I don't really have a ton of new exciting adventures to tell of here in TZ. Surprisingly, even when you live in an exotic land your life remains horribly mundane if you're there for longer than it takes to visit everything.
April and May were pretty much exclusively teaching time. It always works out that the first two to three months of class are the most consistent, productive class time that one has in the school year so it was good to dive in and get a chunk out of the way before things really took off. It was a little concerning how quickly I felt like I was exhausted of teaching however. I look at my teaching load and responsibilities here in country and it just baffles me how teachers in the states do what they do for as many hours a day as they do it. Yeah, teaching two classes the same thing is easier to prepare but it's just as tiring! Not to mention the extra work outside of class where you have to grade etc. Anyway, as with everything else, I'm much more grateful for our education system in the states having seen an alternative.
Things really started to pick up the first full week of June. I headed to Morogoro the first to attend what we call the Training of the Trainers, or TOT for short. PC loves their acronyms and you find that everything and everyone has some two to three letter combination used as a reference to speed up conversations. Anyway, TOT was a gathering of every person, volunteer, staff, or contracted help, to plan sessions for the incoming class of trainees (PCTs in case you were wondering). Each volunteer (PCV :P) had applied to facilitate various sessions during the training and so we spent most of the week refining our plans and trying to coordinate between sessions occurring other weeks.
I've always felt like I've done a good job of surrounding myself with people that are one step above me on the intellectual scale. If you look at my resume, I feel like it reads quite impressively but when I look at myself in the context of those around me, I often feel overshadowed. Things like TOT, highlight it the most for me. All these other amazing volunteers have really brilliant ideas for passing on important information and I'm left looking at relatively simplistic ideas presented in a boring way. Nevertheless, we finished the week with a solid product prepared for the new group when they arrived just more than a week after that.
The Saturday after closing TOT, I boarded a bus to head all the way back to Mbeya because the following Monday, I took 3 girls to our annual girls empowerment conference in Mbeya town. Each year, for the last 3 years, the volunteers in the Mbeya region have come together to plan and execute a girls empowerment conference that teaches young women in our communities life skills. We do some of the standard HIV and AIDS presentations, but we go beyond that also, encouraging girls to achieve the most out of their lives. We have successful women come in and give talks about their achievements and the decisions that got them there. We have sessions teaching about family planning and why waiting isn't just about sexual health. There's a session on self-defense where we teach the girls how to quickly get away from someone who may be about to assault them. All-in-all, it's a really fun time while still being a significant educational experience that teaches information that often does not filter down to students in Tanzania.
Every year there is a talent show and for the past 3 years the volunteers have made a production to put on stage alongside the girls' talents. This year we chose Waka Waka, the Shakira song that was created as the theme song to the World Cup in South Africa. I think the video is on youtube if you want to find it but it was one of my favorite moments as a volunteer. We choreographed only the first two verses of the song intentionally, partially because of time constraints and partially because we planned to include the girls, but after we did our portion of the dance we brought up the girls to dance with us on stage. It's clear to me now that that event was not just South Africa's but rather all of sub-Saharan Africa and since Waka Waka represents that event, it's also everyone's song. There was passion in that free-dance beyond what I could have expected and it was a really awesome moment of community. But that's what the arts and athletics can do, bring together two sides of the world and have them cheer in unity.
Following the girls conference was the one week of normalcy in the last 6 or so. I had to pull together my strength to actually teach for a full week. I thought it would be easy since I knew I was going to leave again soon but instead it turned out to be much harder. I just could not focus and it seemed to be a waste of time to put in the effort to make each lesson valuable. I did make it through the week (life is so hard, right?) which was followed by the A-level short break, a one week vacation.
I had already made plans to spend this week on a trip to visit Anna and Adrienne, health volunteers in my region, and so Saturday morning I packed up and rolled out to Mbeya to get the bus that would take me to their villages. Now, if I could have driven straight from my site to theirs it couldn't have been more that 50km, but because the roads are poor and the bus takes people to Mbeya, I had to travel the long way around by first traveling north out of my own valley to Mbeya and then south along the ridge to my west above my valley to get to their sites, probably a good 150-200km.
The week consisted mostly of getting to see the daily life of a health volunteer. There's somewhat of a disconnect sometimes between the lives of health and education volunteers at their respective sites. Education is very structured and we have things laid out for us where as health volunteers really have to develop their work on their own. Additionally, the houses of health volunteers are usually more spartan than those of education volunteers. Both have their benefits but the lifestyles are noticeably different. The differences in Mbeya are highlighted even more by the fact that the health volunteer sites are very village with no water, no electricity, and so forth, where as education volunteers live quite well compared to the majority of Tanzanians. We spent time playing lots of cards, exercising, and cooking in between seeing the various projects they worked on. We made lots of yummy food including two chocolate cakes...in two days.
We returned as a group and hiked Ngozi crater the following day. I think that was my 5th time doing the hike, but since it's such a nice hike, it just happens. Finally, after meeting up with additional friends, some PC, some not, we rented a car to travel to Matema Beach to celebrate the 4th of July. Again, I think this was my 5th time going to Matema Beach, but I could go 5 more times and not be satisfied, as it's the perfect mix of village and tourist all in one.
The group was fantastic and it could be split into smaller groups if that was more appropriate for the activity. There's little more to say than that it was as close to the quintessential beach party as you could get. We played baseball in the lake with my whiffle ball and bat (thanks mom!), relaxed in the sun and read a book every morning, and even roasted a pig on July 4th. So it was actually only half the pig but it was still legit. We dug a pit and lit a fire of coals below and then placed the pig on logs that were laid across the pit. Despite the set-up catching fire a couple times, we enjoyed a nice pile of delicious pig that night.
Finally, upon returning from Matema, I continued on to Morogoro to do the actual training of the new class. 39 volunteers make up the group of incoming trainees, however the big difference between this and years past, aside from the scheduling, is that almost half of the group is English teachers. Recently, Peace Corps did an impact study here in Tanzania and found that our single greatest contribution is English language education. I’m not sure if that’s what motivated the switch to English teachers with the new classes, however, it has become a focus one way or another. This resulted in the size of my math group being significantly smaller which is both nice for the short term and disappointing for longer term goals.
I facilitated three sessions to varying degrees of success. The first day we had a math session dealing with the culture of defeatism that most Tanzanians have when it comes to math. Since the day was running slowly, it was kind of tacked carelessly on and ended up getting significantly shortened, which made anything beyond general conversations a challenge. The second day, our morning session was on logical thinking and problem solving and it went much better. We analyzed our own analysis of a Sudoku puzzle in order to identify methods of problem solving and then took a list of methods and applied them to a form 1 (first year of secondary school) math problem. It was a really good session with lots of discussion on how to teach at the introductory level. Finally, the afternoon session was kind of wiped away unfortunately. The original topic of group work was addressed through various other sessions in the previous weeks so we considered trying a physics lab for those who were interested. However, due to some miscommunication we ended up learning how to read 4-figure math tables which are necessary for the first half of secondary school so not all was lost. After sessions, we all went to dinner together and had an enjoyable evening of drinks and pizza.
The next day I had intended to go to the bus stand and get on a bus for home, however, July 7th (Sabasaba or sevenseven for those translating) is a national holiday much like our labor day. Therefore, people travel everywhere and even with an entire fleet of buses heading southwest, I was not able to find a seat. I was able to buy a ticket for the following day, which I did, then returned to the training site. The afternoon was the time period where the trainees learn about the sports and games that are played in the schools and so it was an opportunity to get exercise, something I am always in need of here.
The next day was a rather uneventful day of traveling, which I have learned to consider a good thing. Eventful usually means bad and so the fact that I woke up at a normal hour and was in Tukuyu before sunset made it a very good travel day.
Now I’m teaching from now until COS conference and then with long break approaching who knows what I’ll do the last month.
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