Short Rainy Season

The short rains are upon us. What this means is that it rains mostly at night, but sometimes in the mornings and afternoons too. And everything gets covered with mud. You should see my classroom floors. It’s disgusting. It also means that my shoes get completely covered in muck.

It can create other complications as well; the other night Kelly and I took a cab back from a bar. It dropped us off in front of our house and Kelly went inside and passed out on her bed. I was in the midst of brushing my teeth when I heard a knock on the door. It ws the cab driver; he was stuck in the mud right outside of my house and my neighbors house (who happens to be the principal of primary school) The cab driver and I try for a while; one of us pushing and the other in the car. All that we ended up doing was digging the wheels in……

So I ended up calling Nick and about three askaris (the school guards) came by to help get the cab out. TWO AND A HALF HOURS LATER the stupid car was finally out. . It was 4:30 in the morning and I was completely covered in mud. The wheels spun at one point and splattered mud across my face and entire body. I had also been kneeling in the mud to hold the flashlight under the car for the askaris to dig. It was rough…Thank you rainy season.

Victoria going for a stroll.

New Classroom!

I’ve moved! To a much bigger classroom! I love love love all the new space. It is so much more light filled and colorful and I can actually have the kids work in small groups in different parts of the classroom. There are a few downsides though: I am much farther away from Sofia and Lisa now I don’t see them hardly at all. And the classroom is in the Infants building so we are with all of the teeny tiny kids. It's not perfect yet....still a work in progress!

All those woven baskets I have, (aka the basis of my organizational system) I bought from one of the mamas that sells them on the side of the street. She originally wanted 12,000 shillings for each one but I worked her down to 8,000 (roughly 4 or 5 dollars) This seriously took about 20 minutes and a lot of grumpiness on her part, but now that we have the deal I don't have to bargain any more. She actually greets me with a smile now when I show up at her stand, which is a big improvement...

On Duty Weekend

So I survived the dreaded duty weekend, but just barely. Friday night I went out (I couldn’t give up my whole weekend!) with Kelly and Becca to Colobus Club, a bar that is made up of one room for dancing and one room for karaoke. Becca is obsessed with karaoke so we spent the majority of our time in that room.

Anyway so we get back at a decent time, 1am I think, but then I have to get up at 7:30 in the morning to supervise the boarders eating breakfast. They had to eat a little bit earlier than usual because after breakfast we headed over to ISM (another international school about 5 minutes down the road) In order to get to ISM we had to all pile in the bus.

Funny thing about road safety in Tanzania, there is none. We piled 30 some kids on a little bus blatantly meant for 20 people at most. Seatbelts are nonexistent. There were kids sitting/standing in the front seat next to the driver; no seatbelts. The only thing from then and the road was the windshield. There were children in other children’s laps. Children perched on the back of chairs, standing in the aisles, sitting on top of boxes of juice and sandwiches. So basically if we hit anything more than a mini-pothole, there would be casualties. Luckily there were no mishaps and we made it to ISM.

Sports day consisted of students from 4 or 5 different school competing in track and field activities like the 100m, 200m, 400, 800, relays, discus, javelin, long jump, high jump, etc. For most of the day I hung out under the St. Cons awning and amused the children who were there to watch. The day extremely hot and dusty and every time anybody moved, a little puff od dust would wash over nearby people.

There were little grey and brown lizards everywhere. I found them really cute. They were roughly 3 inches long and caused some amusement when a few ran up one of the male teachers pant leg.

St. Constantine’s kids are super good at sports and so we ended up sweeping almost all of the awards. There were awards for Under 10 girls, Under 10 boys, Under 12 girls, Under 12 boys, Under 16 girls, Under 16 boys, Open girls and Open boys. St. Cons won all of these awards except two of them and we won the whole thing by almost 200 points. It was almost embarrassing how much we won; the kids loved it though.

Finally sports day ended and all the children made it back safely. I was hot and dusty and begged off to take a shower. After that we kinda puttered around until dinner.

After began my camping saga. The boarders had made it known that they wanted to go camping on the school grounds. So I took it upon myself to organize this. I has passed out a sign up sheet beforehand (originally I had planned to only take primary students but then the secondary kids kinda revolted and desperately wanted to come; though I was terrified that there was going to be some inappropriate behavior and someone was going to end up pregnant or something) So I ended up with 39 kids.

After dinner I took them all out to the field to set up the tents (this was the worst part) none of them had any clue what to do. There was only me and like two other teachers there and so there were children wandering around with tent poles and tent covers blowing away not to mention the sun was going down pretty swiftly. Somehow we got the tents up and Jose came by to make a fire for the kids to roast marshmallows on.

One thing that really surprised me was how many kids had no clue what a marshmallow was. Even the secondary boys had never experienced them. And none of the children had ever roasted them on sticks over a fire before. They ended up absolutely loving it; we went through soooo many bags of marshmallows.

After that I made them all sit in a circle around me and a lantern and sing songs. I figured the secondary students would think this part of the night stupid and I even gave them the option of not participating but I honestly think they liked it the most. I led them in the Tarzan song (a BIG favorite; One of the secondary girls told me that students were singing it in groups all over the dorms the next morning) We did Singing in the Rain (how very appropriate: warning: foreshadowing) and then I did the improvised skit Emily’s Candy Store. The students were soo into it and really had a great time.

At this point the other teachers left so it was just me and one dorm master, Jackson, with the 39 kids.

After singing I shoved the primary students into their tents, but let secondary hang out in little groups in the middle of the tent circle. They were really well behaved but I stayed on top of them when they decided to play a truth or dare game that involved spinning a phone in the middle fo a circle and whomever the phone flashlight landed on was the truth or darer. (Liiiitle too much like spin the bottle for the game to be kosher) I then shoved them into their tents at around 10 and settled down into a chair in the middle of the tent circle to read my kindle and watch for escaping children.

At around midnight it started to drizzle. But then it stopped, I set up a tent for myself in the middle just in case it started up again. And oh did it start up again. At 1am it started to downpour and it didn’t stop until 6am.

Now some of the tents are like 10 years old and lack any type of waterproofing. Not to mention that there were three children in all of the tents so people were leaning up against the sides of the tents.

At around 3am I hear a plaintive, “Mees? Mees?” One of the boys tents full of three 9 year olds has entirely flooded, I mean a couple of inches of water in the bottom. I have no clue how they slept as long as they did. So I walked them back to the dorms and their beds. From about 3am until 5am I ended up walking back a total of 8 children for flooded tents, but all of the rest stayed.

At 6am I woke up the rest of the tents and even though all but one tent had water issues there were still children that didn’t want to leave. I had to promise a whole bunch of them that we would camp in the field again soon.

Sunday was rough; though the rest of my team let me sleep from the time when I woke the kids up until lunch time.

And sorry no pictures.......

Sports Day

A couple of weeks ago, one whole Friday was set aside for sports day. The whole school is split up into houses. Delphi, Olympia, Sparta, and Athens (Greek cities because the school was founded by the Greeks in Arusha) Each person gets a shirt with their teams name on the back and in the team color. (Delphi is red, Athens is blue, Olympia is yellow, and Sparta is green)

TO begin all the teams congregate and begin their team cheering (just generic chants. Nothing nearly as creative as the Comfort Zone Camp cheers) Then everyone marches around the field cheering and waving their team flags. Once everyone is settled in their team areas the sports begin. There were races (100m all the way up to the 800m) the long jump, high jump, discus, shot put, tug of war, and relays. The energy was ramped up pretty much all day.

All of the teachers had jobs Kelly was in charge of judging high jump, (And see if you can spot her in a neon green wig, haha) I was one of the teachers in charge of the teams. I’m on Delphi so I had to make sure that all of the Delphi kids got to their events and that they weren’t getting out of control. (The seating area for the teams was right up against the track so every now and then random students would wander out onto the track while people were racing. Part of my job was controlling that)

Almost the whole day I had a little shadow. Esme, one of the students in year 3 (though not in my class) decided to stick to me like glue. She followed me around everywhere and for part of the day I was carrying her around piggy-back. We even ate our lunches on the field together. She is such a sweetheart! And now whenever she sees me around campus (which is a lot) she gets really excited.

My favorite event of the whole day was the tug-of-war. All of the kids got super pumped for it (even the older ones who were wayyy too cool to cheer). Some of the battles were really intense! There was one match between us (Delphi) and Olympia that went on and on and back and forth (to everyone’s delight) until eventually Olympia yanked away the win.

By the end of the day I was sunburnt and tired but I had a good time.