Zaidi ya mwaka moja!

One month until I'll be finished with my first year of teaching in Tanzania! It's flown by! I've definitely noticed that I'm more comfortable teaching and being in the classroom, and I like how my students are used to my style and I know what to expect from which students. I'm still not sure if I'll want to continue teaching when I finish here, but it's nice to be settled. I've still got things I want to change next year, but overall I'm happy with how my students and I are used to each other and know what to expect from each other.

It feels like spring here! Bright green leaves and little white and pink flowers started blooming on the pear and apple trees about a month ago -- it's so pretty! I don't particularly like the dust devils or walls of dust that blow around, but it makes me smile when pretty little petals swirl around the classroom :) I'm also happy that it's getting to be fruit season again! I can get oranges and am starting to be able to buy bananas in my village, and in a few more months we'll have apples and pears out the wazoo. Papaya season is ending, but I can still buy pineapples in town (although the price has gone up) and blood fruit, passion fruit, and mangoes will start to be available in the next few months! I've started cooking a bit more, which I always enjoy once I start but still often put off and decide to read instead. I've made some good tomato sauces and stir fries (very sad that they lack tofu), a delicious molten chocolate cake, and a whole wheat onion bread that's nice.

I'm just finishing up teaching about circles and spheres (and by the way, the syllabus here includes some crazy, but cool, properties that I don't ever remember learning and also a whole chapter entitled "the Earth as a Sphere"), and I want to share some examples of Tanzanian ingenuity I've seen. Very few students have school supplies other than notebooks and pens, so having a compass to draw circles is pretty unheard of (I think I've seen 2 of my students with one). Some students sketch circles free hand, the way I do on the board, but others rip a corner off a piece of paper and fold it over a few times, then use the tip of their pen or pencil to make two small holes in it, borrow their neighbor's pen to use as a stationary center in one hole and put their pen into the second hole, using the distance between the two pens/holes as a fixed radius and thus drawing a circle! How awesome is that?! Another way that students get around their lack of equiptment all the time is to push the staples through the paper and fold down the ends by hand (sometimes students get staples from the school, or they buy staples but don't have a stapler), to use push pins instead of staples, or poke a hole through the top corners of papers they want to stay together and rip out a small piece of yarn from their sweater to put through the hole and tie the pages together. Another random thought I've been meaning to share -- the students bathe with water right out of the tap or well, which is incredibly obvious once I thought about it but I have to admit it took me almost a year to seriously consider my students' bathing habits. They have no way to warm the water because they don't have stoves, so that's gotta be incredibly cold! B.O. is common and I don't like it, but after realizing what my students have to use to bathe, I can't blame them. If possible, I bathe in the afternoon during the warmest part of the day because I get cold in between pouring warm water on myself! And I really can't imagine bathing with water fresh out of the ground in the cold season, that would be torture.

A few weeks ago I had a bad day and was feeling really unproductive and ineffective, which pushed me to stop trying to arrange a time when I could go to our school library and organize, and just follow the trail to the key (from the secretary to the nurse to a teacher...) so that I could go whenever I wanted. Another teacher was using the library to spread out all the things he had to grade, and I just walked in and started organizing. It took me two full afternoons to put all the math books together and in order, and it was wonderful! I feel so accomplished when I look at those 3 bookshelves! They start with the arithmetic workbooks and gradually get more difficult until getting to calculus and linear algebra (probably not going to be used, ever). In addition to being organized by difficulty, they are also organized by topic -- so all the algebra books are together, the geometry books are together, etc. It really helped me when I was feeling down! Now I have to figure out what to tackle next... it'll probably be the English language stuff, which covers a wide range. We have a few children's books (more now, thanks to my mom and the LM library system's book sales!), some English Literature textbooks, and a lot of random chapter books -- from young adult to Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Sylvia Plath and Neitzsche. We also have a few French and German textbooks, some middle school science textbooks, and a bunch of workbooks to practice "sheetmetal calculations." They've all been donated, many from a school system in Erie, Pennsylvania and a library located on High St. Kensington in London. A lot of them are stamped saying they're taken out of circulation. I'm still not quite sure how we got all these books, and even though a lot of them are ridiculously not useful, it's great that we have a few good ones. After I get it more organized, I'll start working out how to give the students regular access...

I've seen other PCVs a lot in the past two months because of big get-togethers (doubling as good-bye parties) and midterm school breaks. The Education class from the year before me is starting to finish their service (they leave in Nov. and Dec.), which is hard to believe because that means I'm now in the position they were in when I met them... but I don't feel as knowledgeable or as proficient in Kiswahili as I thought they were. Probably a bit like how freshmen tend to think seniors know so much...

Next week I hope to have my first Girls Empowerment Conference! We're still waiting on the PC grant meeting so they can send the paperwork through, but we have unofficial okay's from the necessary people. I'm working on it with 4 PCVs nearby, the 3 closest to me (2 from my class and 1 from the Ed class before me who's extending for a third year, which I'm really happy about) and another awesome PCV who lives off a road East of Njombe (as opposed to the rest of us who are South). We're each bringing 7-10 female students -- chosen from essays that pretty much serve as an excuse for favoritism -- and a Tanzanian counterpart to help teach. We're focusing on HIV/AIDS and gender equality, and although we have a detailed schedule for the 4 full days of sessions, we probably wont get through all of it. We're all really excited, and at least one other PCV is hoping, like me, that this will pave the way for more Girls Conferences and Boys Conferences next year. I've got some great male students who I really want to do conferences with -- the idea behind it being that men must also believe in gender equality for things to change. I'm nervous about logistics working out, the girls participating and enjoying themselves, how helpful our counterparts will be, and doing everything in Kiswahili! In general I still feel like my vocabulary's pretty bad, and when it comes to explaining the biology behind the transmission of HIV it's just downright terrible. I'm learning, though :) I have a feeling that it'll be educational for our counterparts, too, which is exciting. Last week we had a big downer, though, when we found out that one of our counterparts had been engaging in romantic/physical relationships with students :( It's common here, although illegal. Actually, it's illegal for students to have sex at all -- variously described as having or doing love affairs, playing love, or other innocuous word combinations. This former teacher (he had left his school because his mother was sick, although now it seems that may have been a cover-up) was a dedicated teacher, extremely helpful and friendly, interesting and intelligent, and frequently engaged in discussions of cultural differences, problems and ways to solve said problems. And then a number of different sources said that he pressured female students into relations. It sucks. I've asked around at my school, and it seems that my headmaster kicked out a few teachers for the same type of behavior before I arrived and that no teacher's doing it now. I'm not sure I believe it, but at least if it is happening it's not on a large scale. On a similar note, all female students have regular pregnancy tests -- meaning the school nurse feels their stomach/abdomen area and if she suspects something sends the student to the village health center -- and last month there were 3 pregnancies, all students in forms 1-3. Girls are expelled if they're found to be pregnant, and if the father is found to be a student, he's supposed to be expelled, too. My headmaster says he'd follow that, but apparently so far the girls who have talked have identified the father as a villager so I'm not sure what would really happen. Frequently the girls don't give any information, and I've heard horrible stories from other PCVs about the humiliating interrogations teachers make the girls go through -- the same as all disciplinary meetings, the student stands or kneels in front of a room full of teachers and answers questions, is subjected to verbal and, occasionally, physical abuse. Fun! The don't understand or like the typical teacher-student relationship here, but all I can do is lead by example and try to engage people in discussion, although more often than not it doesn't often lead to anything productive and I'm too frustrated/upset/disillusioned/discouraged/cynical to plow into it seriously.

Hm, it seems I went off on a bit of a downer there... but really, I am happy and glad I'm here! Villagers are really friendly, little kids smile shyly and slowly become more adventerous the more I see them, women offer to braid my hair, people ask all sorts of questions about the U.S. and tell me I should stay in TZ longer (some say 5 years, others suggest moving here permanently), and a friend who met my dad, sister, and Isaiah in June affectionately brings up "the professor" in at least 75% of our conversations. "The professor" is, clearly, my dad. This is the same Tanzanian who has also referred to himself as my father and me as his daughter, and who has said he'd give a goat for my dowry if we did that in my culture. He's the father of the family who's been so wonderful to me, and probably my favorite person at school and in my village -- don't worry, though, Dad, you're not being replaced :)

I hope you're all enjoying the fall (I have to admit I miss the trees and the leaves), and remember to enjoy some tasty food for me....