Hello Hello,

Once again 2 weeks have whizzed past and now, quite unbelievably, I only have 2 weeks left in Yamba! As ever, the last couple of weeks have been busy….I finished knitting my first hat (topped off with a huge pompom), I've played several spontaneous games of football (and even scored a few goals), I have even taught an after-school netball session (in spite of never having played!) and of course I've done some teaching too.

Blue was delicious!

These past 2 weeks at school have been a little squiffy because there's been various tests going on…and in true Tanzanian style, there's not really a timetable for it. So we've sort of just been taking a class if we've seen that they're free…it feels like guerilla teaching! And as ever, classes have been funfilled.

I rounded off the spelling topic with STD 2 by reading them 'Cat in the Hat'; a slightly self-indulgent lesson, but it has lots of the words we'd been learning in it which gave me a good excuse. I didn't expect they'd love it so much that I'd read it through 3 times…I reckon I could probably recite it now! Since then, I've moved on to colours which is proving to be trickier than anticipated. Apparently the Kiswahili colour words are variable and so the concept of one colour and one name is mindblowing for my mad little frogs…5 lessons later and I think we've finally grasped red, yellow and blue. I did a game where they each had colour cards, I'd say a colour and they'd hold up said colour…I think that's when it clicked for most, except for one little boy who gave up and ate his cards instead (he liked the taste of blue best as it was gone completely ). On Thursday I gave them their end of year English test and in spite of my initial worries, I seem to have imparted enough wisdom for a good chunk of my class to score more than 50% (and even about 10 kids above 80%)-I felt like a proud parent. Even more so because no-one ate the test paper! I was most proud when my favourite little donut (not the brightest but really keen) handed me a legible test paper with 10/20 correct answers on it! My final STD 2 anecdote…I've been determinedly teaching them 'see you later alligator'etc. just like I did with STD 5 and finally after 2 weeks of just having 'CROCODILE!!!' yelled at me, we have learned the full expression and actions (giant jaw like arms of course!). Now 5 minutes at the end of every lesson is dedicated to being crocodiles-hilarious. However, it now seems they say 'in a while crocodile' to anyone who even says only 'see you later'…which makes them look just a little bit mad! STD 5 continue to be generally fantastic. Since last blogging, we have learned the expressions 'of course' and 'certainly' (making them sound like posh Brits!) and we've learned 'maybe' and 'perhaps' too. As part of me is still all about the paper folding, I took the opportunity to make paper fortune tellers which included maybe/perhaps sentences about our futures. They were pretty grubby once they were all folded but the class loved it. They found it very funny when the flap I picked revealed 'In the future, maybe you will have 20 children!'. I also tested STD 5 on Thursday and they did amazingly-all of them getting at least 10/20 and the majority getting 75% or more….once again, proud parent feeling I can't believe I only have a couple of weeks left teaching….I don't want to leave my crazy children, I've gotten rather attached. I've nothing too taxing planned for them...I'm going to continue colours with STD 2 and have the ambitious vision of accurately coloured rainbows and I'll be writing instructions with STD 5. And as obligatory for the last few days of term, lots of games, drawing, word searches and being silly. And probably some goodbye tears on my part!

It's hard not to think about the end of my time here…I'm looking forward to Zanzibar of course but it's going to be sad to leave this funny little place that's been my home for these past few months. There's lots of little quirks and goings-on that my everyday life will seem odd without….

HELLLOOOO!HELLOOOO!

For instance, I'll miss that whenever I go anywhere in the village, I'll hear shouts of helloooo from every direction and faraway hillside. Naturally who I walk past will greet me and vice versa but I always find it funny that everyone, especially the children, are so keen to speak to you that they'll yell from miles away. Seriously, you'll hear hello being shouted by a kid that you can't even see because they're so far away. Even after 3 months I still find it rally hard to work out which direction the shouts are coming from and so my solution is normally just to shout really loud and to wave enthusiastically in all directions. The most enthusiastic children shout 'hellohowayoooo!' at the top of their voices….it seems they know it as a single expression and is hollered in one breath which always makes me smile. I think I'll find it quite difficult to adapt to the sullen faces and silence that'll greet me (or not!) around Stirling and I'll have to stop myself from energetically replying if I overhear a hello.

Fashion faux-pas

Another little quirk that always makes me smile is the lack of clothing rules. As I mentioned before many women wear traditional kangas but a lot of the other clothing that villagers wear have been donated to and distributed by the charity. And as the distribution is done my way of lucky dip, and the local know no western fashion rules, I'll often see full grown men wearing pink socks with googly eyed cows on, or tartany-golf trousers or little girl wearing t-shirts with skulls on or little boys with outrageous Obama campaign shirts! Naturally they're oblivious which makes it all the more comical for me. (Dad-I might buy you some eccentric socks for Christmas to relicate this Tanzanian trend!)

Jupa-Jupa!

Living on top of a mountain means that I can't just turn on the tap for a drink of water and so since September my water has been Kilimanjaro bottled water. In itself, not a very interesting anecdote. However, the excitement that an empter water bottle can create is quite unbelievable and as the 3 of us in Yamba go through 20+ bottles a week, there's a lot of potential for some very very excited children. It's because it's a container you see…you can carry river water in it, store stuff in it to keep it clean etc. and so if we decide to hand out our empty plastic bottles there is a mad rush and lots of excited squealing 'Jupa jupa' (bottle bottle!) It's similar to the levels of excitement that you might ordinarily imagine from releasing a child into a toyshop, it's crazy. It's hard to keep things fair and it can be a little bit stressful (someone will cry!) so we often leave it up to our house-girl Esturide as to what happens to the bottles. When we do share them out though, it's quite a remarkable thing to witness!

Flirting with beans

I mentioned in a previous blog that I've been givn some eggs by my students as a sort of 'Thank-you teacher'. Recently though I've been given some other foodstuffs with a slightly different message. It's quite funny really…it seems a 14-year old boy has a developed a bit of a crush on me. It began with a stream of letters (written in English, very sweet) but he's stepped things up a notch byt giving me a few bags of beans. I guess it's a Tanzanian teenager flirting technique…the other volunteers have come to the conclusion that while eggs are for teaching, beans are for love! It's very kind…but there's only so many beans we cat eat, and I'm starting to feel sorry for his family who he's swindling bans from! I think we're going to buy him a mango as a thank-you gift this weekend….let's hope he doesn't get the wrong idea. Just another funny anecdote about my African life! I wonder how a tin of Heinz would work as a flirting technique once I'm home?!

'Cock-a-doodle-doo'

The various noises I live with are also a quirky part of my Tanzanian existence. The kind of noises that mean even when it's quiet, it's never really quiet….they juist sort of become background noise. There's a bird that sounds like an alarm clock, a constant crickety sort of noise, goats bleating, snakes rustling, insects buzzing, usually singing or shouting from somewhere…and then inevitably a rooster which doesn't stay background noise! Kelloggs lied-roosters don't just do their thing in the morning, they cock-a-doodle-doo- very loudly- all day long! Life at home (even the irritating wood pigeons) will feel very quiet indeed in comparison. I've also recently noticed that many of the villagers who have mobile phones (it's a sort of status symbol if you have one but I'm talking old temperamental 3210s) often amusingly choose to set their ring tone to be an electronic sounding rooster…a funny addition to the rest of the rabble!

It's little oddities like this which I'll miss when I leave and it'll take me a while to settle back in to the UK way. For now though, I have 2 weeks left in this fantastic little village to enjoy as many SBDs as possible, my lessons with my crazy cat kids, the sunshine , the bucket showers and everything else too before I say (what will undoubtedly be) a tearful 'Kwa heri'

Until next time,

All my love,

Linsey

xxxxx