Jambo Jambo!

Here we have it, my first blog as a 19 year old. Not bad eh? My birthday yesterday was Amazing, I love my housemates so much for making it work! We woke up in our favourite hotel in town (where we normally spend saturday nights) so I could start my day off with a nice hot shower as opposed to our horrific, ice-water bucket showers that I have simply never got used to. My housemates gave me presents and cards they'd made in the room when I fell asleep the night before, all of which where very sweet. Then we went to a restaurant to have an amazing breakfast feast of vegetable samosas, fruit yoghurts (luxury), banana smoothies (incredible), and a very English plate of sausages, beans and toast (ultimate luxury). From there it was onwards to a surprise manicure for all four of us from the house (verging on insane luxury), it was so surreal to sit around reading admittedly ancient but still Western magazines and generally being spoilt!

The afternoon was spent grabbing supplies with my housemate Kirsty for our rasta barbecue, and we came back to find Catriona and Rachael had made the house beautiful, with balloons and a banner and just general niceness....We also got a visit from our friend from New Life Academy, Teacher Joshua, who brought me a card and a beautiful Kanga (local sarong type thing). Then we had a rasta dress-up session and started off the barbecue just in time for all my volunteer friends to arrive, in suitable rasta attire of course. The party was fantastic, our outfits definitely got a smile out of the locals but the biggest laugh of the night was definitely when Tom, Andy and Roger put on a surprise West Country strip-tease.....easily the funniest thing I've EVER seen. If anyone has seen 'The Full Monty', the scenes when the men are rehearsing in a warehouse is close to what we witnessed....definitely made all the funnier when we realised some of the neighbouring women had been watching around the corner, all respectable, god-fearing Tanzanian women absolutly crying with laughter at the half-naked Mzungus (westerners).

The night ended with a trip to Via Via, the rasta live music venue, where we danced and danced until it wasn't my birthday anymore.

All in all, a fantastic day that I'll remember for a long time....

p.s - in case you're wondering, I did actually teach this week, Catriona and I had to set an epic test for the children and even though it was quite difficult, we got a top score of 78% and a bottom score of 16%. If that sounds bad it really isn't, another teacher was looking over the marks and we had a conversation like so:

Teacher Anna: 'Yes, but who is getting the zero?'

Me: ' No-one Teacher Anna, no child scored zero.'

Teacher Anna: 'Yes, but some childs get zero! You tell me who is it, and I will beat them.'

Me: 'Riiiiiight' *walks away*

Ahhhhh, Tanzania.