Uploaded a bunch of pics from Thanksgiving, Ruvuma river, Mikandani, Christmas, Kilwa, and New Years...check 'em out!
I've attempted to get online for the last couple of weeks, but the internet/electricity at the nearby Teacher's Training College is not the most reliable. So I know I'm a bit late, but I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and New Years! Apparently I also had quite the celebration back at home, as I was pleasantly suprised to find a bunch of new pictures on facebook of me with my ridiculous but wonderful friends, cold beer, pitcher of margarita, chips and salsa, etc. In reality my New Years was significantly less exciting and tasty, although we did make some mac and cheese that tasted just like home. But anyways I had fun celebrating at Katie's house along with Ghee and Leslie. It was really nice to just hang out as a small group from our training class. We didn't have any champagne but we did bust open a bucket of mango wine that Katie started a couple of weeks prior. PCVs have discovered that pretty much anything can be fermented and try out lots of interesting recipes; this mango wine was actually really tasty, so long as you got over the idea of drinking bright orange wine!
I headed back to site on Jan 1st which was a bit of a relief after so much traveling over the holidays. I think I logged something like 90 hours on buses from Thanksgiving to New Years. Four-hour bus rides now seem completely reasonable, although they have not become any more fun and took quite the toll on my bank account. But with school now in session, I will likely be enjoying cheap village life and not traveling for some time!
Speaking of village life, in early January I attended my village's annual meeting which was really interesting. The meeting was supposed to start at 10 in the morning and my mkuu and I mosied on over around 10:20. The rest of the villagers came a bit later so the meeting didn't actually start until noon (Tanzanians don't stress too much about time). Both my VEO (village executive officer) and village chairperson are actually females which I think is pretty great. I had to sit with them up at the front along with a few other "honorable guests", facing the 100 or so villagers who were sitting under two giant mango trees. That actually added a bit of excitement to the meeting, as we were in peak mango season at the time and mangoes were literally just falling from trees; there were many close calls with villagers getting pounded and the crowd found it funny every time (Tanzanians literally laugh at everything...I love it and fit right in!). I had to stand and say a few words, so I just introduced myself and thanked them for welcoming me into their village (Tanzanians like to give speeches and they especially like to make guests give speeches). But the most surprising part of the whole meeting was when it was decided that the village will be split into two because it has grown too large, at about 2000 residents. The back part of the village, where I live, is now separate from Maputi. Unfortunately I already forgot my village's new name, so I'll have to get back to y'all on that. But it looks like my school will still be named Maputi Secondary, which won't be confusing at all.
The other highlight of the month happened in the same week, when Katie and Ghee both literally shit their pants. Before you get too grossed out, you should know that this pretty much happens to every PCV at some point. But it is still funny everytime. Ghee's soiled boxers now sit at the bottom of Katie's pit latrine, which should be enough to entertain us for the next 2 years. I'm pretty sure they shared this info in their respective blogs, but telling you all this definitely can't help my gastrointestinal karma, which has actually been pretty good so far (I've only had diarrhea once, ironically after eating pizza at a nice wazungu restaurant). So now I probably deserve to be next...stay tuned! In general, bowel movements are quite the hot topic among PCVs and are discussed with ever-growing casualness. Here's an excerpt from a recent phone conversation for an example:
Me: "How's the diarrhea going? Cleared up yet?"
Nameless PCV: "Well sort of. I'm no longer shooting water out of my ass, but I wouldn't exactly call it solid."
And now I should probably apologize to everyone at home that is thoroughly disgusted, and generally doesn't care to know about their family or friends' poops. But really, everybody poops.
Other than that, January didn't bring a great deal of news to share. Prior to school starting I had a great deal of free-time to try and fill. Because everything here takes way longer to do than in the US, I spent quite a bit of time just doing daily chores like cooking on my little kerosene jiko (stove), collecting water, washing clothes and dishes, and cleaning my house. I was sweeping my house and courtyard atleast once per day, which actually came to be one of my favorite things to do to pass the time. I've also done a great deal of reading, listening to my ipod or my shortwave radio (I can pick up BBC), or chatting on the phone with other volunteers (we all pay to be on the PC phone plan, which is awesome and lets us talk unlimited to each other). After my mom sent a jump rope and some resistance bands in a care package, I even started to get a little bit of morning exercise, although let's face it, jumping rope gets old fast.
I also did a fair amount of obsessing over my house and planning my future decor which probably doesn't surprise any of you. I painted a 4x4' chalkboard on one of my walls which has been fun and is now home to lots of lists and Kiswahili/Kimakonde vocabularly. And thanks to some recent lighting additions, it's a little easier to stay up at night (I've even pushed 10 pm a couple of nights). I bought a solar-powered charger that can charge my phone battery and also has a lightbulb that is now hanging from my living room ceiling. I also finished making my door-cinderblock-mattress-couch, which looks remarkably like a real couch (pics next time?). It is even pretty comfortable and was tested and approved by my first houseguest, Katie. Receiving a visitor was quite exciting because I won't be getting a whole lot of PCV-through-traffic over the next 2 years (my site is way off both the main roads and is kind of a bitch for everyone to get to).
And because a lot of you have asked about how my Kiswahili is coming along... I tested at 'intermediate-high' just before swearing-in (you need 'intermediate-mid' to swear-in which basically means you can greet, introduce and talk about yourself, use past/present/future tense and basic grammar, etc). I can definitely converse about basic things but I'm not to the point of having any type of extended, meaningful conversation in Kiswahili. Quite frankly I don't feel like I've improved at all since coming to site, which is pretty dissapointing but mostly my own fault. My headmaster and other teacher both started off speaking to me in English, which was really nice at first as I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on, but now I really should ask them to switch to Kiswahili full-time. And at this point most of my interactions with villagers are pretty superficial (basic greetings, etc) so I don't get much practice on a daily basis. Travelling with volunteers that have been here for a year also doesn't help because they are pretty fluent and end up doing most of the Kiswahili conversing. So it is definitely something I need to work on because it's really important to me to eventually reach fluency. And because learning one language isn't hard enough, I've also got to work on learning Kimakonde, the tribal language spoken here. My headmaster keeps appointing me Kimakonde teachers even though I keep saying I need to work on my Kiswahili first; basically the thought of me speaking Kimakonde might be the funniest thing in the whole world to the villagers here and everyone is pretty excited to teach me. So who knows, maybe after two years I will also be able to speak a bit of Kimakonde.
And before I forget the whole reason I'm here, my school has been officially in session since Jan 17. Just to update you, I am in fact responsible for teaching all of the math (form 1-4) and physics (form 1-3) at my school, so I have my work cut out for me. But there are no other teachers and I just can't rationalize doing the alternative, leaving half of the students not learning any math or physics at all. But anyways, this is Tanzania and the first week(s) of school means students and teachers may decide to start showing up, then the students must clean the school environment, etc. So last week I didn't do a whole lot, but this week I started off really popular by testing my form 2-4 (grades 9-11) students. Since my school hasn't had a math or physics teacher the last 4 years, I had no idea what level any of the students were at and whether I could just start teaching the syllabus or if I needed to do a lot of review. So I wrote what I thought would be simple exams, made from material that should have been covered in previous forms (i.e. I gave questions from form 1 material to my form 2s, form 1+2 questions for form 3, form 1+2+3 for form 4, etc.). I started with my form 4 maths and holy shit was it an eye opener! First off I thought it would maybe take an hour (29 questions, simple enough for no calculators). I finally cut them off at 3.5 hours because I thought they were either going to fall asleep, die of exhaustion, kill themselves, or kill me. And grading their exams was significantly more painful.
A few examples of answers from nearly every one of my form 4s (11th graders):
1) 1/4 + 2/3 = 3/7
2) 15 - -6 = 9
and my personal favorite because it would never have occurred to me,
3) Solve 5x - 3y when x=4 and y=3 --> 54-33 = 21
So as it turns out, I will need to start out with basic math for nearly all of my students. I'm going to try and meet with my mkuu tomorrow to talk about solutions. I've spoken with my second-master/other teacher about the possibilities for dividing the students up based on ability rather than grade-level and he seemed really receptive, so we will see. Ideally I could start all 4 classes with basic math but be able to move the classes along at different paces. Another serious problem is that most of my students speak little to no English, and of course we have no English teacher. I am hoping to start a "conversational English" club after school where we can have informal English lessons and they can get in some more practice.
Welp I think that's probably enough updatin' for now, so until next time!
