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Fern in Tanzania
The last two weeks have been slightly odd ones with elections, lots of changes at the school, continuing to settle in and an increased workload. For some reason I cannot sleep past 4am and so I'm feeling pretty tired a lot of the time and still recovering from being ill two weeks ago. However, waking up really early has meant I have managed to fit more into my day! I also moved rooms this weekend and am now no longer sharing. Even though it's only been 24 hours it has already made a huge difference. I have been able to unpack properly, decorate the walls with photos and Swahii words to learn and have somewhere I can go and shut the door if I want, have the light on or off if I want, play music if I want and sleep undisturbed. I think this is going to make life a lot easier as I was starting to feel a bit burnt out.
As last week was not a 'normal' blog post, this week I shall cover the last two weeks of happenings here in Monduli….
Last Sunday was election day in Tanzania. There were two main parties who were thought to be in with a chance with winning, the current ruling party who has been in power since independence who put forward a new candidate as president this year. Their election campaign focused on electricity, providing buses and sorting out traffic in cities (to summarise), the main opposition party's leader, Lowassa, is from the area I am staying in and so was the favourite here. Polling stations opened early on Sunday and closed around 6pm. Here to vote your name must be on the election register which is printed about a week before polling day and put up somewhere for everyone to see. In the town I am staying in they were put up in schools and on trees. When going to vote, people queue according to their gender, this is to try and prevent trouble. The police and army have very heavy presence everywhere as well which started a few weeks before the elections and is just beginning to lessen now. After voting the voter gets black ink put on their pinky finger so they cannot vote anywhere else. All the Tanzanian teachers at school this week as a result have been going round with black ink on their fingers as it really doesn't seem to come off! Some places in Tanzania had their polling stations opened later as they failed to open in time.
Election day itself other than people going to vote, it was extremely quiet until the evening. People were not allowed to go out in groups larger than ten and everywhere the advice was to stay inside. As we were not allowed to leave our house for the day, I followed a lot of what was going on on Twitter and there were many photos of Dar es Salaam with empty streets that are normally extremely busy. Here we made the most of being stuck in by reading, having a cards tournament (I have yet to win a game but am determined to by Christmas) and three of us made eggplant ravioli. Ravioli is a surprisingly complicated but fun process and involves a lot of flour going everywhere! It took us about three hours to make so we were all starving by the time it was ready and so had two bowlfuls each straight away and then finished it off for tea. Possibly one of the best meals I have had since I arrived!
In the evening after the polling stations had closed, some local results started to come in. We didn't really know what was going on at the time and it was pretty scary sitting in the house hearing lots of crowds of people shouting and screaming. There was also some gunshots going off to which was not very good at building confidence. However there seemed to be very little trouble here. In other places it was not quite so lucky as people got attacked, courts and official building burnt down, and a man who was transporting votes got beaten up by a mob and the votes he was carrying burned. Results for the presidential candidate was not due until later in the week and came out on Thursday evening. The ruling party won the election, however there have been demands for recounts as the final count was extremely close with them winning by 56% and Zanzibar refusing to accept what their results came out as. Ever since I keep having emails from the British Consulate saying that bombs are being found in a market in Stone Town in Zanzibar. All though in theory the elections here are over, I feel it could be a while before it really feels that way.
School has got a lot busier in the last two weeks. Due to two people having to leave unexpectedly I have taken on some more work. I am now going to be teaching an extra three classes, I am actually really looking forward to this though as the classes include word games, creative writing and drama/film watching- all things I enjoy anyway. I had my first lesson with the new class on Friday and they are a really, really nice group. I gave them ten minutes to ask me any question they wanted to know about me and then spent ten minutes asking them questions. Some of them also handed me some 'homework' a group of words or sentences to learn in either Swahili or Maasai at the end of the lesson. The questions they asked me were quite varied from, 'What is your favourite food?", 'How old are you?", 'In the UK why is your father's first name not your last name?", 'How many grandparents do you have?", 'Are there tribes in Scotland?" etc. They were surprised to learn I was only 22 (some of the students at school are also 22 and a few are 23) and said they thought I was much older. I should have learned by now to never ask someone how old do you think I am as one student said 66! One of the teachers here tells her classes that she is one million- the youngest students always seem to believe this!
My drama classes have gone well this week too. In the Pre-Form literature class they had been reading a book about a pot that doubles everything that goes into it and so they were able to act this out. There is a huge range in English abilities and so I am trying to mix the groups up, the only problem with this is that those whose English is better tend to then take over their group- something I still have to work at finding a better solution to. They really enjoy drama games and for the past week (we have drama outside) I have been getting them to pretend they travel there on a different form of transport. We have had daladala's, ships, planes, rowing boats and trains. Some of my PreForm girls came to find me at break on Friday as they had made me a ring with beads. It was a really nice surprise and a very good end to the week!
Alongside extra teaching I am also going to be doing some photography work for the school. This should be really good as it gives me an excuse to get out and about with my camera and take photos that I would normally like to take but not be able to. In the past two weeks I have taken photos of football matches, art clubs, science experiments, drama classes, life skills (like Social and Health Ed.), and various after school activities. I will have to watch my camera though as I cleaned it on Friday and it had accumulated a large amount of dust already! I will hopefully be able to upload some photos at some point but am finding it hard to find somewhere where the internet speed will let me! The internet at school is quite good in the conference room, but I am reluctant to use that as it runs out of credit quickly and I think that might use a lot! I have been asked to continue with the photography until Christmas but hope I shall be able to carry on next year too.
The person who was slowly handing over activities and athletics coordinating to me, had to leave unexpectedly this past week. As a result I have been thrown in a little bit at the deep end with some of it which while being stressful, I am really enjoying the challenge. I have just found out that there are two school trips happening next Saturday and so this coming week i will have to work out how to order buses, bread and bananas, school lunches and then make sure the students all turn up! One of the trips is to two museums and the other is to a sporting event. While I would like to go to the museum trip I will however have to go to the sporting one as I need to be able to meet the organisers and things and also there are more students going to this one. While spending a day watching sporting events would not be my idea of fun in the UK, here it is not so bad as the students are so enthusiastic and are really good at sports too!
I have finally managed to come up with a system this week to record data for the research project I am helping with looking at the impact of education on the community. I have made some spreadsheets and have to monitor how many people attend activities, clubs, sports, life skills etc. It turns out that the school here offers 24 different clubs, sports and activities each week! Pretty impressive really! To keep up with this I have set up a debating team at school. I was hoping to get between 6-8 people to join however have ended up with 15 so far and still need to speak to three classes. I am planning on, before Christmas, going round all the local schools to speak to them about setting up a debating tournament or matches next term. The debating style in Tanzania seems a bit different from the UK though so I also need to get a good idea of this. Apparently to get this up and running the best way is to write a letter to each school and then hand deliver it in person and stay there until I get an answer. It will be interesting to go into the schools though to see the difference between them.
I am also about to restart the school newspaper. The Orkeeswa Chronicle was set up by a volunteer who was a journalist. There was quite a few issues but sadly it stopped in 2013 as there was no one to run it. I found some past issues and thought it would be good to set up again and helpful to have some sort of record of what goes on in the school and area also. if I'm completely honest I'm not fully 100% sure what I am doing with it but am feeling confident that somehow it will all work out!
In the last two weeks the Swahili classes that I organised for volunteers has also started. Two A-Level students are teaching seven of us. So far it has gone very well and they have turned out to be excellent teachers- I think I am learning teaching tips from them! The first week we covered greetings, introductions and how to say where things are and the second lesson covered counting to 1-100 and simple sentences. I have written out a lot of Swahili and put it on my wall. I feel I have managed to learn quite a bit more in the past week and yesterday managed to only speak Swahili from start to finish on my trip to the market. I think it really seem to make a difference being able to do that and I feel slightly more part of the community than I did.
Also helping me settle in is getting to know the people who live nearby the house. Now in my morning walks to school I have a different person I walk with at each stage of the journey, it makes the start of the day a lot easier!
The other exciting thing that has happened at the school is that Lilly, one of the school dogs, has had four very cute puppies. They are just at the stage where they are starting to wander around but can't yet get the hang of walking properly. They are a bit of a distraction from work but very very adorable (and photogenic!) There have been problems with other dogs at the school though and one of them attacked the puppies this week. One of them had a lot of blood come out of its nose and mouth, and has had extra problems walking. It looked for a little bit that its Mum might reject it however it is still alive and seems to be recovering. Life here definitely teaches that nature can be cruel! The other puppies are just learning to bark which is very, very funny!
Well that's the main things that have happened in the last two weeks. This coming week will be slightly unusual with school trips next weekend and I am not in school on Wednesday as I am attending a university career fair at a very posh hotel to try and start building the school's career resources and collect prospectuses. There are 87 universities attending from 15 different countries. I am very much looking forward to it.
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