Visitors from America

The kids playing with all the fun stuff Laura and mom brought.

Only eight weeks to go… it’s so hard for me to believe that in the nearby future, I will be back in America living the same life I was before I got here- well plus medical school.  Tanzania seems like home to me now.  The people, the food, the culture, the language.. it’s what’s normal.  But I try hard not to think about where I will be in a few months, and focus more on what I am doing now.  The school is going great.  All the students are so wonderful, and are learning more every day.  My students are particularly awesome.  Sometimes they ask questions I don’t even know the answer to so I have to go look it up, and then I get to learn something new!  I feel like I learn more as a teacher than I ever did as a student.  I’m learning how to set boundaries, what behaviors I can and will not put up with, the most effective ways of getting my point across, what I know and what I want to know more about… I’m learning how to be patient, disciplined, loving, tolerant, trusting, and committed, even when things aren’t going my way.  This has helped me to grow in ways I never would have been capable of in America, and though it isn’t easy, it’s been incredibly enriching.  I think I’m learning more than my students are!

Oh yea, she was feeling the love.

So my mom and good friend Laura came to visit me a little while back and they had such a blast.  I

split the classes so they could teach too, and just like I figured they fell in love with my students.  What’s not to love though?  The innocence, the joy, the laughter… no one is a stranger to those children.  I was so grateful to share this part of my life with people from back home, it’s not easy to explain this place to those who have never been to Africa.  Now I think they understand more of what’s special about Tanzania and why I chose to come here for a year.  Laura taught my classes how to do the hokey pokey and now it’s their favorite thing to do!  They especially loved meeting my mom, most of the kids call me ‘Mom’ so they started calling my mom ‘Grandma’ and she loved it!  It was really such a great time. We were at the school for four days, and on the second day we went to dinner at a Tanzanian teacher’s house.  Mom actually killed and de-feathered a chicken!  I’m sure their whole family thought we were ridiculous because we were all screaming and jumping around when we were trying to catch it, but to them it’s just a normal day.  Everything here is fresh, straight from the ground or the animal.  And even though there wasn’t as much meat on that chicken, the flavor was better than anything I’ve had back home.  We all sat around the fire while it was cooking and watched the sun go down.. it was a very African experience.  After a few days at the school, we went on safari to Mikumi Park (where we saw TONS of animals!) and then to Zanzibar for two days, we had so much fun!  Overall it was a very nice little vacation.

Me holding the chicken mom was about to kill.

Well we got a new teacher from America, her name is Lisa and she has been such a blessing.  I was starting to get worried about leaving my students without a ‘mzungu’ to make sure things run properly, but now she is here and staying for at least a year.  She is teaching remedial classes for the students who are really struggling.  This is wonderful for them to get that personal attention, but also great for the rest of the class who don’t want to wait for me to explain things a hundred times to the kids who are behind.  Remember I talked about Phaustine in the last blog post?  Well he has been in remedial and he is doing SO MUCH BETTER!  His English has improved and he can actually read a simple book cover to cover and only mis-pronounce a few words.  I am so impressed with how he is doing, and it’s only taken a few weeks with Teacher Lisa to get him up to speed.  So things have been running really smoothly, and it’s nice to have another American there to talk to and help me out.  I talked her into taking the Standard 4 English class so I could teach Standard 4 Science, this has been super fun!  Standard 4 has the most brilliant students, and most want to be doctors and nurses , so they are interested in all things science.  Lately we have been talking about infectious diseases and how to prevent/diagnose/treat them, we’ve talked about the digestive system and what foods our bodies need to survive, and now we are on plant and animal sexual reproduction (the giggling has almost died down..). I have loved every minute of it, not just because I love science but because I love how excited they get about science.  What I would do for a microscope for those kids… oh well, maybe next year. 

Mom de-feathering the chicken with T. Samson.

On safari!

Other interesting news about Standard 4, we recently went to another private school about an hour away to take a mock national exam.  In Tanzania, to go to Standard 5 (fifth grade) the students have to pass an exam covering every subject they have in school.  The problem is that the test is in English and most schools don’t teach English, mostly because the teachers don’t know it, so the majority of kids don’t pass and this is the end of their academic career.  But our school has had a native English speaking teacher since it began so our kids are fabulous at English, and most other things, so we really weren’t worried.  

We just thought it would be a good idea to have the kids take an exam similar to what they will take at the end of the year and see how they do.   The good news: since you only need a 45% to pass, most of our kids did well above that.  We enforce a 70% passing rate so even though a 50% didn’t seem good enough for me, it is good enough for Tanzania.  The not so good news:  the kids really struggled with the test because the English was not correct and they are used to proper English from us at all times, so they kept getting really confused. Also, they are not used to taking paper exams. We don’t have the money to print a hundred pages every time we want to test the students, we just use the blackboard to give them quizzes and see how well they know the material.  So they had a hard time, but from now on we will work on making more paper tests to prepare them better.  All the time and effort we have put into the school would be no good if our kids don’t pass this exam.  Overall, it was a great experience because now we know where our weaknesses are and what we need to focus on.  It was also really good for us to see how other schools are operating and what we can improve on.

A beautiful female lion resting under the shade.

 Well this last week was pretty stressful because all of our boarding kids and about half of the local kids got pink eye.  We found out that the water supply at boarding was extremely dirty and unsanitary; there were all sorts of bugs and worms in the well that they use to wash clothes and bathe in.  And because pink eye is very contagious, every day there were five or six new kids who showed symptoms.  There was nothing we could give them so we just said they need to wash their hands often and not touch their eyes, but they were sad when we had to send them home.  The church is supposed to be responsible for keeping the well water clean so they cleaned it yesterday and hopefully, this won’t happen again.  But that’s the thing about Tanzania, it’s all about reaction.  There is no prevention.  They just wait until someone is sick or dying before doing anything, instead of doing regular maintenance to make sure bad things don’t happen.  But what can we do?  We can educate our children so that when they grow up, they are more responsible than those that came before them.

Awesome herd of elephants at the watering hole.

Also last week, my friend Martha and her friend Lisa came to visit me… of course me and Martha both caught the pink eye, which was expected but still not fun.  Besides that, I think they had a really good time meeting the kids and seeing the school.  It was nice to have visitors again, I feel loved to have so many people come out here to see me!

Posing for the picture.

Well that’s about it.  Things are going well with the school and Berega.  Scott and his team of workers are finally getting started on building the new school.  Their goal is to have three classrooms built by the end of the year… but you know how that goes, nothing ever happens in a timely manner here. But the director of Hands4Africa, Dr. Brad Logan, is coming in a couple of weeks and he is sure to get things moving along. I am really looking forward to meeting the generous man who gave us this wonderful opportunity,  I hope that one day I can do as much good in the world as he has done for this place.  I really do miss my family and friends back home, thank you all for loving me and supporting me through this journey.  I can’t wait to see everyone in a couple months!  But for right now, I am just soaking in each moment and enjoying life to the fullest.  Take care.

Obviously, these monkeys were having more fun than we were.