Healthy & Happy in May
Trip Start
Jan 10, 2008
1
10
12
Trip End
Oct 2008
Iringa,
Tanzania
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Things with me have improved a lot since I last wrote, I'm back in town at the moment to attend the monthly meeting and am glad to have successes to report this time! Most notable is the difference in our Secondary school. We had been concerned that the students didn't really want us there and weren't taking in any of our lessons, so we decided to spend more time with them in the hope that they'd become more comfortable with us and would open up a little. Jacob has been spending many evenings at the school playing field, playing football and volleyball with the students, and I've been spending more time in our Information Resource Centre in the school, talking to the students and trying to improve my Kiswahili.
We noticed a change in them early in May when we had a really good, interactive day of lessons, and students began coming to us for advice and counselling. We had three students come to us for advice that day, on various issues. Everything continued well, although we were very busy teaching and preparing to hold a festival in the Secondary School on 24th May. Tanzanian A-Level results came out this month and Jacob didn't do as well as he'd hoped, so he took some time out to re-apply for universities but unfortunately this had to be done in the week leading up to the festival, so I was alone in preparing almost everything. Three days before the festival I was close to breakdown, but then went to the Secondary School Information Resource Centre to see what the students had prepared and was overwhelmed by how much they'd done and the excellent standard of the role plays, songs, comedies, poems, art and essays and their relevance to the theme of the festival: Pregnancy Now = Problems Later. I felt my mood change massively in a couple of hours, going from despair to pride, happiness and even a little bit of hope that maybe this festival might not turn out to be a disaster after all.
I still wasn't sure how things would turn out until the festival was actually underway - we were supposed to start at 10am, but the guests didn't arrive until after noon so we had to cut the programme a little, which was a real shame for the students who had prepared songs etc. Once things got going, the smile on my face couldn't be erased, the students really did themselves proud, the room looked great and the guests enjoyed themselves. It's been the highlight of my time in village so far - those students have incredible talent.
I'm heading back out to Ukumbi tomorrow to continue teaching and prepare for other activities. Holidays for me start in just over two weeks, when I'll be going to pick up Sveinn from Dar es Salaam and then see what happens - maybe go to see some animals in the Serengeti and Ngorogoro crater then spend a little time on Zanzibar.
Love,
dipak
