Rainy season's ending...

I just reread my last blog and saw a number of typo's and grammatical errors. Oops and sorry!

So, what's been going on since February 25th... I started having open office hours a few nights a week in the library, and it's great! Some nights only 1 student shows up, other nights there are a bunch of small groups of students with questions, and sometimes... I write letters. I really like it :) We got back from midterm/Easter break the Thursday after Easter and started exams, which continued through the next Wednesday. Math was on the first day, so I was busy grading during the testing time but finished in time to give the students their exams back on Friday. Some students did very well, though of course a lot didn't. I still feel like I write bad tests, but I'm getting better. I'm also working on getting some new shelves for the library finished (they were supposed to be done by the end of February...) and figuring out how to do a library orientation for the students. We had been planning another Girls Empowerment Conference for May, but we decided to focus on the peer education that the students who have gone to the other conferences do and wait until next term to do more conferences. So I'll just be teaching for the next month and a half, and Dasha will be here in a month! Then it's June break and travel time, a July 4 party, the second term starts, Ybi visits!, I have my Close of Service conference, probably don't finish the syllabus, my students take their national exams, and I'm done. Whoa! Time is flying by!

Other news since my last post -- we had a Boys Conference, focusing on HIV/AIDS education and Gender Equality, that went really well. Our Tanzanian counterparts were incredible and the students were great! We had some really good discussions about cultural gender roles and their effects, as well as what we can do about it. Probably everyone who was there is still a bit sexist (some more, some less), but at least we got a conversation going. And my students were really excited to be peer educators at school! The first weekend we were back they taught other students! So now there are 10 girls and 10 boys who have been to conferences and do peer education. Well, not all of them like and/or are good at peer ed, but at least half of them are enthusiastic, so I'm happy. I'm hoping we'll get a Doctor or Nurse to come to school and do a Q&A, but I don't like the Doctor in village so I need to talk with NGO's in Njombe town to see if they'd send someone out to us one day. Soon after the Boys Conference I went up to Iringa, a big town 4-5 hours north of me, to help PC with In-Serivce Training for the new Ed PCVs. I co-ran sessions about women's empowerment, conferences, and peer education. It was fun, although the days they asked me to go were a few days on either side of the day I had to be there to get the swine flu vaccine, so I ended up spending a week there. It was a long time, but I enjoyed some sessions, hanging out with the newbies, hanging out with old friends who were around for a variety of reasons, and eating fancy food -- lasagne, paninis, ice cream, cake and cookies!! YUM! After that I was only at school for two days before we closed for midterm break, so I missed a lot of teaching in March :( I left notes, group work and homework for my students, but of course not all of them did it and I'm sure even fewer understood it. I don't expect to have time to finish the syllabus, but I don't want to leave the few students who actually have a chance of moving on to A-level and studying science hanging. So, I plan to switch some of my open office hours to a special extra class for the kids who do really well. We'll start with the topics at the end of the syllabus and work backwards, so hopefully I'll be able to teach them all. The syllabus is ridiculous in a number of ways, but the one that is relevant here is that it is specifically designed to take a full year of teaching when the national exam is always in early October (otherwise, school ends late November). The Ministry of Education has detailed syllabi for every subject, including topics and subtopics and how many periods should be spent on each topic. The number of suggested periods for the Form 4 syllabus and the number of required periods per week lead to finishing the syllabus late November. Awesome.

So, midterm break! Brian and I traveled up to Dodoma/Singida, the center of the country. I was gone for 11 days, 5 of which did not include traveling on a bus. And Brian had an extra day on either end of my traveling! Our first day was 5:30am - 6:30pm, the second 10:30am-3:30pm, the third blissfully spent in one place... our longest day was 5am-7pm I think. And our shortest was 7am-10am. It was a lot of bus time, but it was fun. We visited two friends at their schools, saw the capital (Dodoma), saw a bunch of other towns for the first time, experienced a new part of Tanzania and hung out with a bunch of friends. We cooked a lot while visiting one friend and not at all while visiting the other. We watched a bunch of movies and TV shows from Chinese DVDs and external hard drives (thanks Matt!). We saw some of the earliest rock paintings humans ever created (Mary Leakey "discovered" them) and crammed 9 people into a little Suzuki (kind of like a Rav4 but smaller). We tried 5 different types of homemade wine, each of which was delicious! My favorite was choya wine, made from dried choya flowers. The friend who makes tons of wine is the same friend who we cooked with a lot. His house not only has electricity and running water inside, but a mini-fridge, a stove and oven, a rice cooker, a water heater, 3 sinks, a shower (not heated, but it's too hot there to care), a western toilet and a pomegranate tree outside. Hott damn!!! We made tons of bread, pancakes, passionfruit "jam" (boiled sugar and passionfruit), cinnamon toast, quacamole and tortillas, stir fry, egg rolls (baked, with shells of tortillas rolled as thin as we could), pizza (with cheese!), mashed potatoes, fajitas, and lots of meat. They had meat with nearly every lunch and dinner -- roast beef sandwiches, corned beef and cabbage (for Easter, in honor of St. Patty's day...), and lots of cubes of beef cooked with spices. There was also homemade beef jerky, which I tried and had a very difficult time chewing (none of those softening chemicals that's in the Trader Joe's variety, apparently). We all helped cooking, though on any given day there were between 4 and 7 of us so often there wasn't enough for everyone to be busy. I must've made at least 9 loaves of bread, it was fun and so nice to just turn on the oven and plop them in! Nothing fancy, just a basic white/whole wheat. Yummy tho :)

I didn't do anything special for Passover, April Fools or Easter this year, maybe I'll get my act together next year. It's starting to get cold here, and it rains pretty much everyday. I'm up to 3 blankets at night (last year my high was 5) and considering lighting my stove for warmth. People at school and in village have started saying that I'm leaving so soon and why am I leaving, that I should stay -- it feels good to hear them say that, but I'm not going to extend. I'll probably leave mid/late November and travel for 2-6 weeks, I'm not sure what I want to do yet. Then it'll be home to figure out what next...