there was quite a feat! We rode for fifteen minutes from our house on the main paved road in Morogoro to the junction of the dirt road that the school is on. We continued for another fifteen minutes winding around that really curvy dirt road until we finally reached the school. On our way we passed by a ton of men in orange jumpsuits (prisoners, no doubt) and about 7 other Secondary Schools before we got to Yespa. It felt like we were on a quest for some long lost Secondary School way out in the middle of nowhere. For the last 10km to the school there were little signs directing us toward Yespa staked in the ground pointing to which ways we should turn. Once we got out of the taxi it felt like we’d just been on a small version of a ride at a theme park. The crazy trip was more than worth it when we arrived, though. The school is set in a really beautiful area in which you can see most of the Uluguru Mountains and almost all of Morogoro at a distance. It felt like I was looking at a small snow globe of Morogoro from where we were standing at the school. I could get used to that.
As for the school, it’s quite sparse but very well manicured so far. The school just opened for the first time in January of this year. Since it’s is so new it only has 35 students so far who are all in Form 1. There are two streams, or separate classes, of students; one has 15 students and the other has 20. The Headmaster there said that there currently is not an English teacher at the school, so he is in dire need of hiring someone to teach English right away. So far the school only has 7 teachers who teach 12 subjects in total which range from Chemistry, Biology, and Physics, to Geography, History, and Kiswahili. The small size of the student body and faculty would make teaching there really cozy and welcoming. Being as social as I am, I have no doubts that I would be able to adjust to the small environment. I’m pretty excited about being able to teach such small classes after teaching a huge class of nearly 40 at Dakawa! I’m really interested in taking the position and I’m going to talk to my boss about it this week while she’s in Morogoro helping set up my job at the Moro Sec. School.
Under my contract with WorldTeach I have to teach at at least one government school while I’m here, since I get living stipends from the Ministry of Education, which supports government schools. Since Yespa is a private school, I’ll have to teach somewhere else that’s a government school, like Moro Sec, if I end up teaching there. Hopefully by later this week I’ll be able to work out a schedule so that I can teach at both schools. It would be so rewarding teaching at Yespa because the need there for an English teacher is so great. If I work there I’ll really feel like I’m making a big difference in students’ lives here. Before at Dakawa I only had three classes a week because there were over 6 English teachers at the school! The funny thing is that WorldTeach seemed to place us at schools in Tanzania that don’t have such a great need for English teachers, even though there are tons of schools around that could use our help a lot more. It’s really no fault of World Teach’s, but rather more of a decision made by the Minsitry of Education, which ultimately decided where it wanted us to teach at for the first year of our program. I have to say, although I’ll really miss my students at Dakawa, I’ll be happy to teach at other schools in Tanzania that have a greater need for the services I’m able to offer as a native English speaker and teacher. I’m enthusiastic to get things rolling this week so that I can start teaching soon. Hopefully I’ll have an update later this week about what my teaching position will look like for the rest of the year. I’ll keep you posted!
Monday, September 20, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
New Beginnings at Kilakala
Dear Readers!
I’m writing this blog from my new house at the Kilakala Girls’ Secondary School in Morogoro!! I moved on Friday. Our friends Becky (my new housemate) and Matt came all the way to Dakawa on Friday in a taxi to pick me up and help me move all my stuff to Kilakala in Morogoro. They ended up getting wicked lost on their way and drove by a ton of Maasai villages that were heavily populated by mud huts and they also drove through a random prison accidentally - I didn't even know that was near us at Dakawa...yikes. It was quite a journey for them so by the time they reached our house they were so tired and glad to be out of the taxi! Abby, Alice and I cleaned the house and prepared lunch for them.
When we got to the house at Kilakala on Friday I unpacked and then Becky (my new housemate) and I made Annies for dinner and then watched “Grown Ups” which just came out. You can get new movies that have just come out in theatres here for about $3. They’re all imported from Japan and China. While we were watching the movie about 10 of Becky’s students surprised us at the house because they wanted to meet me. They all read a bunch of Becky’s gossip magazines and danced to music that Becky and I played for them. It was so nice to get such a warm and inviting welcoming to the community here through her students. They were all really sweet and I know it will be nice to see them while I’m living here with Becky. We finished the movie after they left and I fell asleep even before midnight…I was super tired! I slept like a baby because I felt totally relaxed and comfortable in my new environment. It was an unbelievable feeling.
On Saturday I woke up and Becky and I met Alice in town to go to a used clothes market. It was really nice to explore around and see what was there. All the clothes were between 200 and 500 shillings, which is super cheap since 1500 shillings is $1. Most of the clothes were kinda ratty looking but there were some nice things. There are a lot of super random American t-shirts that you’d never really expect to see in Africa…like Alice got an old Sesame Street t-shirt. We’ve seen a lot of shirts for a bunch of the colleges and universities we all went to before we came here, haha. It’s sort of fun to look through everything and see what’s ended up here.
I might go back to the used clothes market to see what’s there again, but on second thought though, I might not because it was really scary there at times. Becky almost got her phone stolen from her right after we got into the market. A guy came out of nowhere and reached around Becky to distract her while another guy tried to steal her phone out of her pocket. Becky started screaming “Fuck You!” and I said “Sitaki!” which means “I don’t want that” or basically “Get away!” I hit one of the guys over the head with my water bottle and pushed him away from Becky. Luckily her phone didn’t get stolen, but Becky was still really shaken up and annoyed. Actually, we were all livid. The used clothes market was jam-packed with people but they didn’t do anything about it. It seemed to be normal to them that people get mugged and robbed. The fact that no one was really willing to help us or do anything to the thieves was really uncomfortable and unsettling. Their apathetic behavior seemed to completely contrast with the huge sense of communal wellbeing and protection that I’ve felt among most Tanzanians since I’ve been here. What’s more, the attempted robbery was definitely planned, which makes it extra eerie because we know that people here are actually scheming to steal from us... I have to say it was ironic when Becky almost got mugged because it happened a moment after we’d gone into a little outdoor shop in the market. When we went inside the shop vendor saw our purses loosely strung over our shoulders so they were draping behind our backs and immediately told us to make sure we kept our purses in the front of our bodies and tightly around our shoulders so no one would take them. Even though we left the shop following his guidance, Becky still got attacked. Oy vey.
It’s hard to live here knowing that you’re so vulnerable to robberies and muggings every day, especially because of how we look. Everyone can tell we’re not from here because we’re White. Tanzanians’ assumptions about our unfamiliarity with the environment and their thinking that most Whites here are very affluent makes us prime candidates in their society to steal from. I really hate thinking that just because I’m White people see a huge dollar sign masking my face and think that I’m so new to and hence unfamiliar with the environment that they’ll have an easy time stealing from me. Thinking about that puts a really rotten feeling in my stomach, so I rather not think about it. After all, I’m actually living here and not just visiting. In order to protect myself, I just have to remind myself that since I do stand out here and I seem like an easy target for crime I should always be aware of my surroundings and abide by general city smarts to stay safe. Hopefully by doing such I won’t run into such trouble during the rest of my time here. I can only hope the same goes true for the other volunteers as well.
Becky and I mentioned what had happened at the used clothes market to one of her students who came to visit us on Sunday and she said that it’s really common for even Tanzanians to be the targets of such petty crime. She told us a story of when she was holding her friend’s purse at a craft market in Mwenge, Dar es Salaam. She was waiting on a daladala for her friend to finish shopping and these girls started talking to her on the bus distracting her. She had been clutching her friend’s and her purses so tightly around her shoulder that she never noticed that while the girls had been talking to her they had cut the straps of the girls’ purses and took them, leaving her to think that her purses were still fine. When her friend returned to the bus she was horrified that her purse had been taking. Meanwhile, Becky’s student had no idea until her friend acknowledged that the purses were gone. It was devastating. On another occasion she told us that she had gone to Karume, Dar es Salaam, to a well-known shopping center to buy new school shoes. Before she had left her mother had warned her that new thieves were selling really nice shoes for super cheap prices as a way of stealing from people. They were selling nice shoes that should usually be 10,000-15,000 shillings for only 2,000 shillings. Becky’s student brushed off what her mom said and went to the market confident that nothing would happen to her. After she’d spent all day shopping and had bought a pair of shoes she saw a man with some really nice shoes that were just right for school. He said he’d sell her one pair for only 2,000 shillings so she paid the man and took a pair of shoes. Immediately after the man started screaming “Give me back my shoes, you thief!” and making a huge scene. He claimed that she’d only given him 2,000 shillings when the shoes were really 12,000. He was lying of course. Feeling helpless, Becky’s student told the man to calm down and she’d give back the shoes if he gave her back her money. She was so uncomfortable that she rushed the exchange and started walking off. A bunch of people around started yelling at her to look at the money the man had given her back. She just ignored them until about a minute later. When she looked at her hands she saw the man had only given her a piece of paper instead of her 2,000 shillings back, hence he’s stolen her money. Her stories are not atypical of most Tanzanians’ experiences here. Even though we’re all White volunteers and are more easily spotted as easy targets for stealing from, regular native Tanzanians still experience similar crime. It’s a real shame, but in a developing country such as Tanzania where many people barely have enough money and resources to support themselves day-to-day, petty crime becomes somewhat of a normal element in the society. I’m counting my blessings because I’ve managed to avoid all such interactions, but I’m sure a day will come where I won’t be so lucky. Until then, I have to try to do as I said and be as smart as I can in making sure I’m safe here. That’s really all I or anyone else can do. You just have to accept it, suck it up and get on with living your life.
After the mugging fiasco on Saturday, Alice, Becky, and I mulled around the center of Morogoro town for a bit and then retired to our house at Kilakala to rest before dinner. We met up with our friend and fellow volunteer, Matt, and went out to dinner at Dragonaires Saturday evening. I had chicken masala curry with chapatti (which is like Indian roti) and the rest of the volunteers had pizza. Dragonaires is known for its amazing pizza but it’s also generally a Chinese and Indian restaurant. Usually it only makes pizza on Friday and Sunday nights, but on Saturday night the stone-hearth oven was lit so pizza was fair game on the menu. We ate and talked until about midnight and then took a cab home. Alice and Matt were staying at a small hotel nearby Kilakala called Amabilis, which is run by nuns, so we dropped them off there first. The funny thing about Amabilis is that they lock the doors to the hotel at 10:00pm no matter what, so by the time we got there at midnight to drop Alice and Matt off they couldn’t get inside to their rooms. We had to get the guard at the front gate to call one of the nuns with Alice’s cell phone to let them in. It’s quite a whacky system. It seems a little weird that the guard to the hotel wouldn’t have his own key to any of the doors to unlock the place, but T.I.T. (This is Tanzania) so not everything here makes sense to us. Becky and I arrived home safely shortly thereafter and fell asleep immediately.
On Sunday Becky and I waited all day for her students to come by so that we could all play volleyball together. There are only two more weeks of school left for the girls here and their midterm exams are approaching, so Becky and I wanted to do something fun and relaxing with the girls before they had to start studying for exams. We only left the house once for about 15 minutes to visit the little vegetable market down the road from us to get an avocado, lettuce, some tomatoes, small chili peppers, and bananas for dinner. When we returned we still hadn’t seen the girls anywhere so we both took short afternoon naps. The stress of moving here, although it’s been somewhat of a relief in many ways, has generally made me exhausted the last couple days. When I woke up around six in the evening Becky’s student came by to tell us that she and the other students had come by earlier in the day but we weren’t around. Becky and I were so sorry and realized they must’ve come while we were at the market for that brief amount of time. Hopefully we’ll be able to play volleyball with them at another time in the near future.
On Sunday night Becky and I made homemade tomato soup, which we poured over avocados, and garlic bread. The meal was so good, especially considering that all the ingredients were fresh from the market that day. That’s what’s so nice about living here – we can always get fresh fruits and vegetables no more than half a mile down the road from where we live. There’s always a plentiful amount of produce at the market so we never have to worry about getting food for the day. Although the prices aren’t nearly as cheap as they were in Dakawa (e.g. 5 tomatoes here is 500 shillings whereas I could usually get 20 or more tomatoes in Dakawa for the same price), they’re still relatively cheap compared to prices in America for the same types of foods. It’s nice to be so close to fresh food for once in my life. Actually, the route I’ll have to walk everyday to get to the new school I’ll be working at next month passes right by the food market so everyday when I come home from work I’ll be able to get food for Becky and I. Talk about convenient!
Overall I’m warming up to Kilakala in general. The campus is really pristine and nice looking. The school really prides itself on its aesthetics. Kilakala is known for being the best girls’ secondary school in the Morogoro region and even most people from Dar es Salaam have heard about Kilakala. Kilakala’s students usually rank quite high on the national examinations for public government schools. In some ways it seems like we should be placed at other less-successful government schools where our native English speaking skills would really help the communities more, but Kilakala will be fine this year. I think the Tanzanian government placed us at schools that are high in the ranks like Kilakala, Dakawa, and Mzumbe because one, they’re close to Dar es Salaam and for the practicalities of our Field Director visiting us (who lives in Dar) it made the most sense placing us here. Secondly, I think the TZ Ministry of Education wanted to make a good impression on us by placing at the schools whose English is the strongest, creating the illusion that Tanzanians are really ok with English and we’re not as needed here as we might’ve originally thought. Whatever the reason, we’re placed here at these schools this first year of the program and we’re going to finish the year and then reassess if there might be other schools which might be able to use our help more than these ones in the future.
You know it’s funny because when I first signed up for WorldTeach I was originally told I would teach at Kilakala, not Dakawa, so it’s ironic that I’ve ended up here anyway after all the changes that’ve gone on. Even though I’m mostly liking Kilakala so far, there are some things I definitely miss about Dakawa. For example, when I was living at Dakawa our water only ran out a couple of times and even then it was only out for a few hours and then it came back on. Adversely. Kilakala currently doesn’t have any running water on campus other than in the kitchen where even so there is only one spout that provides running water. Kilakala’s water supply started to run dry a couple of weeks ago and during that time, when Tracy was still living her with Becky, they’d have to go behind the house every night around midnight to collect the running water from the faucet that only worked around that time of night. Since Tracy left and I moved in, however, one of Becky’s students told us that Kilakala has completely run out of water except for that one spout in the kitchen. Thank god there’s still water to cook with here, but really it’s become a bit of a pain for us Americans who are usually spoiled to use as much water as we please back home in the States. Fortunately, since Becky is part of the staff here, we get the privilege of filling up our water jugs and buckets in the kitchen. Even then it’s completely on the other side of campus from where we live so usually on our way back to the house when we’re struggling to carry our water a lot of students will run up to us and help us carry our water. It’s a really nice gesture of respect, since they understand that we’re certainly not used to this. As for most of the students here, they have to walk about 20 minutes (at least!) to go fetch water from a neighboring school in the region whose supply hasn’t run out. Usually the girls can only carry one full bucket at a time which they balance and carry on their heads the whole way back. Becky and I would try that but being Wazungu (White people) I think we’d get so laughed at we wouldn’t be able to stand it, haha. Plus I don’t know how we could do that without breaking our necks! It’s a wonder girls half our size that we’re teaching can handle that much weight atop their heads for such a distance! Since it’s been such a hassle for us to get water, Becky and I have learned to conserve, conserve, conserve! We try to use less than a bucket of water a day per person. It’s funny to think that we’re actually able to do it considering that most Americans go through more than an average of 20 gallons of water a day just for one shower! It’s a totally reality check being here.
It’s a real shame with the water situation because apparently there’s another secondary school with a big water supply that’s much closer to Kilakala than the school the Kilakala students have been going to to get water, but apparently that school will not allow Kilakala girls to get water from it because Kilakala has Americans working for it and the school is Muslim. Talk about crazy politics, ayayay. It’s not just Becky and I who are lumped into the American pool because a couple years ago two Peace Corps volunteers from American were working here also, but even so the fact that the girls have to walk twice as far just because we’re Americans really is a punch in the gut. It sucks that it has to be that way. Oh, this is a crazy world we live in.
Aside from the water disaster, one of the luxuries of living at Kilakala is that I don’t have to shell out 2,500 shillings to and from town and ride for a minimum of one hour each way in a crammed daladala that goes between Dakawa and town just to get to town anymore. I can’t even tell you how happy that makes me. Personally, I really don’t mind the daladalas usually and I find them kind of charming, but it’s nice not to have to travel an hour just to go to town to get airtime for my phone or groceries we’ve run out of at the house. I can just walk to town from Kilakala pretty much whenever I want which makes my life so much easier. I can also use the internet more often and stay in touch with people from home a lot easier. Clearly there are a lot of perks to living in town.
On the other hand though, I really don’t mind the daladalas and I’m especially going to miss the commute between Dakawa and town from now on. For example, the other weekend when I was on the daladala coming to town from Dakawa we picked up some Maasai from the villages that populate the area between Dakawa and town. One Maasai woman sat next to me in the back of the daladala for about half the ride. She was adorned with tons of beautiful yellow and white beaded necklaces and different metal chains that were folded through her gauged earlobes and metal bracelets that were wound around her ankles/shins and forearms. She was absolutely stunning and it was such a privilege to be able to sit next to her and interact with an authentic Maasai person from her original environment. Most of the time when foreigners come to Tanzania they only get to hear about the Maasai or see the ones who live in town. Usually the Maasai you see in Tanzania if you’re a foreigner who’s just sticking to the major areas of TZ like Morogoro and Dar, especially, are almost always males who work as security guards at clubs, hotels, and restaurants and guards for parked cars in any parking lot you can imagine, mostly at night. They’re almost always robed in two flannel-patterned kangas, one of which they wrap around their waists to cover their legs and the other which they wrap around their torsos to cover up their chests. Most of their kangas are red and blue colors that are patterned with different geometric lines that make really cool patterns. Almost all of the Maasai I’ve seen have gauged earlobes from which usually only the women hang different ornaments and earrings. Although they mostly speak their own Maasai language, some Maasai know Kiswahili, too. When I was on the daladala sitting next to the Maasai woman she started speaking to me in Swahili and I was able to tell her a little bit about myself…that I’m from American and I work in Morogoro as a high school English teacher, etc. You should’ve seen the smile gleaming from her face when I spoke Kiswahili with her. That’s why it’s so important to me to learn Kiswahili here. The more I learn, the more I can get the opportunity to learn about and exchange information with people who don’t know barely any English here. It’s an absolutely wonderful feeling. I’ll never forget that daladala ride. Even though I won’t be riding to Dakawa as often as I did before when I lived there, I will still gladly make the trip periodically to visit my old students, my former Headmistress (whom I still adore), and be able to reap the cultural benefits of the daladala rides.
This morning (Monday) I went for my first run in the Kilakala area. It was nice to start running again since last week. The scenery is absolutely stunning because there's a backdrop of the gorgeous Uluguru Mountains right behind the school so everywhere you're in Morogoro you can see them. When I finished my run I filled up two jugs of water for Becky and I. We were out of water when I got back to the house so I had to make the trip. Becky was busy teaching beginner English classes to some kids down the street at a new school that just opened up. When Becky got back from class we took a taxi into town for lunch and then did some shopping for the house and now I'm here at the Internet Cafe. While we were at lunch a street vendor came up to us with a lot of stuff and then started jabbering off in Swahili about something. I just told him "Hapana, asante" ("No Thank You") but he ended up taking our plates and eating our food! We were already done so it wasn't a big deal but it was kind of uncomfortable because we didn't know what was going on at first. We left shortly thereafter. We tried to buy some shelves for our house at some little shops next to the restaurant but they kept trying to rip us off so we just moved on. It's always an interesting experience being in town here. You really never know what's going to happen. You just have to go into town with a brave yet friendly face on and see what awaits you!
I’m writing this blog from my new house at the Kilakala Girls’ Secondary School in Morogoro!! I moved on Friday. Our friends Becky (my new housemate) and Matt came all the way to Dakawa on Friday in a taxi to pick me up and help me move all my stuff to Kilakala in Morogoro. They ended up getting wicked lost on their way and drove by a ton of Maasai villages that were heavily populated by mud huts and they also drove through a random prison accidentally - I didn't even know that was near us at Dakawa...yikes. It was quite a journey for them so by the time they reached our house they were so tired and glad to be out of the taxi! Abby, Alice and I cleaned the house and prepared lunch for them.
When we got to the house at Kilakala on Friday I unpacked and then Becky (my new housemate) and I made Annies for dinner and then watched “Grown Ups” which just came out. You can get new movies that have just come out in theatres here for about $3. They’re all imported from Japan and China. While we were watching the movie about 10 of Becky’s students surprised us at the house because they wanted to meet me. They all read a bunch of Becky’s gossip magazines and danced to music that Becky and I played for them. It was so nice to get such a warm and inviting welcoming to the community here through her students. They were all really sweet and I know it will be nice to see them while I’m living here with Becky. We finished the movie after they left and I fell asleep even before midnight…I was super tired! I slept like a baby because I felt totally relaxed and comfortable in my new environment. It was an unbelievable feeling.
On Saturday I woke up and Becky and I met Alice in town to go to a used clothes market. It was really nice to explore around and see what was there. All the clothes were between 200 and 500 shillings, which is super cheap since 1500 shillings is $1. Most of the clothes were kinda ratty looking but there were some nice things. There are a lot of super random American t-shirts that you’d never really expect to see in Africa…like Alice got an old Sesame Street t-shirt. We’ve seen a lot of shirts for a bunch of the colleges and universities we all went to before we came here, haha. It’s sort of fun to look through everything and see what’s ended up here.
I might go back to the used clothes market to see what’s there again, but on second thought though, I might not because it was really scary there at times. Becky almost got her phone stolen from her right after we got into the market. A guy came out of nowhere and reached around Becky to distract her while another guy tried to steal her phone out of her pocket. Becky started screaming “Fuck You!” and I said “Sitaki!” which means “I don’t want that” or basically “Get away!” I hit one of the guys over the head with my water bottle and pushed him away from Becky. Luckily her phone didn’t get stolen, but Becky was still really shaken up and annoyed. Actually, we were all livid. The used clothes market was jam-packed with people but they didn’t do anything about it. It seemed to be normal to them that people get mugged and robbed. The fact that no one was really willing to help us or do anything to the thieves was really uncomfortable and unsettling. Their apathetic behavior seemed to completely contrast with the huge sense of communal wellbeing and protection that I’ve felt among most Tanzanians since I’ve been here. What’s more, the attempted robbery was definitely planned, which makes it extra eerie because we know that people here are actually scheming to steal from us... I have to say it was ironic when Becky almost got mugged because it happened a moment after we’d gone into a little outdoor shop in the market. When we went inside the shop vendor saw our purses loosely strung over our shoulders so they were draping behind our backs and immediately told us to make sure we kept our purses in the front of our bodies and tightly around our shoulders so no one would take them. Even though we left the shop following his guidance, Becky still got attacked. Oy vey.
It’s hard to live here knowing that you’re so vulnerable to robberies and muggings every day, especially because of how we look. Everyone can tell we’re not from here because we’re White. Tanzanians’ assumptions about our unfamiliarity with the environment and their thinking that most Whites here are very affluent makes us prime candidates in their society to steal from. I really hate thinking that just because I’m White people see a huge dollar sign masking my face and think that I’m so new to and hence unfamiliar with the environment that they’ll have an easy time stealing from me. Thinking about that puts a really rotten feeling in my stomach, so I rather not think about it. After all, I’m actually living here and not just visiting. In order to protect myself, I just have to remind myself that since I do stand out here and I seem like an easy target for crime I should always be aware of my surroundings and abide by general city smarts to stay safe. Hopefully by doing such I won’t run into such trouble during the rest of my time here. I can only hope the same goes true for the other volunteers as well.
Becky and I mentioned what had happened at the used clothes market to one of her students who came to visit us on Sunday and she said that it’s really common for even Tanzanians to be the targets of such petty crime. She told us a story of when she was holding her friend’s purse at a craft market in Mwenge, Dar es Salaam. She was waiting on a daladala for her friend to finish shopping and these girls started talking to her on the bus distracting her. She had been clutching her friend’s and her purses so tightly around her shoulder that she never noticed that while the girls had been talking to her they had cut the straps of the girls’ purses and took them, leaving her to think that her purses were still fine. When her friend returned to the bus she was horrified that her purse had been taking. Meanwhile, Becky’s student had no idea until her friend acknowledged that the purses were gone. It was devastating. On another occasion she told us that she had gone to Karume, Dar es Salaam, to a well-known shopping center to buy new school shoes. Before she had left her mother had warned her that new thieves were selling really nice shoes for super cheap prices as a way of stealing from people. They were selling nice shoes that should usually be 10,000-15,000 shillings for only 2,000 shillings. Becky’s student brushed off what her mom said and went to the market confident that nothing would happen to her. After she’d spent all day shopping and had bought a pair of shoes she saw a man with some really nice shoes that were just right for school. He said he’d sell her one pair for only 2,000 shillings so she paid the man and took a pair of shoes. Immediately after the man started screaming “Give me back my shoes, you thief!” and making a huge scene. He claimed that she’d only given him 2,000 shillings when the shoes were really 12,000. He was lying of course. Feeling helpless, Becky’s student told the man to calm down and she’d give back the shoes if he gave her back her money. She was so uncomfortable that she rushed the exchange and started walking off. A bunch of people around started yelling at her to look at the money the man had given her back. She just ignored them until about a minute later. When she looked at her hands she saw the man had only given her a piece of paper instead of her 2,000 shillings back, hence he’s stolen her money. Her stories are not atypical of most Tanzanians’ experiences here. Even though we’re all White volunteers and are more easily spotted as easy targets for stealing from, regular native Tanzanians still experience similar crime. It’s a real shame, but in a developing country such as Tanzania where many people barely have enough money and resources to support themselves day-to-day, petty crime becomes somewhat of a normal element in the society. I’m counting my blessings because I’ve managed to avoid all such interactions, but I’m sure a day will come where I won’t be so lucky. Until then, I have to try to do as I said and be as smart as I can in making sure I’m safe here. That’s really all I or anyone else can do. You just have to accept it, suck it up and get on with living your life.
After the mugging fiasco on Saturday, Alice, Becky, and I mulled around the center of Morogoro town for a bit and then retired to our house at Kilakala to rest before dinner. We met up with our friend and fellow volunteer, Matt, and went out to dinner at Dragonaires Saturday evening. I had chicken masala curry with chapatti (which is like Indian roti) and the rest of the volunteers had pizza. Dragonaires is known for its amazing pizza but it’s also generally a Chinese and Indian restaurant. Usually it only makes pizza on Friday and Sunday nights, but on Saturday night the stone-hearth oven was lit so pizza was fair game on the menu. We ate and talked until about midnight and then took a cab home. Alice and Matt were staying at a small hotel nearby Kilakala called Amabilis, which is run by nuns, so we dropped them off there first. The funny thing about Amabilis is that they lock the doors to the hotel at 10:00pm no matter what, so by the time we got there at midnight to drop Alice and Matt off they couldn’t get inside to their rooms. We had to get the guard at the front gate to call one of the nuns with Alice’s cell phone to let them in. It’s quite a whacky system. It seems a little weird that the guard to the hotel wouldn’t have his own key to any of the doors to unlock the place, but T.I.T. (This is Tanzania) so not everything here makes sense to us. Becky and I arrived home safely shortly thereafter and fell asleep immediately.
On Sunday Becky and I waited all day for her students to come by so that we could all play volleyball together. There are only two more weeks of school left for the girls here and their midterm exams are approaching, so Becky and I wanted to do something fun and relaxing with the girls before they had to start studying for exams. We only left the house once for about 15 minutes to visit the little vegetable market down the road from us to get an avocado, lettuce, some tomatoes, small chili peppers, and bananas for dinner. When we returned we still hadn’t seen the girls anywhere so we both took short afternoon naps. The stress of moving here, although it’s been somewhat of a relief in many ways, has generally made me exhausted the last couple days. When I woke up around six in the evening Becky’s student came by to tell us that she and the other students had come by earlier in the day but we weren’t around. Becky and I were so sorry and realized they must’ve come while we were at the market for that brief amount of time. Hopefully we’ll be able to play volleyball with them at another time in the near future.
On Sunday night Becky and I made homemade tomato soup, which we poured over avocados, and garlic bread. The meal was so good, especially considering that all the ingredients were fresh from the market that day. That’s what’s so nice about living here – we can always get fresh fruits and vegetables no more than half a mile down the road from where we live. There’s always a plentiful amount of produce at the market so we never have to worry about getting food for the day. Although the prices aren’t nearly as cheap as they were in Dakawa (e.g. 5 tomatoes here is 500 shillings whereas I could usually get 20 or more tomatoes in Dakawa for the same price), they’re still relatively cheap compared to prices in America for the same types of foods. It’s nice to be so close to fresh food for once in my life. Actually, the route I’ll have to walk everyday to get to the new school I’ll be working at next month passes right by the food market so everyday when I come home from work I’ll be able to get food for Becky and I. Talk about convenient!
Overall I’m warming up to Kilakala in general. The campus is really pristine and nice looking. The school really prides itself on its aesthetics. Kilakala is known for being the best girls’ secondary school in the Morogoro region and even most people from Dar es Salaam have heard about Kilakala. Kilakala’s students usually rank quite high on the national examinations for public government schools. In some ways it seems like we should be placed at other less-successful government schools where our native English speaking skills would really help the communities more, but Kilakala will be fine this year. I think the Tanzanian government placed us at schools that are high in the ranks like Kilakala, Dakawa, and Mzumbe because one, they’re close to Dar es Salaam and for the practicalities of our Field Director visiting us (who lives in Dar) it made the most sense placing us here. Secondly, I think the TZ Ministry of Education wanted to make a good impression on us by placing at the schools whose English is the strongest, creating the illusion that Tanzanians are really ok with English and we’re not as needed here as we might’ve originally thought. Whatever the reason, we’re placed here at these schools this first year of the program and we’re going to finish the year and then reassess if there might be other schools which might be able to use our help more than these ones in the future.
You know it’s funny because when I first signed up for WorldTeach I was originally told I would teach at Kilakala, not Dakawa, so it’s ironic that I’ve ended up here anyway after all the changes that’ve gone on. Even though I’m mostly liking Kilakala so far, there are some things I definitely miss about Dakawa. For example, when I was living at Dakawa our water only ran out a couple of times and even then it was only out for a few hours and then it came back on. Adversely. Kilakala currently doesn’t have any running water on campus other than in the kitchen where even so there is only one spout that provides running water. Kilakala’s water supply started to run dry a couple of weeks ago and during that time, when Tracy was still living her with Becky, they’d have to go behind the house every night around midnight to collect the running water from the faucet that only worked around that time of night. Since Tracy left and I moved in, however, one of Becky’s students told us that Kilakala has completely run out of water except for that one spout in the kitchen. Thank god there’s still water to cook with here, but really it’s become a bit of a pain for us Americans who are usually spoiled to use as much water as we please back home in the States. Fortunately, since Becky is part of the staff here, we get the privilege of filling up our water jugs and buckets in the kitchen. Even then it’s completely on the other side of campus from where we live so usually on our way back to the house when we’re struggling to carry our water a lot of students will run up to us and help us carry our water. It’s a really nice gesture of respect, since they understand that we’re certainly not used to this. As for most of the students here, they have to walk about 20 minutes (at least!) to go fetch water from a neighboring school in the region whose supply hasn’t run out. Usually the girls can only carry one full bucket at a time which they balance and carry on their heads the whole way back. Becky and I would try that but being Wazungu (White people) I think we’d get so laughed at we wouldn’t be able to stand it, haha. Plus I don’t know how we could do that without breaking our necks! It’s a wonder girls half our size that we’re teaching can handle that much weight atop their heads for such a distance! Since it’s been such a hassle for us to get water, Becky and I have learned to conserve, conserve, conserve! We try to use less than a bucket of water a day per person. It’s funny to think that we’re actually able to do it considering that most Americans go through more than an average of 20 gallons of water a day just for one shower! It’s a totally reality check being here.
It’s a real shame with the water situation because apparently there’s another secondary school with a big water supply that’s much closer to Kilakala than the school the Kilakala students have been going to to get water, but apparently that school will not allow Kilakala girls to get water from it because Kilakala has Americans working for it and the school is Muslim. Talk about crazy politics, ayayay. It’s not just Becky and I who are lumped into the American pool because a couple years ago two Peace Corps volunteers from American were working here also, but even so the fact that the girls have to walk twice as far just because we’re Americans really is a punch in the gut. It sucks that it has to be that way. Oh, this is a crazy world we live in.
Aside from the water disaster, one of the luxuries of living at Kilakala is that I don’t have to shell out 2,500 shillings to and from town and ride for a minimum of one hour each way in a crammed daladala that goes between Dakawa and town just to get to town anymore. I can’t even tell you how happy that makes me. Personally, I really don’t mind the daladalas usually and I find them kind of charming, but it’s nice not to have to travel an hour just to go to town to get airtime for my phone or groceries we’ve run out of at the house. I can just walk to town from Kilakala pretty much whenever I want which makes my life so much easier. I can also use the internet more often and stay in touch with people from home a lot easier. Clearly there are a lot of perks to living in town.
On the other hand though, I really don’t mind the daladalas and I’m especially going to miss the commute between Dakawa and town from now on. For example, the other weekend when I was on the daladala coming to town from Dakawa we picked up some Maasai from the villages that populate the area between Dakawa and town. One Maasai woman sat next to me in the back of the daladala for about half the ride. She was adorned with tons of beautiful yellow and white beaded necklaces and different metal chains that were folded through her gauged earlobes and metal bracelets that were wound around her ankles/shins and forearms. She was absolutely stunning and it was such a privilege to be able to sit next to her and interact with an authentic Maasai person from her original environment. Most of the time when foreigners come to Tanzania they only get to hear about the Maasai or see the ones who live in town. Usually the Maasai you see in Tanzania if you’re a foreigner who’s just sticking to the major areas of TZ like Morogoro and Dar, especially, are almost always males who work as security guards at clubs, hotels, and restaurants and guards for parked cars in any parking lot you can imagine, mostly at night. They’re almost always robed in two flannel-patterned kangas, one of which they wrap around their waists to cover their legs and the other which they wrap around their torsos to cover up their chests. Most of their kangas are red and blue colors that are patterned with different geometric lines that make really cool patterns. Almost all of the Maasai I’ve seen have gauged earlobes from which usually only the women hang different ornaments and earrings. Although they mostly speak their own Maasai language, some Maasai know Kiswahili, too. When I was on the daladala sitting next to the Maasai woman she started speaking to me in Swahili and I was able to tell her a little bit about myself…that I’m from American and I work in Morogoro as a high school English teacher, etc. You should’ve seen the smile gleaming from her face when I spoke Kiswahili with her. That’s why it’s so important to me to learn Kiswahili here. The more I learn, the more I can get the opportunity to learn about and exchange information with people who don’t know barely any English here. It’s an absolutely wonderful feeling. I’ll never forget that daladala ride. Even though I won’t be riding to Dakawa as often as I did before when I lived there, I will still gladly make the trip periodically to visit my old students, my former Headmistress (whom I still adore), and be able to reap the cultural benefits of the daladala rides.
This morning (Monday) I went for my first run in the Kilakala area. It was nice to start running again since last week. The scenery is absolutely stunning because there's a backdrop of the gorgeous Uluguru Mountains right behind the school so everywhere you're in Morogoro you can see them. When I finished my run I filled up two jugs of water for Becky and I. We were out of water when I got back to the house so I had to make the trip. Becky was busy teaching beginner English classes to some kids down the street at a new school that just opened up. When Becky got back from class we took a taxi into town for lunch and then did some shopping for the house and now I'm here at the Internet Cafe. While we were at lunch a street vendor came up to us with a lot of stuff and then started jabbering off in Swahili about something. I just told him "Hapana, asante" ("No Thank You") but he ended up taking our plates and eating our food! We were already done so it wasn't a big deal but it was kind of uncomfortable because we didn't know what was going on at first. We left shortly thereafter. We tried to buy some shelves for our house at some little shops next to the restaurant but they kept trying to rip us off so we just moved on. It's always an interesting experience being in town here. You really never know what's going to happen. You just have to go into town with a brave yet friendly face on and see what awaits you!
Bittersweet goodbyes
Written Monday, September 6, 2010
This past week I taught my last week of classes to my students at Dakawa. They were so happy to see me on Tuesday when I came to class since I’d been out the week before. I tried to pick up the pace from where we left off with word formation vocabulary and class went well.
On Wednesday morning my Field Director called Mrs. Mtima, the Headmistress of Dakawa, to tell her that I will be leaving the school. One of the girls in the WorldTeach Tanzania Program decided to go home early. She was living with another one of the volunteers, Becky, in Morogoro town and teaching at the Kilakala Girls’ Secondary School. Since she left, there’s now an opportunity for one of us at Dakawa to move to Morogoro to live with Becky. I decided to move because I’ve naturally become the third wheel among my two housemates and I. Instead of teaching at Kilakala, I’m expecting to teach at the Morogoro Secondary School. It will be quite different from Dakawa because it’s not a boarding school; it’s just a day school. I think the ability for my new students to see their families and live at home and just go to school during the day will really affect how I interact with them versus how I’ve been engaging with my students at Dakawa. Many of my students are really homesick a lot so they sought comfort in getting to know me at their teacher and talking to me about where they come from. I’m sure I’ll fair just fine with my new students and get to know they just as well, but I’m expecting to talk to them about different things because they’re still at home. Either way, I’m excited and ready for the transition.
I have loved Dakawa and my favorite part about it has been teaching my students, but I know I will be able to adjust well into my new placement. I still have yet to determine the details of what my teaching position there will look like, but I am hoping it will involve more teaching hours for me and offer me with more things to do than I was able to do at Dakawa. At Dakawa I’ve just been teaching English three times a week for 80-minute blocks and teaching beginner computer classes about twice a week. Nevertheless I am really going to miss Dakawa and I will especially miss my students. They have all been really sweet to me during the last month that I’ve gotten to know them.
When I told them I was transferring to Morogoro more than half the class started bawling and telling me not to go. Their second comment was, “Why you?” Ayayay it was rough trying to explain my situation to them. I nearly cried myself and I hardly ever cry! They’ve gotten really attached to me and I to them. Almost every class I’ve received notes from several of my students telling me how much they like me as a teacher and how I’m changing their lives by being here at Dakawa. They say they love me all the time, haha. Every time I read one of their notes I get confirmation that I’m making a positive impact on their lives and since that’s truly what I’m here for I couldn’t ask for anything better to receive from anyone in Tanzania. I will really miss getting to know them and seeing them three times a week, but I’ve promised them that I will visit as often as I can. They’re affected my life just as much as I believe I’ve impacted theirs so I’m not about to just disappear forever. Since I only live an hour away and I’m used to the hour plus bus ride from Morogoro town to Dakawa I think I can visit at least once a month, if not more.
In order to celebrate our time together I taught them a short lesson during our last class on Thursday last week and then used the rest of the class to have fun and just hang out with them. Ever since I became their teacher they’ve asked me to sing for them so I sang them about 4 songs during Thursday’s class to the music I’ve often brought in from my iPod. They loved that! They sang along to the songs they knew and got up to dance. They even had dance-offs with each other in front of the whole class while the music was playing. The other students on campus could hear how much fun we were having (we were all laughing and cheering), so many of them came to join our class to watch and participate. In addition, I brought my camera and snapped a ton of photos with my students and I together and I also took a lot of photos of them with each other. I’m planning to print them out and give them all copies of the photos they’re in. I also brought my tape recorder and offered to let them record anything on it for me. I haven’t listened to it yet but I’m curious and enthusiastic to hear what the students had to say. I bet I’ll laugh my head off when I listen to what they said! While I was going to end all of our fun at the end of our regular class time I decided to let the students listen to my music player until the next teacher arrived…but she never came so we ended up celebrating for the whole next class! It was well worth it though and in all honesty I’m glad I got the extra time with them. I was having just as much difficultly leaving the classroom as they were having to say goodbye to me. When I finally left class a lot of the students gave me letters they’d written expressing their sadness and wishing me well in my transition. Some of the students insisted that they carry my teaching bag to the English office on my way out the door. Overall the last day I taught I was overwhelmed with sadness and happiness all at the same time. It really was bittersweet, but it was the best version of a goodbye I could imagine so I’m really happy with how things ended. I even brought in American goodies for the class like cookies and Skittles for them to enjoy on our last day. Eish I’m going to miss my students but I definitely will visit and keep in touch. They have a break coming up this week that will last for the next month and I asked them to tell me where they’re be during the break and how I can reach them if they want me to try to see them if I’m around their area during the vac. I’ll most likely be in Morogoro, Dar, and I’m going to try to visit Arusha as well. A lot of my students live in those regions so I should be able to see some of them during the next month when we’re out of school. I’m really glad that they want to continue our contact just as much as I want to. I feels so good to know that I’ve had an everlasting impact on 40 students’ lives in only one-month’s time…I have 10 more months to look forward to and I can only imagine how my life will be impacted by my future students and vice versa. I’m so excited to find out in the coming months.
On Thursday night I left Dakawa to go to Morogoro to say goodbye to Tracy, the volunteer who’s leaving the Program. One of my housemates met us there as well as another one of the volunteers who teaches about 20 minutes outside of Morogoro. We all went to Dragonaires (a good pizza restaurant in Morogoro) and had a good time. I slept overnight at their house (slash my future house!) and on Friday morning I got to introduce myself to both of the volunteer’s classes so I could familiarize myself with some of the students I’ll be living amongst when I move there.
Afterwards Becky, Tracy, and I took a bus to Dar for the weekend to have a final goodbye dinner with Tracy before she left Tanzania for good. On Friday night we met up with two of her friends, went to dinner, and then went out to a club called “Maisha.” Because it was the last night Tracy would be in Dar, her two guy friends offered to pay for all three of us girls to go to the VIP lounge at the club. I’ve never been a VIP at a club before and even though the VIP service was really modest compared to some other places I’ve heard about, especially in the States, it was cool to just see what it was like. The club was mostly empty because a lot of normal club-goers are celebrating Ramadan currently and staying indoors on the weekends. It was nice not to have the club totally packed though because we were able to move around the dance floor more. Afterwards we all said our final goodbyes to Tracy and went back to the hotel and slept…we were all exhausted! I got to stay the night at the Hilton with Becky which was so nice and Western you would never even know you were in Tanzania while you’re inside of it! I think it’s the nicest hotel in all of Dar. It was amazing to take a hot shower for the first time in about two months there and the beds were so squishy and comfortable! Ah it was just amazing!
On Saturday Becky and I relaxed by the pool at the Hilton all day and even got to soak up some sun. Later on we met up with another volunteer, Duffie, who lives three hours south of Dar at her placement in Kibiti and we all had dinner together at a favorite place of ours called Thai Village. The food was really great and it was spectacular to catch up with Duffie finally since I hadn’t seen her since I moved to Dakawa 6 weeks ago. I met another one of my friends after dinner at the hotel and we went to a bar and hung out and relaxed for a few hours then decided to go to the Bilicanas club for about an hour after. It was another late night for me! I spent the night at my friend Roman’s mom’s (Mama Lemi) house in the center of town since it was just near the club we were at.
I woke up Sunday morning and hung out with Mama Lemi…she is still the sweetest lady ever. I rode a couple of local buses across Dar to meet up with Becky and Duffie for a late lunch. I ended up getting a little lost, but luckily a nice guy directed me to where I needed to go. Even when I get lost I like being by myself because then I really have to force myself to learn the routes myself. I think I’m going to try to get a map of Dar so that I can really put all the places I know there together in a sensible way so I’ll have an easier time of getting around in the future. After finally reaching Becky and Duffie we got lunch at Subway, which is a real luxury here. It’s the only American fast food chain I’ve seen anywhere in Tanzania. It does has its own African charm, though, e.i. there was only one type of bread, a few vegetables and dressings you could choose from, haha. Even so it was nice to get a sandwich. After we ate lunch I took a bus back to Morogoro. I got into Morogoro by the time it was dark and stayed at my future house in town. I cleaned up my new room and spent my first night there. It was really nice to get a taste of what my future life will be like here. I’m excited to move there soon. I’m especially thrilled to move in with Becky because I get along with her the best out of anyone here so I know we’ll have a great time living with each other. It’ll be nice to live with someone I can really talk to and whose company I enjoy and vice versa.
This week at Dakawa all of the Form Five students are taking their midterm exams so I’m not teaching at all. Instead I’m proctoring one exam per day for three hours. It’s funny to be on the proctoring side of testing rather than being someone who is actually taking the test. I have to say it felt good to be done with tests and such, at least for a little while, since I’m out of college now.
As time has gone on here I have had to think more about what I want to do after my time in Tanzania is finished. I was originally planning on extending my stay past June 2011 when I’m supposed to leave because I really enjoy Dar and I wanted to see if I could get a job and live there for a little while. On second thought, I’m not sure if that’s the greatest idea. For one, I really miss my family and friends back home so it’d be nice if I actually went back when I’m supposed to. I should also work hard on trying to find a good, well-paying job so that I can save up money so that when I’m in Africa again I won’t have to scrape by with such a little amount of money like I’ve had to do this trip. I can see myself working for a year or so back home in the U.S. somewhere, coming back to Africa to volunteer again or work, then going somewhere to continue my post-grad schooling in some Masters or PhD program. I still don’t know exactly what I want to do when I’m older for sure, but I have a good idea about my likes and dislikes at this point. I really like international development so I might want to get a degree in Development Studies. I also really like social justice and sociology so I might try to incorporate those topics into a future degree. I really like interacting with people and getting them excited about taking full advantage of the big world we live in by encouraging them to travel and engage with people from other cultures. Maybe I’ll be a travel journalist someday (kind of like now, haha) and enthuse other people to explore the world with my accounts of what I’ve seen through my own explorations. I could also see myself as a study abroad coordinator someday in which I have a home base somewhere in the world but I get to travel to different study abroad sites around the world before the students go to them. That way I could satisfy my love of traveling and exploring new cultures and places while also motivating other young people to take advantage of the opportunity to study abroad. We’ll see though! I could also see myself working for the U.N. or some NGO somewhere as well. Either way I just want to see the world and help people which you anyone can achieve in a ton of ways. I’m not in any rush to figure out what I want to do with my life, but I’m glad that I’ve started thinking about it. No matter what I end up doing when I’m older, I just want to love what I’m doing and be passionate about what my job accomplishes. I think everyone deserves to be happy with what they end up doing in their lives. I don’t just want to settle for some mediocre 9:00-5:00 desk job, I want to move around and shake things up a bit! The world is too incredible and vast than to stay sedimentary in one boring job for your whole life…
This past week I taught my last week of classes to my students at Dakawa. They were so happy to see me on Tuesday when I came to class since I’d been out the week before. I tried to pick up the pace from where we left off with word formation vocabulary and class went well.
On Wednesday morning my Field Director called Mrs. Mtima, the Headmistress of Dakawa, to tell her that I will be leaving the school. One of the girls in the WorldTeach Tanzania Program decided to go home early. She was living with another one of the volunteers, Becky, in Morogoro town and teaching at the Kilakala Girls’ Secondary School. Since she left, there’s now an opportunity for one of us at Dakawa to move to Morogoro to live with Becky. I decided to move because I’ve naturally become the third wheel among my two housemates and I. Instead of teaching at Kilakala, I’m expecting to teach at the Morogoro Secondary School. It will be quite different from Dakawa because it’s not a boarding school; it’s just a day school. I think the ability for my new students to see their families and live at home and just go to school during the day will really affect how I interact with them versus how I’ve been engaging with my students at Dakawa. Many of my students are really homesick a lot so they sought comfort in getting to know me at their teacher and talking to me about where they come from. I’m sure I’ll fair just fine with my new students and get to know they just as well, but I’m expecting to talk to them about different things because they’re still at home. Either way, I’m excited and ready for the transition.
I have loved Dakawa and my favorite part about it has been teaching my students, but I know I will be able to adjust well into my new placement. I still have yet to determine the details of what my teaching position there will look like, but I am hoping it will involve more teaching hours for me and offer me with more things to do than I was able to do at Dakawa. At Dakawa I’ve just been teaching English three times a week for 80-minute blocks and teaching beginner computer classes about twice a week. Nevertheless I am really going to miss Dakawa and I will especially miss my students. They have all been really sweet to me during the last month that I’ve gotten to know them.
When I told them I was transferring to Morogoro more than half the class started bawling and telling me not to go. Their second comment was, “Why you?” Ayayay it was rough trying to explain my situation to them. I nearly cried myself and I hardly ever cry! They’ve gotten really attached to me and I to them. Almost every class I’ve received notes from several of my students telling me how much they like me as a teacher and how I’m changing their lives by being here at Dakawa. They say they love me all the time, haha. Every time I read one of their notes I get confirmation that I’m making a positive impact on their lives and since that’s truly what I’m here for I couldn’t ask for anything better to receive from anyone in Tanzania. I will really miss getting to know them and seeing them three times a week, but I’ve promised them that I will visit as often as I can. They’re affected my life just as much as I believe I’ve impacted theirs so I’m not about to just disappear forever. Since I only live an hour away and I’m used to the hour plus bus ride from Morogoro town to Dakawa I think I can visit at least once a month, if not more.
In order to celebrate our time together I taught them a short lesson during our last class on Thursday last week and then used the rest of the class to have fun and just hang out with them. Ever since I became their teacher they’ve asked me to sing for them so I sang them about 4 songs during Thursday’s class to the music I’ve often brought in from my iPod. They loved that! They sang along to the songs they knew and got up to dance. They even had dance-offs with each other in front of the whole class while the music was playing. The other students on campus could hear how much fun we were having (we were all laughing and cheering), so many of them came to join our class to watch and participate. In addition, I brought my camera and snapped a ton of photos with my students and I together and I also took a lot of photos of them with each other. I’m planning to print them out and give them all copies of the photos they’re in. I also brought my tape recorder and offered to let them record anything on it for me. I haven’t listened to it yet but I’m curious and enthusiastic to hear what the students had to say. I bet I’ll laugh my head off when I listen to what they said! While I was going to end all of our fun at the end of our regular class time I decided to let the students listen to my music player until the next teacher arrived…but she never came so we ended up celebrating for the whole next class! It was well worth it though and in all honesty I’m glad I got the extra time with them. I was having just as much difficultly leaving the classroom as they were having to say goodbye to me. When I finally left class a lot of the students gave me letters they’d written expressing their sadness and wishing me well in my transition. Some of the students insisted that they carry my teaching bag to the English office on my way out the door. Overall the last day I taught I was overwhelmed with sadness and happiness all at the same time. It really was bittersweet, but it was the best version of a goodbye I could imagine so I’m really happy with how things ended. I even brought in American goodies for the class like cookies and Skittles for them to enjoy on our last day. Eish I’m going to miss my students but I definitely will visit and keep in touch. They have a break coming up this week that will last for the next month and I asked them to tell me where they’re be during the break and how I can reach them if they want me to try to see them if I’m around their area during the vac. I’ll most likely be in Morogoro, Dar, and I’m going to try to visit Arusha as well. A lot of my students live in those regions so I should be able to see some of them during the next month when we’re out of school. I’m really glad that they want to continue our contact just as much as I want to. I feels so good to know that I’ve had an everlasting impact on 40 students’ lives in only one-month’s time…I have 10 more months to look forward to and I can only imagine how my life will be impacted by my future students and vice versa. I’m so excited to find out in the coming months.
On Thursday night I left Dakawa to go to Morogoro to say goodbye to Tracy, the volunteer who’s leaving the Program. One of my housemates met us there as well as another one of the volunteers who teaches about 20 minutes outside of Morogoro. We all went to Dragonaires (a good pizza restaurant in Morogoro) and had a good time. I slept overnight at their house (slash my future house!) and on Friday morning I got to introduce myself to both of the volunteer’s classes so I could familiarize myself with some of the students I’ll be living amongst when I move there.
Afterwards Becky, Tracy, and I took a bus to Dar for the weekend to have a final goodbye dinner with Tracy before she left Tanzania for good. On Friday night we met up with two of her friends, went to dinner, and then went out to a club called “Maisha.” Because it was the last night Tracy would be in Dar, her two guy friends offered to pay for all three of us girls to go to the VIP lounge at the club. I’ve never been a VIP at a club before and even though the VIP service was really modest compared to some other places I’ve heard about, especially in the States, it was cool to just see what it was like. The club was mostly empty because a lot of normal club-goers are celebrating Ramadan currently and staying indoors on the weekends. It was nice not to have the club totally packed though because we were able to move around the dance floor more. Afterwards we all said our final goodbyes to Tracy and went back to the hotel and slept…we were all exhausted! I got to stay the night at the Hilton with Becky which was so nice and Western you would never even know you were in Tanzania while you’re inside of it! I think it’s the nicest hotel in all of Dar. It was amazing to take a hot shower for the first time in about two months there and the beds were so squishy and comfortable! Ah it was just amazing!
On Saturday Becky and I relaxed by the pool at the Hilton all day and even got to soak up some sun. Later on we met up with another volunteer, Duffie, who lives three hours south of Dar at her placement in Kibiti and we all had dinner together at a favorite place of ours called Thai Village. The food was really great and it was spectacular to catch up with Duffie finally since I hadn’t seen her since I moved to Dakawa 6 weeks ago. I met another one of my friends after dinner at the hotel and we went to a bar and hung out and relaxed for a few hours then decided to go to the Bilicanas club for about an hour after. It was another late night for me! I spent the night at my friend Roman’s mom’s (Mama Lemi) house in the center of town since it was just near the club we were at.
I woke up Sunday morning and hung out with Mama Lemi…she is still the sweetest lady ever. I rode a couple of local buses across Dar to meet up with Becky and Duffie for a late lunch. I ended up getting a little lost, but luckily a nice guy directed me to where I needed to go. Even when I get lost I like being by myself because then I really have to force myself to learn the routes myself. I think I’m going to try to get a map of Dar so that I can really put all the places I know there together in a sensible way so I’ll have an easier time of getting around in the future. After finally reaching Becky and Duffie we got lunch at Subway, which is a real luxury here. It’s the only American fast food chain I’ve seen anywhere in Tanzania. It does has its own African charm, though, e.i. there was only one type of bread, a few vegetables and dressings you could choose from, haha. Even so it was nice to get a sandwich. After we ate lunch I took a bus back to Morogoro. I got into Morogoro by the time it was dark and stayed at my future house in town. I cleaned up my new room and spent my first night there. It was really nice to get a taste of what my future life will be like here. I’m excited to move there soon. I’m especially thrilled to move in with Becky because I get along with her the best out of anyone here so I know we’ll have a great time living with each other. It’ll be nice to live with someone I can really talk to and whose company I enjoy and vice versa.
This week at Dakawa all of the Form Five students are taking their midterm exams so I’m not teaching at all. Instead I’m proctoring one exam per day for three hours. It’s funny to be on the proctoring side of testing rather than being someone who is actually taking the test. I have to say it felt good to be done with tests and such, at least for a little while, since I’m out of college now.
As time has gone on here I have had to think more about what I want to do after my time in Tanzania is finished. I was originally planning on extending my stay past June 2011 when I’m supposed to leave because I really enjoy Dar and I wanted to see if I could get a job and live there for a little while. On second thought, I’m not sure if that’s the greatest idea. For one, I really miss my family and friends back home so it’d be nice if I actually went back when I’m supposed to. I should also work hard on trying to find a good, well-paying job so that I can save up money so that when I’m in Africa again I won’t have to scrape by with such a little amount of money like I’ve had to do this trip. I can see myself working for a year or so back home in the U.S. somewhere, coming back to Africa to volunteer again or work, then going somewhere to continue my post-grad schooling in some Masters or PhD program. I still don’t know exactly what I want to do when I’m older for sure, but I have a good idea about my likes and dislikes at this point. I really like international development so I might want to get a degree in Development Studies. I also really like social justice and sociology so I might try to incorporate those topics into a future degree. I really like interacting with people and getting them excited about taking full advantage of the big world we live in by encouraging them to travel and engage with people from other cultures. Maybe I’ll be a travel journalist someday (kind of like now, haha) and enthuse other people to explore the world with my accounts of what I’ve seen through my own explorations. I could also see myself as a study abroad coordinator someday in which I have a home base somewhere in the world but I get to travel to different study abroad sites around the world before the students go to them. That way I could satisfy my love of traveling and exploring new cultures and places while also motivating other young people to take advantage of the opportunity to study abroad. We’ll see though! I could also see myself working for the U.N. or some NGO somewhere as well. Either way I just want to see the world and help people which you anyone can achieve in a ton of ways. I’m not in any rush to figure out what I want to do with my life, but I’m glad that I’ve started thinking about it. No matter what I end up doing when I’m older, I just want to love what I’m doing and be passionate about what my job accomplishes. I think everyone deserves to be happy with what they end up doing in their lives. I don’t just want to settle for some mediocre 9:00-5:00 desk job, I want to move around and shake things up a bit! The world is too incredible and vast than to stay sedimentary in one boring job for your whole life…
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Ayayayayay....
So here’s a recap of last week’s events, during which time I probably underwent just about every human emotion you can imagine…
This past weekend I left on Friday at 9am from my house at Dakawa to go to Dar for the weekend. I left my house so early in anticipation of being able to make it to Dar by the early afternoon so that when I arrived it would still be broad daylight. I arrived in Morogoro around 10:30am and went to grab some early lunch at my favorite place to eat: The Blue Room. I was at the bus station ready to take off for Dar by 12:00pm. As soon as I got to the bus station everyone was calling after me, “Unaenda wapi?” (“Where are you going?”). When I replied “Dar” a guy led me by the arm to a bus and before I knew it I’d paid the 5,000 shillings at the door and been pushed onto the bus. A split second after I knew I’d made the wrong decision to get on that bus.
I looked around and there were only four people on the whole bus! It was almost totally empty and with the way the buses work here, with everyone paying for their tickets at the door and buses not leaving until they’re packed with people, I knew it was going to be a long wait. The bus I was on was called, “Islam” on the front. To my right there was a “Hood” bus and beyond that there was an “Abood” bus. All three buses were going to Dar. The bus I was on was pretty old and rickety compared to the Hood and Abood buses which looked more polished and like they functioned better. Alas, I ended up waiting on my bus to leave for more than three hours during which time three Hood buses and five Abood buses had already left for Dar since the time I’d arrived at the bus station. By the time we left I was at the end of my wits already…I was getting really impatient and cranky and felt like I’d been ripped off. In the time it took me to even leave Morogoro, two friends of mine who are also volunteers had gotten on their Abood bus and had already arrived in Dar! Ayayay. Needless to say I was a little pissed, haha. So much for trying to arrive fairly early in Dar. After the time we left Morogoro around 3:00pm it ended up taking a little over four hours to actually get to the bus stop in Dar! It usually takes about two and a half to three hours on a normal bus, eish! My bus was so old and run down that we could barely chug our way up all the big hills on the highway. I saw way too many 18-wheeler trucks and even larger Abood and Hood buses whoosh by us, even up hills, than I was happy with. I finally arrived in Dar at 7pm and it was already dark out. I was awfully sore because I hadn’t even stood up out of my seat or walker around at all since I’d boarded the bus at noon.
As soon as I arrived in Dar a smidgeon of good luck reigned on me. My friend, Pendo, who owns his own car said that he was on his way to pick me up from the bus station and that he was going to bring me to his house where he and his girlfriend were preparing dinner for me already and had set up their bathroom for me to take a refreshing shower. Holy cow I was ecstatic…after a journey like that even a meal off the street and a bucket bath with dirty water would’ve made me feel better, haha. Luckily, I ran into better luck than that though. On our way back to his house we picked up my other friend, Roman, who I’d ended up staying the whole last week with. We all went back to Pendo’s house for dinner and drinks. Apparently one of Pendo’s housemates had seen a small black snake in her bedroom for a split second and had totally freaked out and told the whole house about it. By the time we got to the house everyone had evacuated to the outdoors! We spent about an hour looking for the snake with no success and finally called it quits, even though our eyes were still as alert as hawks when we went back inside. Later on we had a scrumptious homemade dinner and sat outside and chilled and talked. Aside from the snake scare, it was a great start to a much-needed night out after all that traveling!
After dinner we stopped by another friend’s house to pay our respects since his father had passed away 40 days ago. According to Tanzanian culture, once someone you know has been deceased for 40 days you unite with friends and family and have a final celebration and remembrance party in honor of that person’s life. After 40 days passes you culturally expected to lessen your grieving, pick yourself back up again, and move on as you continue living your life. It was a nice celebration and it was great to see my friend, Kiki. I’d met him while I was studying abroad at the University of Cape Town more than two years ago.
From there we shifted gears and headed to my favorite club in Dar which I hadn’t yet been to since I got to Tanzania more than two months ago! The club is called Bilicanas, but it’s called “Billz” for short. I went with Pendo, Roman, and two other of their guy friends. It always seems like I’m the only lady that goes out with a ton of guys, haha. At least I always have an abundance of dance partners to choose from. We got to the club around 2am and danced the night away until about 4:30am. The place was emptier than usual because a lot of people who would have been at the club are staying home for this month while they celebrate Ramadan. Even so I had a ton of fun and it was such great stress relief to dance after having been cooped up in a bus all day! We called it and night and Roman and I headed home and went straight to bed.
On Saturday morning I was extremely happy to wake up at Roman’s house. It’s a really cozy two-bedroom apartment right in the center of Dar es Salaam. When I woke up Roman’s mom, whom I refer to as Mama Lemi (because Roman’s older brother’s name is Lemi), had already made us stacks of fresh Tanzanian style pancakes with fresh berry jam. I can’t even explain how good they were. After having standard oatmeal, cereal, and fruit for breakfast for the past month, I was more than delighted to feast on pancakes. We ate pancakes as we watched television and got up to date on all the news that was circulating around the globe. I hadn’t been able to watch television in such a long time since I arrived at Dakawa, so it was truly a luxury! We mainly watched Aljazeera, CNN, and the BBC. It’s really interesting watching Aljazeera in particular because it’s a very Eastern perspective of what’s going on in the world. Most of the time at home all of the news stations are so Western focused, so it’s been really nice to see a change in perspective. There was certainly a lot of news this past week, most of which was really horrible: terrible floods have destroyed thousands of people’s lives in Pakistan and China; a bus hostage crisis in the Philippines ended up killing 8 tourists from Hong Kong before police could gun down the Philippino ex-police officer holding them hostage who was demanding to get his job back; two plane crashes killed dozens in China and Nepal; bombings and fighting in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan killed a ton of people, ayayay I could go on and on. Although I certainly felt informed after watching the news, it was really depressing watching it. Since I haven’t seen the news in such a long time I’d forgotten how saliently the saying “All news is bad news” applies to the news today. I was disgusted and appalled and totally shocked. After watching the news I just thanked my lucky stars that I’ve been safe and mostly happy in Tanzania since I arrived and that everyone I love and care about is doing well in the world. I know that’s super mushy to say, but you should just eat it up and thank your lucky stars too, haha.
In addition to vegging to television this past week, Roman and I also went to the beach with Pendo and met a few of the other volunteers in the program at the beach off the coast of Dar this last Saturday. It was such a lovely day outside and it was really great to relax on the beach, swim in the ocean, and catch up with good friends of mine. The last time I’d been at the beach I had a wicked case of pink eye, or Nairobi Lady Eyes, so I can’t even tell you how happy I was that I could see clearly this time and fully enjoy the beach in good health. We stayed there all afternoon and came back home that night. We had dinner at Roman’s house and then got ready to go out with some more friends on Saturday evening. We met up at this nice place by the ocean to have a couple of drinks and then we all piled in our cars to go to a new club that just opened up in Dar called “Sun Cirro.” The club was ok…it sort of looked like an oversized basement warehouse in which the space for the balconies could have been majorly expanded to accommodate even more people on the top floor, but the main dance floor on the first floor was pretty cool. At certain points bubbles showered onto the dance floor from above. I got so excited about dancing in bubbles, haha. The music was pretty good, too. It was a mix of American pop and hip hop for a while, then some native Tanzanian Bongo Flava, then some South African tunes. For some peculiar reason, whenever any South African music comes on at the clubs here in Dar nearly everyone in the whole club gets up to do the electric slide dance over and over and over again. I swear everyone did it for even longer than half an hour straight. Now, I would totally enjoy this event if I could actually do the electric slide correctly, haha. However, I somehow seem to be electric slide-challenged. One of my small goals this year is to become a pro at the electric slide to the point where I’m not fumbling around the dance floor when I’m doing it with everyone else, haha. I’ll keep you posted on that progress…
Sunday I slept in late and met two of my volunteer friends at one of the more ritzy places in Dar es Salaam that’s usually where a lot of wealthy tourists stay. It’s called SlipWay and it’s right on the harbor in Dar. My friends grabbed lunch there and we went to the bookshop and a few stores to browse around. Most of the things at SlipWay are outrageously overpriced. I’ve gotten so good at bargaining these days that I’m barely willing to go into a closed off shop where the prices are already marked…especially at SlipWay. Luckily there was an outdoor market with Tanzanian crafts where you could bargain for different things so I went there for a bit. I ended up getting a few gifts for my friend Roman and his mother as thank yous for hosting me this past weekend. I got Roman a wooden pic since he’s got a big afro now and I got his mom a carved and painted fish to decorate her bathroom. I also got a few other items and was happy that I got some good deals because I was able to bargain solely in Swahili with the vendors. Once they knew I spoke Swahili they were more inclined to give me fairer prices, which I am definitely a fan of. After SlipWay my friends headed to the bus station to go back to Dar and I headed to the giant mall on the way. We took a bajaji, which is pretty much like a motorized tricycle that can get up to about 30 mph, haha. They come in handy when you’re looking for cheap and quick transportation. The guy was going to charge us 9,000 Tsh but I talked him down to 6,000 for the three of us. Another prideful bargaining moment, haha. I departed from my friends and headed into the mall to purchase a few things for back home. I met up with a Tanzanian friend of mine at the mall and then headed home to Roman’s place. All of a sudden I had gotten a wicked stomach ache and had to go home right away to lay down. Roman was out having dinner with his dad so it was just me and his mom at home for a while.
Although I was set to go back to Dakawa on Monday, I felt way too sick to even think about going back as I had planned. I went to sleep Sunday night and by Monday morning I felt like there was a war going on inside my stomach. I’m not sure what caused my horrible stomach pains (it could have been dirty water, spoiled food, etc.), but I hope I don’t have to go through that again. Luckily I was in the right place at the right time when I got sick because Mama Lemi is a pharmacist. Pharmacists here are pretty much like doctors who you go see, tell your symptoms to, and they give you medicine. It’s much easier to go see a pharmacist and cut out the doctor as the middle person if you can. Mama Lemi is very loving and motherly and also a very wise pharmacist…she’s seen it all. At fight she thought I had malaria and then she thought it was worms (eww), but finally she decided that I had a bad bacterial stomach infection. By the time we figured out what I was actually sick with I’d taken drugs for malaria and worms without starting to feel better. However, once I started taking an antibiotic for the bacterial infection I slowly began feeling better. The first part of this past week was pretty lame because I could do little more than just lay down for hours straight at Roman’s house on his living room couch. Fortunately I got to watch a few movies and all the news I could stomach (no pun intended) during the hours I was awake so I wasn’t too bored. By Wednesday my stomach began feeling ok but I was still totally drained and wiped out from being so sick during the first couple days of the week. By Wednesday evening I had already missed my Tuesday and Wednesday classes at Dakawa and I was going to miss my Thursday morning class as well the next day. At that point I’d decided it would be in my best interest to just wait out my sickness and lay low in Dar through the weekend until I was feeling all better. That was until Thursday morning, however.
On Thursday the program director from the U.S. was visiting our site at Dakawa with our field director and they wanted to see me there with my other two housemates. In addition, my two housemates claimed if I wasn’t back by Friday for the computer class that would take place late Friday afternoon then one of them would have to teach it and that would ruin their joint plan to leave Dakawa early Friday to go to Dar for the whole weekend. Under pressure I made the spur of the moment decision Thursday morning to go back to Dakawa, even though I wasn’t feeling 100%. By the time I reached home on Thursday I was utterly exhausted and only spent a few minutes with our guests. I laid down the rest of the evening and got up to write the bulk of this post.
On Friday I went to Morogoro on a whim in the morning and picked up my package that my mom sent me...finally! I don't think I've ever been so happy to open one piece of mail in my entire life as when I opened that package!! I got oodles of awesome things from the States and I'm so grateful! :) On Friday night I decided to stay overnight in Morogoro and then Saturday afternoon I returned home. Now it's Sunday and I'm back in town again...I had to come back to pick up more groceries and things from the market here that I can't get at Dakawa. Now I'm about to head home again and teach for another week. It will be nice teaching again after being gone all last week. I've really missed my students!
This past weekend I left on Friday at 9am from my house at Dakawa to go to Dar for the weekend. I left my house so early in anticipation of being able to make it to Dar by the early afternoon so that when I arrived it would still be broad daylight. I arrived in Morogoro around 10:30am and went to grab some early lunch at my favorite place to eat: The Blue Room. I was at the bus station ready to take off for Dar by 12:00pm. As soon as I got to the bus station everyone was calling after me, “Unaenda wapi?” (“Where are you going?”). When I replied “Dar” a guy led me by the arm to a bus and before I knew it I’d paid the 5,000 shillings at the door and been pushed onto the bus. A split second after I knew I’d made the wrong decision to get on that bus.
I looked around and there were only four people on the whole bus! It was almost totally empty and with the way the buses work here, with everyone paying for their tickets at the door and buses not leaving until they’re packed with people, I knew it was going to be a long wait. The bus I was on was called, “Islam” on the front. To my right there was a “Hood” bus and beyond that there was an “Abood” bus. All three buses were going to Dar. The bus I was on was pretty old and rickety compared to the Hood and Abood buses which looked more polished and like they functioned better. Alas, I ended up waiting on my bus to leave for more than three hours during which time three Hood buses and five Abood buses had already left for Dar since the time I’d arrived at the bus station. By the time we left I was at the end of my wits already…I was getting really impatient and cranky and felt like I’d been ripped off. In the time it took me to even leave Morogoro, two friends of mine who are also volunteers had gotten on their Abood bus and had already arrived in Dar! Ayayay. Needless to say I was a little pissed, haha. So much for trying to arrive fairly early in Dar. After the time we left Morogoro around 3:00pm it ended up taking a little over four hours to actually get to the bus stop in Dar! It usually takes about two and a half to three hours on a normal bus, eish! My bus was so old and run down that we could barely chug our way up all the big hills on the highway. I saw way too many 18-wheeler trucks and even larger Abood and Hood buses whoosh by us, even up hills, than I was happy with. I finally arrived in Dar at 7pm and it was already dark out. I was awfully sore because I hadn’t even stood up out of my seat or walker around at all since I’d boarded the bus at noon.
As soon as I arrived in Dar a smidgeon of good luck reigned on me. My friend, Pendo, who owns his own car said that he was on his way to pick me up from the bus station and that he was going to bring me to his house where he and his girlfriend were preparing dinner for me already and had set up their bathroom for me to take a refreshing shower. Holy cow I was ecstatic…after a journey like that even a meal off the street and a bucket bath with dirty water would’ve made me feel better, haha. Luckily, I ran into better luck than that though. On our way back to his house we picked up my other friend, Roman, who I’d ended up staying the whole last week with. We all went back to Pendo’s house for dinner and drinks. Apparently one of Pendo’s housemates had seen a small black snake in her bedroom for a split second and had totally freaked out and told the whole house about it. By the time we got to the house everyone had evacuated to the outdoors! We spent about an hour looking for the snake with no success and finally called it quits, even though our eyes were still as alert as hawks when we went back inside. Later on we had a scrumptious homemade dinner and sat outside and chilled and talked. Aside from the snake scare, it was a great start to a much-needed night out after all that traveling!
After dinner we stopped by another friend’s house to pay our respects since his father had passed away 40 days ago. According to Tanzanian culture, once someone you know has been deceased for 40 days you unite with friends and family and have a final celebration and remembrance party in honor of that person’s life. After 40 days passes you culturally expected to lessen your grieving, pick yourself back up again, and move on as you continue living your life. It was a nice celebration and it was great to see my friend, Kiki. I’d met him while I was studying abroad at the University of Cape Town more than two years ago.
From there we shifted gears and headed to my favorite club in Dar which I hadn’t yet been to since I got to Tanzania more than two months ago! The club is called Bilicanas, but it’s called “Billz” for short. I went with Pendo, Roman, and two other of their guy friends. It always seems like I’m the only lady that goes out with a ton of guys, haha. At least I always have an abundance of dance partners to choose from. We got to the club around 2am and danced the night away until about 4:30am. The place was emptier than usual because a lot of people who would have been at the club are staying home for this month while they celebrate Ramadan. Even so I had a ton of fun and it was such great stress relief to dance after having been cooped up in a bus all day! We called it and night and Roman and I headed home and went straight to bed.
On Saturday morning I was extremely happy to wake up at Roman’s house. It’s a really cozy two-bedroom apartment right in the center of Dar es Salaam. When I woke up Roman’s mom, whom I refer to as Mama Lemi (because Roman’s older brother’s name is Lemi), had already made us stacks of fresh Tanzanian style pancakes with fresh berry jam. I can’t even explain how good they were. After having standard oatmeal, cereal, and fruit for breakfast for the past month, I was more than delighted to feast on pancakes. We ate pancakes as we watched television and got up to date on all the news that was circulating around the globe. I hadn’t been able to watch television in such a long time since I arrived at Dakawa, so it was truly a luxury! We mainly watched Aljazeera, CNN, and the BBC. It’s really interesting watching Aljazeera in particular because it’s a very Eastern perspective of what’s going on in the world. Most of the time at home all of the news stations are so Western focused, so it’s been really nice to see a change in perspective. There was certainly a lot of news this past week, most of which was really horrible: terrible floods have destroyed thousands of people’s lives in Pakistan and China; a bus hostage crisis in the Philippines ended up killing 8 tourists from Hong Kong before police could gun down the Philippino ex-police officer holding them hostage who was demanding to get his job back; two plane crashes killed dozens in China and Nepal; bombings and fighting in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan killed a ton of people, ayayay I could go on and on. Although I certainly felt informed after watching the news, it was really depressing watching it. Since I haven’t seen the news in such a long time I’d forgotten how saliently the saying “All news is bad news” applies to the news today. I was disgusted and appalled and totally shocked. After watching the news I just thanked my lucky stars that I’ve been safe and mostly happy in Tanzania since I arrived and that everyone I love and care about is doing well in the world. I know that’s super mushy to say, but you should just eat it up and thank your lucky stars too, haha.
In addition to vegging to television this past week, Roman and I also went to the beach with Pendo and met a few of the other volunteers in the program at the beach off the coast of Dar this last Saturday. It was such a lovely day outside and it was really great to relax on the beach, swim in the ocean, and catch up with good friends of mine. The last time I’d been at the beach I had a wicked case of pink eye, or Nairobi Lady Eyes, so I can’t even tell you how happy I was that I could see clearly this time and fully enjoy the beach in good health. We stayed there all afternoon and came back home that night. We had dinner at Roman’s house and then got ready to go out with some more friends on Saturday evening. We met up at this nice place by the ocean to have a couple of drinks and then we all piled in our cars to go to a new club that just opened up in Dar called “Sun Cirro.” The club was ok…it sort of looked like an oversized basement warehouse in which the space for the balconies could have been majorly expanded to accommodate even more people on the top floor, but the main dance floor on the first floor was pretty cool. At certain points bubbles showered onto the dance floor from above. I got so excited about dancing in bubbles, haha. The music was pretty good, too. It was a mix of American pop and hip hop for a while, then some native Tanzanian Bongo Flava, then some South African tunes. For some peculiar reason, whenever any South African music comes on at the clubs here in Dar nearly everyone in the whole club gets up to do the electric slide dance over and over and over again. I swear everyone did it for even longer than half an hour straight. Now, I would totally enjoy this event if I could actually do the electric slide correctly, haha. However, I somehow seem to be electric slide-challenged. One of my small goals this year is to become a pro at the electric slide to the point where I’m not fumbling around the dance floor when I’m doing it with everyone else, haha. I’ll keep you posted on that progress…
Sunday I slept in late and met two of my volunteer friends at one of the more ritzy places in Dar es Salaam that’s usually where a lot of wealthy tourists stay. It’s called SlipWay and it’s right on the harbor in Dar. My friends grabbed lunch there and we went to the bookshop and a few stores to browse around. Most of the things at SlipWay are outrageously overpriced. I’ve gotten so good at bargaining these days that I’m barely willing to go into a closed off shop where the prices are already marked…especially at SlipWay. Luckily there was an outdoor market with Tanzanian crafts where you could bargain for different things so I went there for a bit. I ended up getting a few gifts for my friend Roman and his mother as thank yous for hosting me this past weekend. I got Roman a wooden pic since he’s got a big afro now and I got his mom a carved and painted fish to decorate her bathroom. I also got a few other items and was happy that I got some good deals because I was able to bargain solely in Swahili with the vendors. Once they knew I spoke Swahili they were more inclined to give me fairer prices, which I am definitely a fan of. After SlipWay my friends headed to the bus station to go back to Dar and I headed to the giant mall on the way. We took a bajaji, which is pretty much like a motorized tricycle that can get up to about 30 mph, haha. They come in handy when you’re looking for cheap and quick transportation. The guy was going to charge us 9,000 Tsh but I talked him down to 6,000 for the three of us. Another prideful bargaining moment, haha. I departed from my friends and headed into the mall to purchase a few things for back home. I met up with a Tanzanian friend of mine at the mall and then headed home to Roman’s place. All of a sudden I had gotten a wicked stomach ache and had to go home right away to lay down. Roman was out having dinner with his dad so it was just me and his mom at home for a while.
Although I was set to go back to Dakawa on Monday, I felt way too sick to even think about going back as I had planned. I went to sleep Sunday night and by Monday morning I felt like there was a war going on inside my stomach. I’m not sure what caused my horrible stomach pains (it could have been dirty water, spoiled food, etc.), but I hope I don’t have to go through that again. Luckily I was in the right place at the right time when I got sick because Mama Lemi is a pharmacist. Pharmacists here are pretty much like doctors who you go see, tell your symptoms to, and they give you medicine. It’s much easier to go see a pharmacist and cut out the doctor as the middle person if you can. Mama Lemi is very loving and motherly and also a very wise pharmacist…she’s seen it all. At fight she thought I had malaria and then she thought it was worms (eww), but finally she decided that I had a bad bacterial stomach infection. By the time we figured out what I was actually sick with I’d taken drugs for malaria and worms without starting to feel better. However, once I started taking an antibiotic for the bacterial infection I slowly began feeling better. The first part of this past week was pretty lame because I could do little more than just lay down for hours straight at Roman’s house on his living room couch. Fortunately I got to watch a few movies and all the news I could stomach (no pun intended) during the hours I was awake so I wasn’t too bored. By Wednesday my stomach began feeling ok but I was still totally drained and wiped out from being so sick during the first couple days of the week. By Wednesday evening I had already missed my Tuesday and Wednesday classes at Dakawa and I was going to miss my Thursday morning class as well the next day. At that point I’d decided it would be in my best interest to just wait out my sickness and lay low in Dar through the weekend until I was feeling all better. That was until Thursday morning, however.
On Thursday the program director from the U.S. was visiting our site at Dakawa with our field director and they wanted to see me there with my other two housemates. In addition, my two housemates claimed if I wasn’t back by Friday for the computer class that would take place late Friday afternoon then one of them would have to teach it and that would ruin their joint plan to leave Dakawa early Friday to go to Dar for the whole weekend. Under pressure I made the spur of the moment decision Thursday morning to go back to Dakawa, even though I wasn’t feeling 100%. By the time I reached home on Thursday I was utterly exhausted and only spent a few minutes with our guests. I laid down the rest of the evening and got up to write the bulk of this post.
On Friday I went to Morogoro on a whim in the morning and picked up my package that my mom sent me...finally! I don't think I've ever been so happy to open one piece of mail in my entire life as when I opened that package!! I got oodles of awesome things from the States and I'm so grateful! :) On Friday night I decided to stay overnight in Morogoro and then Saturday afternoon I returned home. Now it's Sunday and I'm back in town again...I had to come back to pick up more groceries and things from the market here that I can't get at Dakawa. Now I'm about to head home again and teach for another week. It will be nice teaching again after being gone all last week. I've really missed my students!
Friday, August 20, 2010
Life Always Has Its Hiccups
I’ve gotta say I’ve had better weeks than this past one, but I’ll go through it for you…
I ended up getting really homesick at the beginning of the week, which until then hadn’t been debilitating at all. It sort of snuck up on me out of nowhere. I really do miss home, my old lifestyle, and my family and friends most of all (which probably includes you!).
In order to get over my homesickness I decided instead of working in the closed off English department office I would instead do my work outside in the open and fresh air at the wooden tables that are just outside the students’ dormitories. When I first sat there on Monday this past week I was immediately swarmed by some of the kids who live next door to me. Until then they had been too shy to say anything more than really soft “hello’s” back to me when I greeted them. All of a sudden they came to life! I gave them some paper and pens to use and they went to town, so to speak. It was really adorable and they were probably the best cure I could’ve asked for that would lift my spirits back up. After they left a swarm of students (a mix of my own students and others I hadn’t met yet) approached me, introduced themselves, and asked me all about myself. I made the silly mistake of telling them I’d dated a Tanzanian before because after I told them his name there were a few girls around who share the same last name as him and they were like “Oooooh you’re my sister-in-law then! We’re sisters!” Haha. It was sort of hilarious. I tried to explain the concept that he and I are just friends now, but the concept didn’t really sink in because they’ve continued to call me their sister since that first encounter. It’s pretty cute, I have to admit. I love that everyone here is so open and welcoming to new people, even to the point that they’d gladly accept you into their families. It’s a really great feeling knowing that you can really connect with local people when you travel somewhere. It makes it seem you’re your effort to live there is more worth while. Since Monday was such a mood booster I’ve gone to sit at a table outside every day this week and it’s really been amazing. I’ve gotten to know so many wonderful students and they’ve even taken up a hobby of trying to teach me Swahili. They try to talk to me in Swahili as much as they can when they see me there and I also try my hardest to understand and respond to what they say. My Swahili has actually improved quite a bit already just from sitting with them for one week! At least my listening skills and level of comprehension for fast local speakers is improving. I’m excited to see what a couple more months of me sitting there will teach me!
On Tuesday this week I got to teach my very first computer classes to about half of my students. For some of them it was the first time they’d ever seen a computer, while for others they had learned to use computers well because they had them at home before they came to Dakawa. It was pretty fun explaining them first off. I was trying to explain the most basic elements of a computer: the modem, monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Even though I’ve never considered myself very tech-savvy, compared to most people here I have a vast knowledge of computers that I can share with them. I taught all my students how to login, open and use the word processor, and also how to play a game that will help them practice their English. They seemed to enjoy the class a lot. It was nice seeing all of the students in a different context outside of our normal English classes as well. On the down side, our computer lab here only has five working computers that all of the students have to share. During my first computer class on Tuesday there were fifteen students in the lab and during my second session there were only 9 students. Even though the small number of computers doesn’t accommodate all of the students at once, it helps to encourage them to share their knowledge with each other and teach their fellow classmates what they know as they share the computers together. Their willingness to teach each other definitely came in handy during my first classes because I could only be with one group at a computer at a time. Fortunately, some of my students had already learned how to perform the basic functions on the computers because they had taken beginner classes with the girl who came to set them up initially a few weeks ago. I tried to let them take charge as much as they wanted to. As a teacher, I believe in empowering my students to teach themselves and each other and to look to me as an extra resource or a checking point if they need me. All in all, it was super fun teaching the computer classes. One downer was that the power went out half way through my second session so we had to cancel it and we’ll just have to pick up where we left off next week.
On that note, the power goes out a lot, usually nearly once a day! On Sunday this past weekend after my housemates and I had returned from Morogoro the power went out around 7:30 in the morning and it didn’t come back on until 9:30 at night! We all just spent the day being rather lazy. We all get kind of mopey when the power goes out, haha. I ended up reading 300 pages of a book I’d started called, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Luckily it was a really captivating read so I hardly put the book down the whole day. I’d really recommend it if you’re looking for a good page-turner to take on. It’s a really well written mystery that’ll really pull you for a loop. (I swear I didn’t get paid to advertise the book, haha. I just liked it a lot!). I’ve just started the second book in the series now and I’m already having trouble stopping reading in the evenings when I go to bed, even if I can barely keep my eyes open. It’s just so good!
I played a group game with my students on Wednesday to help them practice the 12 tenses in English and I have them a quiz on Thursday to test their knowledge of the tenses. I’d say just short of five students out of all of my 39 (I got another new student this week!) got 100 percent on the quiz! I’m really proud of them! Their success also implies that my teaching style is working well for them, which makes me really happy at the end of the day. Even though one might think it’s juvenile, I always put smiley faces on their assignments when they’ve done a good job. Even though they’re in high school, I still have to admit that seeing some sort of visual representation that implies you did well, like seeing a star or a smiley face, always made me feel happy and laugh a little when I got assignments back when I was in school, no matter how old I was. Since many of the students are weary about their English skills (although I have to say I think they’re all quite good), it’s good to find ways to boost their confidence and make them feel really good when they’ve done tasks well. So, I think I might stick with the smiley faces.
Three other events in class this week really helped highlight my whole week. The first is rather a conglomerate of little events. Four of my students this week wrote me little notes, made me cards, and drew me pictures and gave them to me after class. Every time I get one of them I’m absolutely on my heels laughing with a huge grin on my face. Some of my students are so sweet it’s hard not to smile at what they write for me. For instance, one of my students chose to write me a get-well note. Earlier this week on Tuesday I chose to go running in the evening for the first time in about two weeks. I ended up running rather far and when I got home I felt pretty good. However, that night my left heel started throbbing like crazy all of a sudden and when I woke up on Wednesday morning I couldn’t even put a smidgeon of pressure on my left heel without experiencing excruciating pain. I’ve never experienced that kind of pain no matter how long I’ve taken in between runs in the past, but the ground here is rather rough on your feet to be honest. It’s really packed down solid dirt with a ton of near-bowling ball sized rocks mixed in. All of the rocks are sticking out fo the surface of the dirt and when you run over them they really do a number on the bottoms of your feet. As a result of the pain I ended up limping and hobbling around for most of Wednesday. Even though how I’d hurt myself was rather pathetic, my student still chose to write me a nice note at the end of class telling me that she was so sorry I’d hurt my foot and that she would pray for me to feel better soon. I’m not quite sure if her praying or even well-wishing in the first place is what made me feel better, but by Thursday I only had a little pain left and I could finally put a normal amount of weight on my foot without cringing.
The second highlight of my week was when I sang Beyonce’s song, “Halo” for my class on Thursday morning. Ever since I’d started bringing music to class to play for them they’ve been asking me to sing them something. I’m not really the performing type and if I do perform I usually prefer to be somewhat in the background rather that front and center, or let alone by myself. However, after much pestering from them about my tendency to push back when I said I would sing for them (I kept saying “Tomorrow…”), I finally mustered up the courage to sing for them on my own to the tune of “Halo.” Although they’re just high school girls, they’re really impressionable and it seems like every little thing I’ve done in class so far has really affected all of them (hence most of their little notes), so if for some reason they thought I didn’t have a good singing voice I was nervous about how that would affect class, haha. It sounds ridiculous, but I felt like it was a legitimate concern. I was almost shaking like a leaf when I started singing, but by the time I got into the chorus I was fine and I was moving around the room semi-dancing as I sang. After I stopped they all cheered and clapped and were smiling a lot, haha. So I guess that means I passed their vocals test, haha. On another positive note, my singing made them happy enough that it gave them all a good boost of energy before they started the quiz.
The third high point of my week came from all the times I played with the children who live next door to us. There are sooooo many little kids who live around us and somehow our house has become as desirable to spend time at as the ball pit at McDonald’s Playhouse, haha (that’s how my housemate described it). The kids are all four years old with the exception of a ten year old, Ima, a three year old, and a couple of 5 year olds. They’re super adorable! They try to speak Swahili with us and we try to understand them and converse with them as best as we can in reply. On Wednesday when they came over I pulled out the two picture books I brought with me of Vermont and they loved looking at them. I sat wedged in a chair in our living room and the tidal wave of kids poured over my lap, squishing me further into the seat, as I went page by and page and tried to explain that Vermont was my “nyumbani” (“home”) in America. Every time they saw something they recognized (a cow, flowers, trees, birds, houses) they would belt out the Swahili word for it in unison. It was hilarious. After I finished the books I went outside with them with my computer and pulled up some pictures of my family and friends from back home and also some of the pictures I’d taken in Morogoro and also here at Dakawa. They really enjoyed looking at the pictures. While I was showing them the photos I played some Bongo Flava music that they knew and they were all singing along to the lyrics. My heart nearly melted at the sound of their little squeaky voices singing Swahili pop and love songs, haha. There’s a really famous song by Marlaw called “Peep, Peep” where the singer basically says, “Peep! Peep! Move out of the way. I’m tired of waiting in traffic. I have to get home to my baby…” Every time the words “Peep Peep” came on in the song all the kids would pipe up and scream “PEEP! PEEP!” haha. Ah it was great. I also got to talk with one of the kid’s mothers for a while who lives right next to us. She was very nice and talkative – all in Swahili! – although I couldn’t form some of the replies I wanted to, I understand most of what she was saying and could speak a little in Swahili. After she said, “Unasoma Kiswahili vizuri!” (“You speak Swahili well!). That piped up my confidence a bit. It’s nice everyone around here is so encouraging!
On Thursday we also started what will be our regular Swahili lessons with a Swahili teacher at our school. It was funny to be a student in one of the classrooms! Usually we’re the one’s teaching, but when we started our lesson we were seated at the desks listening, writing notes, and responding. Our teacher, Sophia, reviewed the three verb tenses and taught us new vocabulary for body parts. I enjoyed the lesson. Now in order to actually learn the new vocabulary I have to study it!
Randomly on Thursday night we had a huge infestations of bees overtake our house. It felt like I was in some horrible horror film like Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” except this version was “The Bees.” They were swarming the lights outside of our house and they kept crawling underneath our doors at both ends of our living room. They looked sick for some reason. They couldn’t actually fly, they just buzzed and spun in circles on the floor. With a phobia of bees like mine I was definitely not happy. I took my sandal to all of them when they crawled under the door. I must’ve killed more than 50 bees last night, no exaggeration! I have no idea why they were all possessed to come through our doors – they’re never done that before… We have bug spray killer that kills on contact. We bought it mostly for the cockroaches and mosquitoes that hang around inside our house, but it works for bees too. You really don’t want to mess with the bees here. They’re a huge problem especially near the dormitories where the students stay. This type of African bee can actually kill you quite easily if you manage to get attacked by a hole hive. There’s something especially poisonous about the poison it injects into you with its stinger. That said, I have no desire to get stung even accidentally last night. I took my sandal and bug killer spray to them and after two hours most of them had died. They started coming into the house right around dinnertime and our dining table happens to be right in between the two doors they were coming through. We had to carry all of our stuff for dinner into one of my housemate’s room’s and eat dinner while sitting on the floor as we waited for the bug spray to take action and kill all the bees during our meal. It definitely worked because when we came back out to the living room there were about 25 bees dead on the floor! I even sprayed the foot of both doors and apparently the poison leaked outside and killed a bunch of bees that were buzzing around the lights outside. I swear I’ve never seen so many dead bees in all my life! I rather have them dead than alive though. Sorry bees, but I gotta look out for number 1! Haha. Luckily this morning there aren’t any bees around that I can tell…so far…
Today is Friday and I’m going to Dar es Salaam this weekend. A Tanzanian friend of mine has to leave to go back to his Masters Program in Sweden next Wednesday and I wanted to see him before he leaves. Two of the other WorldTeach volunteers are going to Dar this weekend and they’ve booked a really swanky resort at a place called “South Beach” where there’s a pool, Jacuzzi, and obviously the ocean. I’m going to try and meet them there to hang out on Saturday. Tonight I’m going to try to go to my favorite club in Dar which is called, “Billicanas,” or “Billz” for short. I haven’t been to that club yet since I arrived in Tanzania this time around so I’m hoping tonight’s plans will work out! Fun times ahead. For sure, it’ll be nice to unwind after this week. Dancing’s always a good cure for me when I’m feeling kinda down, so bring on the medicine! I’ll try to post updates when I can about my weekend when I return.
Also, I have a package from my family waiting for me to fetch it at the post office in Morogoro! I am so excited I can hardly wait. It wouldn’t even matter if they’d sent coal and an ugly letter – the fact that something actually got from my home in the U.S. all the way to Morogoro, Tanzanian is astonishing and wonderful to me. Way to go regular snail mail for delivering my package! I think I’ll pick it up on Monday when I come back from Dar. I don’t teach classes until Tuesdays so I figured I would stay through Monday in Dar since I have the time to do it. Again, I’ll report back when I can. Ciao for now! I hope you’re all doing super well!
I ended up getting really homesick at the beginning of the week, which until then hadn’t been debilitating at all. It sort of snuck up on me out of nowhere. I really do miss home, my old lifestyle, and my family and friends most of all (which probably includes you!).
In order to get over my homesickness I decided instead of working in the closed off English department office I would instead do my work outside in the open and fresh air at the wooden tables that are just outside the students’ dormitories. When I first sat there on Monday this past week I was immediately swarmed by some of the kids who live next door to me. Until then they had been too shy to say anything more than really soft “hello’s” back to me when I greeted them. All of a sudden they came to life! I gave them some paper and pens to use and they went to town, so to speak. It was really adorable and they were probably the best cure I could’ve asked for that would lift my spirits back up. After they left a swarm of students (a mix of my own students and others I hadn’t met yet) approached me, introduced themselves, and asked me all about myself. I made the silly mistake of telling them I’d dated a Tanzanian before because after I told them his name there were a few girls around who share the same last name as him and they were like “Oooooh you’re my sister-in-law then! We’re sisters!” Haha. It was sort of hilarious. I tried to explain the concept that he and I are just friends now, but the concept didn’t really sink in because they’ve continued to call me their sister since that first encounter. It’s pretty cute, I have to admit. I love that everyone here is so open and welcoming to new people, even to the point that they’d gladly accept you into their families. It’s a really great feeling knowing that you can really connect with local people when you travel somewhere. It makes it seem you’re your effort to live there is more worth while. Since Monday was such a mood booster I’ve gone to sit at a table outside every day this week and it’s really been amazing. I’ve gotten to know so many wonderful students and they’ve even taken up a hobby of trying to teach me Swahili. They try to talk to me in Swahili as much as they can when they see me there and I also try my hardest to understand and respond to what they say. My Swahili has actually improved quite a bit already just from sitting with them for one week! At least my listening skills and level of comprehension for fast local speakers is improving. I’m excited to see what a couple more months of me sitting there will teach me!
On Tuesday this week I got to teach my very first computer classes to about half of my students. For some of them it was the first time they’d ever seen a computer, while for others they had learned to use computers well because they had them at home before they came to Dakawa. It was pretty fun explaining them first off. I was trying to explain the most basic elements of a computer: the modem, monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Even though I’ve never considered myself very tech-savvy, compared to most people here I have a vast knowledge of computers that I can share with them. I taught all my students how to login, open and use the word processor, and also how to play a game that will help them practice their English. They seemed to enjoy the class a lot. It was nice seeing all of the students in a different context outside of our normal English classes as well. On the down side, our computer lab here only has five working computers that all of the students have to share. During my first computer class on Tuesday there were fifteen students in the lab and during my second session there were only 9 students. Even though the small number of computers doesn’t accommodate all of the students at once, it helps to encourage them to share their knowledge with each other and teach their fellow classmates what they know as they share the computers together. Their willingness to teach each other definitely came in handy during my first classes because I could only be with one group at a computer at a time. Fortunately, some of my students had already learned how to perform the basic functions on the computers because they had taken beginner classes with the girl who came to set them up initially a few weeks ago. I tried to let them take charge as much as they wanted to. As a teacher, I believe in empowering my students to teach themselves and each other and to look to me as an extra resource or a checking point if they need me. All in all, it was super fun teaching the computer classes. One downer was that the power went out half way through my second session so we had to cancel it and we’ll just have to pick up where we left off next week.
On that note, the power goes out a lot, usually nearly once a day! On Sunday this past weekend after my housemates and I had returned from Morogoro the power went out around 7:30 in the morning and it didn’t come back on until 9:30 at night! We all just spent the day being rather lazy. We all get kind of mopey when the power goes out, haha. I ended up reading 300 pages of a book I’d started called, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Luckily it was a really captivating read so I hardly put the book down the whole day. I’d really recommend it if you’re looking for a good page-turner to take on. It’s a really well written mystery that’ll really pull you for a loop. (I swear I didn’t get paid to advertise the book, haha. I just liked it a lot!). I’ve just started the second book in the series now and I’m already having trouble stopping reading in the evenings when I go to bed, even if I can barely keep my eyes open. It’s just so good!
I played a group game with my students on Wednesday to help them practice the 12 tenses in English and I have them a quiz on Thursday to test their knowledge of the tenses. I’d say just short of five students out of all of my 39 (I got another new student this week!) got 100 percent on the quiz! I’m really proud of them! Their success also implies that my teaching style is working well for them, which makes me really happy at the end of the day. Even though one might think it’s juvenile, I always put smiley faces on their assignments when they’ve done a good job. Even though they’re in high school, I still have to admit that seeing some sort of visual representation that implies you did well, like seeing a star or a smiley face, always made me feel happy and laugh a little when I got assignments back when I was in school, no matter how old I was. Since many of the students are weary about their English skills (although I have to say I think they’re all quite good), it’s good to find ways to boost their confidence and make them feel really good when they’ve done tasks well. So, I think I might stick with the smiley faces.
Three other events in class this week really helped highlight my whole week. The first is rather a conglomerate of little events. Four of my students this week wrote me little notes, made me cards, and drew me pictures and gave them to me after class. Every time I get one of them I’m absolutely on my heels laughing with a huge grin on my face. Some of my students are so sweet it’s hard not to smile at what they write for me. For instance, one of my students chose to write me a get-well note. Earlier this week on Tuesday I chose to go running in the evening for the first time in about two weeks. I ended up running rather far and when I got home I felt pretty good. However, that night my left heel started throbbing like crazy all of a sudden and when I woke up on Wednesday morning I couldn’t even put a smidgeon of pressure on my left heel without experiencing excruciating pain. I’ve never experienced that kind of pain no matter how long I’ve taken in between runs in the past, but the ground here is rather rough on your feet to be honest. It’s really packed down solid dirt with a ton of near-bowling ball sized rocks mixed in. All of the rocks are sticking out fo the surface of the dirt and when you run over them they really do a number on the bottoms of your feet. As a result of the pain I ended up limping and hobbling around for most of Wednesday. Even though how I’d hurt myself was rather pathetic, my student still chose to write me a nice note at the end of class telling me that she was so sorry I’d hurt my foot and that she would pray for me to feel better soon. I’m not quite sure if her praying or even well-wishing in the first place is what made me feel better, but by Thursday I only had a little pain left and I could finally put a normal amount of weight on my foot without cringing.
The second highlight of my week was when I sang Beyonce’s song, “Halo” for my class on Thursday morning. Ever since I’d started bringing music to class to play for them they’ve been asking me to sing them something. I’m not really the performing type and if I do perform I usually prefer to be somewhat in the background rather that front and center, or let alone by myself. However, after much pestering from them about my tendency to push back when I said I would sing for them (I kept saying “Tomorrow…”), I finally mustered up the courage to sing for them on my own to the tune of “Halo.” Although they’re just high school girls, they’re really impressionable and it seems like every little thing I’ve done in class so far has really affected all of them (hence most of their little notes), so if for some reason they thought I didn’t have a good singing voice I was nervous about how that would affect class, haha. It sounds ridiculous, but I felt like it was a legitimate concern. I was almost shaking like a leaf when I started singing, but by the time I got into the chorus I was fine and I was moving around the room semi-dancing as I sang. After I stopped they all cheered and clapped and were smiling a lot, haha. So I guess that means I passed their vocals test, haha. On another positive note, my singing made them happy enough that it gave them all a good boost of energy before they started the quiz.
The third high point of my week came from all the times I played with the children who live next door to us. There are sooooo many little kids who live around us and somehow our house has become as desirable to spend time at as the ball pit at McDonald’s Playhouse, haha (that’s how my housemate described it). The kids are all four years old with the exception of a ten year old, Ima, a three year old, and a couple of 5 year olds. They’re super adorable! They try to speak Swahili with us and we try to understand them and converse with them as best as we can in reply. On Wednesday when they came over I pulled out the two picture books I brought with me of Vermont and they loved looking at them. I sat wedged in a chair in our living room and the tidal wave of kids poured over my lap, squishing me further into the seat, as I went page by and page and tried to explain that Vermont was my “nyumbani” (“home”) in America. Every time they saw something they recognized (a cow, flowers, trees, birds, houses) they would belt out the Swahili word for it in unison. It was hilarious. After I finished the books I went outside with them with my computer and pulled up some pictures of my family and friends from back home and also some of the pictures I’d taken in Morogoro and also here at Dakawa. They really enjoyed looking at the pictures. While I was showing them the photos I played some Bongo Flava music that they knew and they were all singing along to the lyrics. My heart nearly melted at the sound of their little squeaky voices singing Swahili pop and love songs, haha. There’s a really famous song by Marlaw called “Peep, Peep” where the singer basically says, “Peep! Peep! Move out of the way. I’m tired of waiting in traffic. I have to get home to my baby…” Every time the words “Peep Peep” came on in the song all the kids would pipe up and scream “PEEP! PEEP!” haha. Ah it was great. I also got to talk with one of the kid’s mothers for a while who lives right next to us. She was very nice and talkative – all in Swahili! – although I couldn’t form some of the replies I wanted to, I understand most of what she was saying and could speak a little in Swahili. After she said, “Unasoma Kiswahili vizuri!” (“You speak Swahili well!). That piped up my confidence a bit. It’s nice everyone around here is so encouraging!
On Thursday we also started what will be our regular Swahili lessons with a Swahili teacher at our school. It was funny to be a student in one of the classrooms! Usually we’re the one’s teaching, but when we started our lesson we were seated at the desks listening, writing notes, and responding. Our teacher, Sophia, reviewed the three verb tenses and taught us new vocabulary for body parts. I enjoyed the lesson. Now in order to actually learn the new vocabulary I have to study it!
Randomly on Thursday night we had a huge infestations of bees overtake our house. It felt like I was in some horrible horror film like Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” except this version was “The Bees.” They were swarming the lights outside of our house and they kept crawling underneath our doors at both ends of our living room. They looked sick for some reason. They couldn’t actually fly, they just buzzed and spun in circles on the floor. With a phobia of bees like mine I was definitely not happy. I took my sandal to all of them when they crawled under the door. I must’ve killed more than 50 bees last night, no exaggeration! I have no idea why they were all possessed to come through our doors – they’re never done that before… We have bug spray killer that kills on contact. We bought it mostly for the cockroaches and mosquitoes that hang around inside our house, but it works for bees too. You really don’t want to mess with the bees here. They’re a huge problem especially near the dormitories where the students stay. This type of African bee can actually kill you quite easily if you manage to get attacked by a hole hive. There’s something especially poisonous about the poison it injects into you with its stinger. That said, I have no desire to get stung even accidentally last night. I took my sandal and bug killer spray to them and after two hours most of them had died. They started coming into the house right around dinnertime and our dining table happens to be right in between the two doors they were coming through. We had to carry all of our stuff for dinner into one of my housemate’s room’s and eat dinner while sitting on the floor as we waited for the bug spray to take action and kill all the bees during our meal. It definitely worked because when we came back out to the living room there were about 25 bees dead on the floor! I even sprayed the foot of both doors and apparently the poison leaked outside and killed a bunch of bees that were buzzing around the lights outside. I swear I’ve never seen so many dead bees in all my life! I rather have them dead than alive though. Sorry bees, but I gotta look out for number 1! Haha. Luckily this morning there aren’t any bees around that I can tell…so far…
Today is Friday and I’m going to Dar es Salaam this weekend. A Tanzanian friend of mine has to leave to go back to his Masters Program in Sweden next Wednesday and I wanted to see him before he leaves. Two of the other WorldTeach volunteers are going to Dar this weekend and they’ve booked a really swanky resort at a place called “South Beach” where there’s a pool, Jacuzzi, and obviously the ocean. I’m going to try and meet them there to hang out on Saturday. Tonight I’m going to try to go to my favorite club in Dar which is called, “Billicanas,” or “Billz” for short. I haven’t been to that club yet since I arrived in Tanzania this time around so I’m hoping tonight’s plans will work out! Fun times ahead. For sure, it’ll be nice to unwind after this week. Dancing’s always a good cure for me when I’m feeling kinda down, so bring on the medicine! I’ll try to post updates when I can about my weekend when I return.
Also, I have a package from my family waiting for me to fetch it at the post office in Morogoro! I am so excited I can hardly wait. It wouldn’t even matter if they’d sent coal and an ugly letter – the fact that something actually got from my home in the U.S. all the way to Morogoro, Tanzanian is astonishing and wonderful to me. Way to go regular snail mail for delivering my package! I think I’ll pick it up on Monday when I come back from Dar. I don’t teach classes until Tuesdays so I figured I would stay through Monday in Dar since I have the time to do it. Again, I’ll report back when I can. Ciao for now! I hope you’re all doing super well!
Saturday, August 14, 2010
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!
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!
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