Special English

Well… the first week of teaching is officially in the bag…. and it went surprisingly well! I was supposed to be teaching three sections or streams of form 1 Math and Physics, but it looks as if there is only going to be two form 1 streams. So, in lieu of the third form 1 stream I am planning on picking up form 4 Biology! A Biology teacher is supposed to be coming to our school, but she has yet to arrive, so I figured I would put my knowledge and money to good use and teach something I actually studied in college.

The first couple weeks of class for form 1 are actually set aside in Tanzania for “Orientation”. Orientation is used to familiarize the students with the English language. Since the form 1 students do not know an ample amount, if any English, but must know it because all of the national exams (NECTAs) are in English they receive a jump-start in the first few weeks of school. This, consequently, means that I must teach in English and Kiswahili (which I have been speaking for less than four months) and it has actually has not been a total train wreck, but my English has to be what we PCVs like to call “special”.  I have to speak painfully slow, annunciate every word, avoid contractions, repeat myself at least once if not twice and formulate very direct and to the point sentences.  It is actually pretty exhausting to speak in Special English, but I am learning to manage. Despite moving at a snail’s pace, so far in form 1 we have learned how to tell English time* (see footnote), as I call it, how to tell someone about our daily routine, colors, verbs, numbers and words specific to Math and Physics. I have found it hard to explain to them, without feeling like I am a professional mime, that I want them to work in groups. I actually had to laugh the other day because it took me 10+ minutes to explain hangman to one of the classes. Eventually the kids picked it up and really enjoyed it, “Repeat game, Madam”. Personally, I really enjoy the games because I do not feel like I am lecturing, yet the kids are learning and watching the girls hand it to the boys, more often than not, especially in a male dominated cultural, is awesome.  I also feel my Swahili has gotten significantly better or at least I feel more fluid when I speak, after this week of teaching. I do not hesitate to correct my students’ English and I am glad they do not hesitate to correct my Swahili (spoken and written).

A few of you are probably wondering what exactly a Tanzanian classroom looks like. Well I can tell you it is in many ways not unlike a classroom in America and in a few ways it is a far cry. The classrooms are all open to the outside, meaning there are no enclosed hallways. There are five long buildings that house three classrooms each. In each classroom there is a black board, some windows, a cement floor, desks, chairs, a sign that says, “speak only English” and nothing else.  To be honest most of the desks and chairs are broken/don graffiti and there are often two students to one desk and chair. There isn’t even a ledge to rest the chalk, but to be honest I would not have it any other way. Some may see lack of resources as a serious obstacle, but I have started to view it as way to be really creative with my lesson plans! There are between 40 to 50 students in each stream, so (not including form 4) I have about 100 or so students. I would say this is a little different from the 9 students I taught last year using a SMARTboard, but I am managing.

Of course my duties reach beyond the classroom. Everyday after the academic day, from 1:50- 2:30 there are different meetings, Monday is self-study period, Tuesday HIV/AIDS club, Wednesday debate, Thursday subject clubs and (my favorite) Friday general cleanness (aka landscaping).  Tuesday, I decided I would pop into the HIV/AIDS club to see what it was all about and also because I am the only science teacher at my school. Thinking I would be just there to supervise I soon found myself with a piece of chalk in my hand and about 70 to 80 students staring at me. This is how it came to be that I ran HIV/AIDS club on the 3^rd Tuesday of January in the year 2011. This is also how I ended up answering questions about HIV/AIDS & kissing, masturbation, circumcision, blood types and why the prevalence of HIV/AIDS is lower in America than in Tanzania. Karibu teaching science in Tanzania / being the village’s teen health expert! It is a little scary that all of these students are receiving most of their sexual education from me, as it is considered somewhat taboo in Tanzanian families to discuss such things, but if not me they probably are not going to get it anywhere else, which is even scarier.  I have also been unofficially placed on sports and games duty two afternoons a week. So, from 4:30pm to about 6:00pm I trek over to the football/netball area and supervise. Until last week I had never seen netball played, but it seems like a really fun game and the girls from Isongole Sec. are pretty good. I was absolutely blown away by their teamwork, especially for a game of pickup netball.  I was also thinking how much I would love to take their passion, spirit, aggression, eagerness and teamwork and inject it into American teenagers.

In other news not related to school, I received two packages recently!! Thanks Mom and Dad! I just got my Christmas present today (i.e. new running shoes!). I will use the Christmas garland to decorate my house! Also, thanks Vashti! Magazines, fruit snacks, Star Wars stickers and chocolate were a great pick me up!!! Actually, earlier this week one of my students came to visit me and the Cosmo you sent me was on my coffee table, she picked it up and opened to a half naked woman in a perfume ad and proceeded to ask me if the woman in the picture was drunk because she had no clothes on…hence the reason I wear long skirts everyday.

Also, in the time between teaching periods I have taken up teaching my counterparts (fellow teachers) American slang. This has proved to be pretty entertaining. We have covered everything from, Sup?, *head nod*, What’s hanging?, what it means to “pound” your drink, chillaxin’, high five, wicked awesome, etc. This sounds funny to say but it is oddly comforting when my counterpart Mr. Gregory greets me in the morning with a “Sup?” and for a few moments I feel a little less far from home. I miss you all dearly! All my love from TZ!

Almost forgot!!! In my next blog post I would love to answer any and all questions people have about my service, teaching, Tanzania, etc. Either comment on the blog with your questions, Facebook me or email me!!!

*I am not sure if I explained this in one of my earlier blog posts and am honestly too mvivu (lazy) right now to go back and look, but in Swahili speaking countries there is a little thing called Swahili time. The Swahili day does not start at midnight 12am, but 6 am. Thus if it is 6 am in the morning and a Tanzanian were to ask the time one would have to tell them saa kumi na mbili asubuhi (hour 12 in the morning). For example school here beings at saa mbili asubuhi (hour 2 in the morning or 8:00 am) and ends at around saa nane na nusu mchana (hour 8 and ½ in the afternoon or 2:30pm).  So anytime anyone asks me the time here I have to add or subtract 6 hours (depending on how you look at it) from English time.

View of school from my front porch

Main Office of Isongole Sec.

Two kids picking fruit in my village

Slasher supervisor/ Where is a blowtorch when you need one?

So, I after one important month (plus a few days) of me feeling a little useless I have officially started school! This past Monday (3^rd) we had a staff meeting that started at 10 am and lasted until 2 pm. For the non-calculators out there or people who are bad with time, like myself, I sat through a 4-hour meeting that was mainly in Kiswahili. Not to worry, I was prepared for the meeting. I brought a pen, notepad and the all-important novel. If I have learned one thing it is this: bring a book wherever you go in Tanzania.  I am grateful however, that my counterparts and Mkuu did not take offence to my reading. In all honesty, I paid attention to as much of the meeting as I could, but after a while my brain gets tired of having to translate from Kiswahili to English and I tune it out. After four hours, I learned that I would be teaching Form 1 Physics and Math (about 28 periods a week). Now some of you out there might be laughing, especially if you know how many Calc and Physics classes I took in college. If you guessed, one Calc class and no physics classes you would be correct. In fact, I have disliked physics since senior year in high school (Thank you, Mari Jones for helping me to pass!).  That being said, I am actually excited to teach both subjects because I will have the opportunity learn the material over again and hopefully obtain a new liking for both! Towards the end of the meeting my Mkuu addressed the 5 year plan for the school and subsequent goals of which numbers 13 and 14 were to construct a “botanical garden” and a “frog/ fish pond”.  I commend my school for trying to improve itself aesthetically, but I think it would be more important to finish putting windows in our classrooms and buy the computer we need to type exams. As an aside, one of my secondary projects is to get a used desktop for my school so we can type up our exams instead of paying someone to do it. In the long run it would save the school a lot of money. My other secondary goal is to build a basketball court at the school (not entirely altruistic), but a goal I feel I can accomplish within the next two years.  Okay…so in all the meeting was actually the shortest 4-hour meeting I have ever sat through (probably due to the novel) and I am proud to say I survived my first meeting in a different language.

Monday night also brought a new experience for me. Let’s lay the scene: I was on the phone because for once my Zain plan was working (it allows me to call other volunteers for free!) with my friend Kat. I was cooking rice and veggies and sitting outside on my back porch. It is also important to note that my umeme (Kiswahili for electricity; pronounced ooo-may-may) had gone out, so I was cooking by flash/candle light. So, while I was cooking/talking on the phone I noticed something move by one of my buckets on my porch. Being the curious person that I am I stood up and held my lamp over my bucket when I saw it…. a tiny black SNAKE! Alright, so although it was tiny, it was none the less …. a snake. Honestly, I like snakes about as much as Indian Jones, so not really at all.  Actually, Kat got the brunt of my encounter with the snake because I proceeded to scream, bellow, yelp, and shriek into the phone. My first thought was to jump on to the chair, which I did. My second was to grab the kerosene that was in my kitchen, throw it on the snake and then light the snake on fire. Thankfully, Kat talked me out of this bright idea by saying that I probably would not want a flaming serpent anywhere near my house and truthfully, she was right. Although…. it would have made for a better blog entry, no? So..in the end the snake and I went our separate ways, but next time I see one near or in my house…it will be getting the blow torch I purchased yesterday. (Just kidding)

School officially started on this Monday and foolishly I thought I would begin teaching, so I prepared a lesson plan. Little did I realize the first couple days/ week of school is designated for school clean-up. Back in the states, school clean-up might involve having students clean up garbage on the playground. In Tanzania, school clean-up means that the students arrive at the school with buckets, hoes and “slashers” from home. For all of you unfamiliar with a slasher, it is a metal tool that looks a lot like a golf club, but has a sharp end and is swung back and forth to cut grass. Apparently there is a severe lack of lawn mowers in the country and livestock that wish to eat the grass around our school, but no lack of teenagers with slashers.  So, my first officially duty as a teacher in Tanzania was as (and yes, I was given this title by the assistant head of school), Slasher Supervisor. I was to make sure that the students were cutting grass and if they were not, I was to punish them. Now, I had no problem supervising the slashing of the grass, but I was not about to punish a student for failing to cut grass. Hell…I wouldn’t even want to cut grass. I believe the students should be in class learning, but schools are run differently in Tanzania. I would not say that their way of opening school is bad or good, but just different. Truthfully, I am glad that the grass in front of my house was slashed and that snakes will probably no longer want to live there, but am I glad that students were doing the work, no not entirely.  Today the same events took place, but in the afternoon it started to rain and the students took shelter in their classrooms. Since I had a nothing better to do I ventured into one of the classroom and had a very long and impromptu Q&A session with some form 4 students. I was asked every question from, “How old are you?”, “Do you have a boyfriend?”, “Do you drink beer?”, “Why does America have nuclear weapons?” to “Are widows inherited by their husband’s brother?”, “Is female circumcision practiced in America?”, “Do people eat ugali?” and “Why is there not a cure for HIV?”. I found all of the questions to be very good, but some more difficult to answer than others. In all sincerity, so far, the opportunities when I get to share my culture and what life is really like in America with students here are the times I feel I am doing the most. Afterward I just exude happiness… there is really no other way to put it. I think, or rather know, that in the long run my students here will do more for me, but in the meantime, hopefully I can teach them something that will stay with them for life.

As for other updates on my life here at site: I planted my first crop! Mchicha (mm-chee- cha), a leafy green, has started to grow, so I think I will start to plant the rest of my seeds this week. I will hopefully go to the fundi this week and ask him to make a crate for my mtoto wa mbwa (dog of baby), aka puppy. She will hopefully arrive within the next two weeks, just in time for my birthday!!  Also currently in training for the Kilimanjaro half-marathon that will take place at the end of February. I have no idea why on Earth I decided to train for another one, but I figure I shouldn’t let the opportunity pass me by…you only live in Africa once, right?

In all I am just thankful for the start of school, a daily routine and what I consider to be the beginning of my real life in Tanzania. As is wont, I hope that everyone back at home is doing well. Miss you all. All my love from TZ.