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Hello!!
I'm having such an really interesting experience here........I'm managing to help lots at a home for street kids called Kuleana. There are about fourty kids aged 9 - 16 who live there. I take a group of them for informal schooling most mornings, it's very challenging as their English is really basic and some of them lack discipline, and there's a goat that wanders into the classroom every now and then causing a bit of a distraction!!! The kids there are so poor and the buildings are run down I'm so happy to be able to do what little I can to help there. The kids and I have started to brighten up the classroom by painting a mural of a safari scene on one of the walls and a brightly coloured alphabet on another. It's manic trying to organise the kids so that the painting looks half decent and you inevitably get covered in paint in the process!!
I'm living in a house with another volunteer, Jenny, she's English and about my age, there are also three Tanzanian guys who live with us. Mutani, the project organiser, and Danny and Geoff who are here to act as our tour guides/ bodyguards! We're virtually the only white people around this area, it's really bizarre walking around having people stare at you and call out 'misungo!' (foreigner) wherever you go, I find it so funny walking past little kids as they get really over excited at the site of us and jump up and down to a chorus of 'misungo, misungo, misungo......' People here are really friendly.
I also work at a secondary school some days.I take English lessons for year nines and tens. The need at this school however, is for more classrooms not more teachers, as there are 15 teachers and only 6 classrooms! They've had to combine classes so they can fit into the classrooms, which means I've taught a few lessons to a class of 80 students! I also help out sometimes at a nursery, but as at the secondary school, the only help I can offer is that I'm a native English speaker. So, my time's better spent at Kuleana.
Really sorry this first message took so long to write. I promise to update you all again soon as we now have the internet at home so I no longer have to try (and often fail!) to write e-mails from the awful computers in town.
Hope you're all well, missing everyone lots!
Love V xxx
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