History

Last weekend, I attended the first basketball tournament that Orkeeswa has ever been part of. In fact, as of one month ago, the girls on the team had never played the sport before, had never touched a basketball. Peter (the school’s director) and Scott transformed the group of female students into third place champions.

What you’ll see in the pictures of the tournament is a normal outdoor court. The tournament took place in Arusha at St. Constantine’s International School and there is a vast difference between Orkeeswa and St. Constantine’s. Orkeeswa students have sponsors in America who fund their education. St. Constantine’s students drive their own cars to school. St. Constantine’s students have an outdoor pool beside their outdoor basketball court. Orkeeswa students have never seen a pool. What’s also different is that Orkeeswa girls practice on a dirt court and they play in heavy black school shoes that they wear to school everyday, not in Adidas or Nike sneakers.

Our girls came in third place out of five teams. Their competition was St. Constantine’s A team, St. Constantine’s B team, Arusha Modern, and the International School of Moshi. Orkeeswa lost their first game to St. Constantine’s A team, and then went on to win their second game against Arusha Modern and their third against St. Constantine’s B team.

It was such a great game to be a spectator at because I really felt like I was witnessing history.

A Rollercoaster Ride

The ride to school after it’s rained a lot during the weekend is like being on the scariest, bumpiest, twistiest rollercoaster ride, except there’s no seat belt. The school’s 1996 Land Rover Defender is no match for Tanzanian mud roads.

A Third Shower

Scott and I spent our first night in Arusha. We went in early Saturday morning for a basketball tournament and spent the rest of the day, night, and next day in the big city (which Lonely Planet has recently called the 8th worst city in the world). We each took two showers in the Paulsen Hotel. This was a huge shock to my body, which has gotten used to taking one bucket-bath a week.

On our daladala ride back home from Arusha, it started pouring. The rain thankfully subsided once we reached Monduli and got dropped off at the daladala stand. We picked up a few groceries (our weekly standards – peanut butter and toilet paper) and started walking home. Ten minutes into the walk, it started raining again. We rain under a shelter normally occupied by students of a nearby secondary school. We thought we could wait it out and even contemplated playing some cribbage to bide our time. As the rain got heavier and the wind picked up, the shelter proved fruitless, so we decided to make a run for it (or a cautious walk for me; I have a phobia for slipping, especially in mud).

It would have been great if we were wearing xtratufs or had some raingear, but we weren’t and we didn’t. We were wearing sandals and summer clothes. So we got drenched and muddy and Scott kept yelling back, "Are you coming?" and I couldn’t stop smiling. Sometimes it’s amazing to be caught in a rainstorm in equatorial Tanzania carrying a package of toilet paper.

At one point during our sprint, when Scott was about ten yards ahead of me, I heard a young woman yell out to him, "Pole." 'Pole' means sorry and it’s often used to express sympathy to someone who’s doing something that may not be that desirable. As an American it takes some getting used to because it’s used very liberally. I’ve had someone see me at school working and say, "pole," or I’ll be walking home from town and someone will say, "pole." Obviously doing my job or taking a nice stroll are not things to pity me for, but walking home in the pouring rain could qualify. As I passed the young woman myself, she switched to English and said, "Sorry, sorry," and I saw the reason why she was outside herself. She was standing under a drainpipe taking a shower. By the time Scott and I reached home, we were about as wet as if we had taken one ourselves, except of course, ours was not on purpose.

Lunch

Here’s what we eat at Orkeeswa Secondary School every week:


Monday is makande (corn and beans).


Tuesday is ugali with beans (and some "Greek" spice added for flavor). Ugali is corn flour mixed with water.


Wednesday is rice, green vegetables, and meat (i.e. grizzle)


Thursday is makande.


Friday is ugali, green vegetables, and meat (although it looks like the kitchen staff skimped out on the meat for this plate).

From Under the Mosquito Net

The temperature dropped for a few days due to rain and Scott and I thought we were in it for the rainy season. The nights were more comfortable with a slight chill. For a couple of days I was even wearing long pants and a long sleeve shirt to bed, the top sheet not keeping me warm enough. But we were wrong. This isn’t the rainy season – just some rain. So now we’re back to uncomfortable, sweltering nights under the mosquito net, top sheet too warm.

***

It was a productive Monday. Taught three blocks of classes. Even got my Form II students to open up and share. I correct myself – they’re good with sharing. It’s more class discussions that I haven’t been able to foster – healthy, productive class discussions. But today I succeeded, and it felt good. It wasn’t anything earth shattering, just a discussion on accidents, a subtopic under the Talking about Events chapter.

I’m giving both my Forms their first monthly test. I’ve been teaching in Tanzania for one month. Crazy. Scott and I both worked on making the tests this past weekend. I dreamt about giving it. I used to dream about taking tests. Now I dream about giving them. I worry that it’ll be too hard, too complicated, too something that’s not right.

***

Tonight I made eggplant parm and chicken parm in a sufuria oven with homemade breadcrumbs and chedder cheese. A sufuria oven is something I use since no actual oven exists at the house (we do have a toaster oven that we toast bread in. I do intend on using it to bake cookies, but it can’t handle anything much bigger). We have a gas stove and several metal cooking pots called sufurias. I take the largest one we have, lay three stones from the yard on the bottom, place a smaller sufuria on top of the stones inside the large sufuria (you just have to make sure there’s at least a half inch around the entire inside sufuria, according to the Peace Corps Tanzania cookbook), put a lid on top, turn on the stove, and – voila! – an oven.

I had always wanted to make eggplant parm but never found the time in Wrangell. I have to say that eggplant and chicken parm Tanzania-style wasn’t bad at all.

Imposter

I am a fake.

A few weeks ago I blogged about how I’ve never really taught prior to coming to Tanzania. I think I explained quite well and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that that was the case. Well, now I can actually say I’ve taught. I’ve taught and I continue to do so every weekday, which I guess makes me a teacher. I spend my nights and days (when I’m not teaching) lesson planning, grading exercises, and racking my brain trying to figure out what will make my students write and speak better English.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching parts of speech and parts of a sentence to my Form 1 students. Tomorrow I’m supposed to start tenses. I say that I’m a fake because I don’t really know anything about prepositions, relative pronouns, conjunctions, or interrogative adjectives. And just looking at the terms ‘present continuous tense,’ ‘past perfect continuous tense,’ or ‘future perfect tense’ makes me want to punch a wall.

As a teacher, I remain barely one step ahead of my students. My lesson planning consists of pouring over at least three different grammar books (and sometimes as many as six) and trying to find matching definitions and examples between my various references. I also struggle to find or make sentences with basic enough vocabulary for my students to grasp. As a native English speaker, I find it extremely hard to teach this material and to sound confident when students ask questions. I would give anything to still have my notes from Ms Lawrence’s seventh grade English class. She was real. She knew what she taught.

I’ve just started using my Parts of Speech material as review for my Form 2 students, and that has been challenging. As new speakers of English, my Form 1 students pretty much accept what I write on the board and what I say. The Form 2 students have been speaking and writing English for some time now so they ask more difficult questions, questions I’m not prepared for and I’m constantly at a loss for how to answer. Writing English has never been about rules to me. I'm having to hold back from answering my students' questions with, “Because it just sounds right.”

I should be looking at this all differently. I should be seeing this opportunity as a way for me to, once and for all, learn the mechanics of English, learn as my students are learning. I need to continually ask myself as I’m lesson planning, ‘Do my explanations make sense to myself?’ The hard thing is, is that they usually don’t. My explanations and definitions often confuse me. But I have to keep chipping away at it. I guess as a teacher, I have no other choice.

Snow in Africa

This past weekend Scott and I journeyed to the town of Moshi, a town northeast of Monduli that lies on the foothills of Kilimanjaro. Our goal was to get out of Monduli for a weekend (i.e. have our first shower in a month) and to catch a glimpse of the famed mountain. We managed to do both those things – the shower once, seeing Kili twice at sunset and sunrise.

In Action

"Who would have thought I’d miss the rain?"

... said Scott, a few minutes after the skies opened up and let down some rain, the first we’d seen in about three weeks. It started out innocently enough; Thabit even called it a drizzle. But by the time I had to teach class, it was an official downpour and extremely windy. With windows opened in the classroom, the weather caused a racket. One student even said, "Teacher, it’s raining. We can’t hear you."

Everyone was in a frenzy. My usual orderly Form one students were buzzing with energy. I kept hearing whispers of, "My God." It was indeed noisy. I had to yell over Mother Nature, who was coming in loud and clear. She was also being felt. Rain poured in through the bottom of the classroom door. The students in the back had to move forward because they were getting sprayed.

It was the strongest storm I’d ever experienced. By the time I was done explaining direct objects, indirect objects, and complements, the rain had returned to a drizzle. But the air had been affected, the heat had lifted, and the ground had turned to clay. Brown clay that got tracked in and out of the classrooms, that stuck to the students’ shoes like chunky frosting. Which meant there could be no after-school sports for fear of ruining the dirt sport pitches.

We put the boys in one classroom and the girls in another. The female students were expecting a guest speaker on life skills, but the woman never arrived, probably due to the torrential storm. So I spent the next forty minutes talking to a group of teenage Tanzanian girls about sex and condoms and HIV and their period. I answered questions like, "Can you get pregnant after doing sex only once?" "If I don’t do sex for a long time, will I turn into a sugar mama?" "Isn’t it true that if you do sex seven days after your period ends, you won’t get pregnant," and "If I wait too long to do sex, will my vagina turn hard?"

I know – "do sex." Don’t worry, I corrected their English. I also answered their questions as best as I could with the knowledge I’ve been equipped with. I also wrote words on the whiteboard – lawyer, doctor, journalist, engineer, President, teacher, nurse, electrician – things that each of the girls said they wanted to become, their goals.