School!

The first weeks of school were super, super busy. Those that I’ve talked to, know that I spend the majority of my time either teaching or lesson planning so that I can teach some more. Both Sofia and Lisa were teaching other grades previously so none of us have a store of lesson plans.

My class is good by American standards, especially when you take into consideration that I have 16 students shoved into a classroom half the size of other classrooms (Jose has decided to move my classroom. I have mixed emotions; delighted that I will get a full size classroom, but sad that I will be moving away from Sofia and Lisa. We are always in and out of each other’s classrooms to distribute things or chat) But by Year 3 (ages 6-8) standards my kids are the hellions. They don’t mean to be but I’ve got a few strong personalities.

One of my boys CANNOT stay in his seat/hold still to save his life. I’ve got two chatty girls that DO NOT stop talking, EVER. One of my kids likes to pick fights, etc. Personalities. Maria, the primary music teacher has had issues with them, a few of the other teachers have told me that they’re a handful.

One of the major irritations for me is a very Tanzanian habit. When the students want my attention, instead of raising their hand, they each call out “Mees! Mees!” Imagine a whole bunch of baby birds chirping Miss (but with a Tanzanian accent it’s Mees) all around you in a room that echoes. NOT OK. That is something we have been hard-core working on; Raising your hand quietly. I don’t answer to “Mees”!

All of my kids are African; I have Tanzanians, Ugandans, Rwandans, and Kenyans. I have more girls in my class but just by a little. I also have a very wide range of ability levels. Some of my students are still reading books with two lines on each page and one is at the point of chapter books.

Despite their faults, they are all pretty affectionate. One of my girls brought me in a rose the other day. I have two that regularly give me back massages at lunch and other students clean up my dishes at meals. Two of my kids are borders and so I see them at all the meals. They are both really sweet and love eating with me and Kelly.

It’s funny being a teacher on campus. It’s almost like being a minor celebrity. In the first few weeks I would be walking around and hear children whisper to each other, “That’s Miss Fano”. Other times, children I had never met would call out “Hello, Miss Fano!” It’s really funny to walk by a table of children, because then they all call out in a little chorus “Hi Miss!” and “Hi, Miss Fano!”

My popularity is really helped by my neon blue slap watch. The kids here are super fascinated with it. They all know what they are because a few of the students have them. I’ve seen a neon pink/purple on one of the secondary girls and one of the Year 6’s had a brown one until he broke the watch face. The little kids love to take it off my arm and put it on their wrists, ankles and heads and the older kids like to slap themselves with it so it curls up.

September 4th, 2011

On Sunday we were finally able to move into our new house! I was originally told that Kelly and I would be living in a two bedroom apartment, but as it turns out the apartment was actually a house. It’s actually really nice. The front window has a view of Mt. Meru!

the view off our front porch

Our neighbors are the primary and secondary principals on one side.

And the other girls on the other side.

The kitchen and the living room are open to each other and it came with all of the furniture (couch, chairs, coffee table, bookshelves, dining table, mini fridge (ours is as big as it gets here. The power can’t handle American sized fridges) and gas stove/electric oven)

Our rooms are enormous in my opinion, much bigger than both my JMU apartment room and my room in Richmond. The room comes supplied with an armoire, a desk, and a bed. The bed for some reason is like a single and seems miniscule in the room. The bed is smaller than both my double at JMU and my day bed at home (which you wouldn’t think would be possible but this bed is considerably shorter) I put up my photo collage!

I love the view out my bedroom window!

The bathroom is very basic toilet, sink, shower head. (I like this shower much better than that strange bath tub with a showerhead and no curtain thing they had going in Berlin.) No storage though.

The house is fabulous! …but there are a few downsides….the floor is straight up concrete, complete with scuffs and paint marks. Also, the dust here comes in and coats it so when you walk across it you get the weird walking on a chalkboard feeling. Our poor maid Gudilla (not how you spell her name) has to mop it everyday.

It was looking pretty bland and the lack of decoration was kinda freaking me out when we first moved in. It took them about a week to give us couch cushions. (Made of some industrial foam stuff that is a very solid rectangle. It does not cushion at all when you sit. It’s the same stuff they choose to make mattresses out of here, haha. But pure exhaustion will make any mattress feel good…)

The other weekend Kelly and I set off to the used market to buy some furnishings. I think this market is called Matumba or Matoomba or at least that is how it’s said. It’s this big row of people selling anything from clothes (some cute ones and good deals) to curtains, bedsheets and shoes.

Our trusty cab driver, Jimmy took us and helped us bargain. Not that Kelly needs help bargaining, she’s much more assertive than I am when it comes to that. We ended up getting:

a gorgeous curtain panel in chocolate brown for the living room. I ended up paying 20,000 shillings for it or 12$. It needed a few alterations and I hung it up that same day.

Bathmats and a shower curtain for the bathroom. A set of three bath mats came to 15,000 shillings or 9$. The curtain Kelly got for 10,000 shillings or 6$ because she bargained the poor man to death. It is a super good curtain from Target that is worth 30$ new. (I know this because I had the same curtain only a different color scheme in my college bathroom) Gudilla washed the mats for us before we set them out.

For my room I picked up a beautiful woven rug that cost me about 20$. Which actually was a rip-off, I should have gotten it for half that price. But they saw the color of my skin and read sucker…and Jimmy wasn’t there at that point. But now we know.

I also got a purple bedsheet for about $3.50 that I cut in half and strung it on my curtain rod in my room. Sometimes the askari’s (the school’s guards) like to creep around back there and I needed a curtain for when I got dressed or changed. It’s looking a lot better now and I feel like I’m finally settling in.

I will definitely feel settled in once I plant some stuff out front. Right now it's all depressing dirt...

September 3rd 2011

To welcome all of the new teachers to the school Jose set up a safari in Tarangire Park for all the newcomers. It’s a 2 hour drive there and we wanted to be at the park pretty early so we got up and met at the front of the school at 4:30 in the morning. (This was difficult for some people because the faculty bbq was the night before and there was, of course, alcohol involved) I think I managed to get to bed around 11pm so I wasn’t too bad.

The safari company, East African Voyage, came to pick us up in the safari cars and we settled in for a long ride. We went through all these little towns on the way and actually got stopped by some kind of police in one of them. (They were guys in normal clothes carrying guns. The driver didn’t seen too distressed so I wasn’t worried) As we got further away the towns turned into Maasai villages surrounded by bush. Every now and then you could see a Maasai warrior walking with his staff. We turned down the road that leads to the park just as the sun was rising and it was absolutely beautiful. My cameras really only got a shallow imitation of how big and colorful it actually was. We turned into the park area and were greeted with a massive baobab tree. ( I love love love these trees. They are so massive and so utterly picturesque that I took tons and tons of baobab pictures.) We got out of the safari cars to stretch our legs and so thesafari dudes could raise up the roof of the car so we would be able to stand up and watch the animals once we got going. Jose warned us to not even stray away from the parking lot here because a few years ago a child from Braeburn (another school in the area) was killed by a leopard just a few feet into the brush.

After a quick potty break we all piled back into our cars and set off. I was sharing a car with Kelly, Maureen and Victoria. The first animals we saw inside the park were gnus, zebras, warthogs, and ostriches. There were animals all around but they were kind far away from the road so it was hard for me to get real good pictures (as I accidentally left my good zoom lens back in Virginia) We drive and drove and drove. We got into the park at 7 or 8 and didn’t end p stopping for lunch until around 1pm. In between we saw impalas, our first elephants, giraffes and lions (including a mama lion with at least two cubs. They were so freakin adorable frolicking around this rock pile. It was very lion king) I also loved seeing the elephants. They were hard to find at first but then it was like they were everywhere.

The terrain is very dynamic. There were flat bits where it was very bush-like and then there were hills and then even places that had small cliffs. At times it was trees, like gigantic baobab trees or marsh or scrub. It’s dry season here so there were many dried river and creek beds.

We finally stopped for lunch at a little outdoor area literally right in the middle of the park. There were no fences or anything so we were wondering what would happen if a lion or leopard decided to join the party. At this point none of us had eaten breakfast and we were practically starving. I think we were all staring a little too hard at the spread of food the safari guys were putting out because they handed us a bunch of bananas and sent us away. (The bananas here are differentfrom the ones in the US. For one thing they are tiny. Usually they are no longer than your middle finger, but they make up for it in taste. They have so much more of a flavor here and much sweeter. The school serves bananas all the time and I love it!)

The company fed us well. They laid out loaves of fresh bread, cheese, some kind of quiche, fresh cut pineapple and watermelon (the school often feeds us this too. The pineapple is super good here, but the watermelon is definitely not as good as what we grow next to our driveway back home) as well as all kinds of cut veggies and cold chicken, potato salad and eggs. It was all really delicious and exactly what we needed.

After lunch we took off again. Tarangire is huge; just to get out of the park from where we had lunch would be two hours. We drove by the marshy area which I think was the most beautiful part. Elephants, zebras, and birds and all kinds of other animals congregated here because of the water. Also, I loved how the ground went from brown dirt, to red clay, to green grass. The color contrast was fabulous. After luch we saw elephants up really close. SO close that we had to be quiet so as not to scare them. At one point I actually ducked back down into the car because the elephant got so so close. (They are massive and slightly frightening when you’re that close) We also saw a wild Kudu, which are very rarely seen, dik diks (cute tiny deer looking things) some hippos, more water boks and a bunch of different kinds of birds.

All along the safari we were fighting off these biting flies (tsetse flies, I believe. Although the guide said they don’t carry sleeping sickness in this area) Those things were obnoxious! They would land on you and nip your skin pretty badly. They could even bite through jeans. I don’t know how this is possible but it really hurts so I know it’s true. Just as we were all grtting really tired and frustrated about the biting flies we spotted more lions. There were two female ones lying underneath a low tree. We stopped to look at them for a moment before moving on a few feet and realizing why they were there. They had recently killed a zebra right up against the gravel road our car was on. One lion was next to the zebra which had been completely gutted and chewed on. We could see light through its body where the lions had eaten completely through. The zebra’s eyeballs were also missing but I’m not sure if that was the lions doing or the work of some other scavenger. That was basically the last exciting event before we left the park.

On the way home we stopped by a little town where women were selling baskets and rugs made of some kind of woven together grass or leaf. We bought the place out. A whole bunch of people got rugs for their classrooms or houses. (I got one for my classroom so the kids would have somewhere to sit) I also got a really nice laundry basket. Then we drove the two hours to get back home. By the time we got home it was around 7pm and we were hungry and exhausted. So we ate and then crashed into our beds.

September 2nd, 2011

Professional Development Week = hellish. .. There have been some big changes and it has made many people very upset so there was a lot of tension in the air. Not to mention the first day was nine straight hours of sitting and listening to presentations. I was soooo grumpy after that day that I dragged Kelly and Nick into the field and forced them to ply Frisbee with me so I could get out some aggression. The rest of the week was basically full of meetings or lesson planning from 8am to 6pm. ROUGH. In terms of lesson planning we pretty much designed the entire curriculum and then planned out the first two weeks. It was a long and arduous process; nobody enjoyed themselves that week.

Part of the issue is that the school year was made significantly longer by like 3 or 4 weeks. (A whole Easter break was done away with) The school day was made longer by a couple of hours. (We have to be at school from 7:40am to 4:30pm. I bit much in my opinion especially when the kids get out at 3:30) Teachers that eat meals provided by the school must eat with the students (a rule I heartily disagree with. I spend too much of my time with the kids; I do require an adult break during the day. Thank you very much. We’ve been trying to get around this one.) Also they have increased the amount of duties that each teacher will have do. There will be eight weekday duties during the year. On these days you just have to monitor breakfast, lunch and dinner and then deal with the two hour homework block after dinner. (I’ve already done one day and it’s just plain boringggggg) On Friday duty you deal with the meal times and then you have to stay on campus that whole Friday night. And then 4 weekends out of the year you have weekend duty. You have to amuse the 50some boarders for all of Saturday and all of Sunday. (Not looking forward to that. I’m hoping my group will at least make it interesting by going on a weekend trip or something.)

On a better note I got to meet the other teachers in my grade. Lisa has been here about five years and has an adorable baby boy. Sofia has been here a shorter time but still a few years. They are both new to Year 3 (Lisa was Year 6 and Sofia was Year 2) so we’re all scrambling to come up with lesson plans. They are both fabulous and I am really glad to have them in my Year group.

My hall

I finally got into my classroom this week. I got the smallest classroom in the entire school (figures) just by luck. According to Lisa, last year the son of the prime minister of Tanzania lived in this room. Very strange…there has to be more to that story. Anyway because if that I am also the only classroom in the school to have curtains, which is nice. These pictures are the before pictures...It actually looks alot better now and will hopefully actually look nice and colorful as soon as I get some of the students' work up on the walls.

My classroom has to be majorly swept everyday because everything gets dusty soooo easily. They don’t really do carpets here because the dust gets in it and then it’s nearly impossible to get out. Also, the amount of dust sticking to the walls means nothing else will stick to them. Posters held up with sticky tack, scotch tape, or even command strips fall within minutes. The only thing I’ve found that works is long strips of clear packing tape on all sides.

Kelly and I are still not able to move into our houses yet, but we’re better off than some of the other girls. Alex and Becca were put in a room in the borders dorms until the houses are finished and the other day the dorm room they were in flooded. A whole bunch of Alex’s things got all wet including her phone, ipod and camera. (They’re ok though, excluding the phone I think.)

Anyway……lesson planning must be done…..