Karibu!

I'm 3 weeks in to my Tanzanian adventure and what a brilliant 3 weeks it has been! I don't really know where to start so I'm going to write this blog in the style I know (and love) the best…as a list.

Yamba Village

3 hours away from civilization, at about 2000ft, a little village called Yamba is now my home. When we were welcomed by hoards of singing, dancing and smiling Africans, I knew instantly I was going to like it. It's definitely the most remote place I could ever imagine but the scenery is spectacular and in spite of the tough environment they live in, the people are very happy and welcoming. There is the constant pitter-patter of little feet and children playing outside our house and there's always someone wanting to say hello. Exploring the village has been fun…there's lots of little mud-houses, goats roaming free and voices shouting 'hello-how-a-you?' from somewhere. The weather has been mixed…we spent a lot of the first week literally in a cloud, but since then it's been sunny and warm. I'm definitely settling in to village life….I'm a pro at bucket showers now, I'm unphased by the long drop toilet and dealing with the zero-meat situation (although definitely making up for it this weekend in Tanga). I'm enjoying the daily adventures, the best of which took us vine swinging and to the Kilimanjaro viewpoint which was pretty incredible!

Being 'Teacher Linsey'

So after an intensive week-long TEFL course, I am now officially 'Teacher Linsey' and teaching started last week. It's going well so far, I think.

The school is reasonably small with about 250 pupils but they have only 4 teaching staff… myself and Efi are teaching in Yamba so they're pretty excited to have us both there. We're teaching the English classes(no farming yet although I'm sure we'll be roped in soon!) and each teach 16 lessons a week. I'm the English teacher for Standard 2 (aged 8ish) and there are about 40/50 of them and for Standard 5 (aged 12ish) there are 15 which is miniscule in comparison! It's definitely different to school in the UK….at the back of my Standard 2 classroom, there's a gigantic pile of bricks and metal cables (I'm talking like half the size of the room kind of big) and there are no windows so clouds sometimes obscure vision! Lack of equipment is a huge hurdle too…it's hard to do writing when only 10 students have a pencil so I'm having to be very imaginative with my lesson planning. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to the next few months-the kids are so keen to learn and are just generally amazing so I know it's going to be good J

Kipi lefti and Swahili time

As well as teaching, I'm learning a lot too. The locals stop and greet everyone so I'm pretty good at greetings by now. I can now also-proudly-count to ten in Kiswahili. I think I'll probably pick up more bits and pieces from the kids too because even though they know we don't understand, they still speak at us in Kiswahili…cue very vacant looks from us. The most random word I can remember is that 'kipi lefti' means round-about….which is a lot of bloomin' use when the village has no roads, let alone a round-about.

Time here is a very fluid thing and locals don't really keep to time. The timetable on the wall at school seems to be merely a decoration for the staffroom. The only defined times are 'sun up' and 'sun down'. I'm learning to relax my time-keeping. Something I can't get my head around however, is that they tell the time differently. Odd, I know. Essentially, they start their day at 6am which they call zero which means that they refer to 7am as hour one, 8am as hour two etc.etc. Why, I really don't know. It's confusing…perhaps that's why nothing runs particularly to schedule.

All-in-all, I'm having an amazing time and if it carries on at this rate, I'm not sure I'll come home. Or when I do, I'll have an army of children in tow.

All my love, Linsey xx