This blog was originally written in early June, but I had computer problems, so it is being posted now.

Terminal Exams are here as the term ends this Saturday. The students will then have six weeks off. They need to take exams in religion, English, civics, mathematics, biology, geography, physics, history, chemistry, Swahili, and agriculture. Each exam is three hours long and must be “invigilated” by a teacher. Cheating is like a game here, and the students try as best they can to give and receive answers from each other, and bring notes into the exam. Teachers inspect them before entering the examination room, and then watch them like hawks to try to catch them cheating. I think that I am pretty poor at invigilating. I have only caught one person cheating, and she was a nun. What is really amazing though, is all the information that the students actually know, and all in a language that is new to them. Except for Swahili, the exams are in English, as the instruction is supposed to be in English. Most teachers at this school do about half English and half Swahili. Since English is my native language, I teach mostly in English, but when I see blank looks on the students’ faces, I will do my best to explain in my poor Swahili. It seems to be enough for most students to understand. I do not enjoy invigilating, as it is really boring. Actually, I am writing this blog while constantly being on the lookout for any sign of cheating.

Lushoto, Tanzania is located 5 degrees south of the Equator and in the Usambara Mountains. It is cool and even cold at nights, and warm and sometimes hot during the day. If you go down out of the mountains to the towns of Mombo or Karogwe, it is hot most of the time, both day and night. Because we are near the Equator, the length of the days does not change during the year as it does in the U.S. We have 12-hour days and 12-hour nights. The Sun rises about 6:30 and sets about 6:30 all year long. Because the length of the days is constant, East Africans start timing their day at 6:00 in the morning, so they call 6:00, 12:00, they call 7:00, 1:00, they call 8:00, 2:00, etc. Their times are just six hours different than ours. They set their watches and clocks according to the way we do, but read them with the six-hour adjustment. They go back and forth between the two different times effortlessly.

We are just finishing with the rainy season, and had a lot of rain during April. We are also supposed to get a lot of rain in May, but it hasn’t rained this past week. June, July and August are supposed to be cold (temperatures at night around 40 degrees F. and daytime temperatures in the 70s. December, January and February were warm, and March had heavy downpours quite often. We had a flash flood near our house. The rains in April were the all-day soaker variety, and were actually more pleasant than the downpours in March.

The mountains here are beautiful, and the climate is very nice. I really enjoy getting up before sunrise when it is chilly, drinking coffee and watching the stars slowly fade as dawn approaches. There is no light pollution, so the sky is magnificent at night.

Today we went to visit Ali and his family. He lives in a mud house, and is in the process of building a new house made of sticks and mud. His new house will have four rooms, and he will also build a kitchen in another building a few steps away from the house. The family was very honored that we would visit them, and they treated us very kindly. We were served a delicious lunch of a rice-coconut mixture with a very tasty sauce and all the chicken we could eat. He served us cold sodas, which is pretty amazing since there is no electricity near his house. He put the sodas in a bucket of water and let them cool during the night, and then brought them inside in the morning to keep them cool for us. Living in the Usambara Mountains, we are having warm days, and very cool nights. The view from his house is spectacular. His house is located near the top of a mountain, and we could see two surrounding valleys, one of which contained our school and our house far below. We had rain showers while we were visiting, so the walk (slide) down the steep, slippery slope was a fun way to end a most enjoyable day.

We are now entering the last quarter of the first term, and I am now teaching two Form IV classes in addition to all of the Form III classes. I teach in an O-Level school, which is equivalent to an American high school, so Form I would compare to ninth grade, Form II to tenth grade, etc. The school system here is oriented around very high-stakes testing. At the end of Form IV, students take national examinations. If the pass, they can go on to A-Level schools, which are like the first two years of college, and contain Forms V and VI. If they do well on their national examinations at the end of Form VI, they can then go on to study at a university. If a student fails the national examination at the end of Form IV, he or she can repeat Form IV and try again. The same applies to students who fail the Form VI examinations. Most students at the school where I am teaching are very well motivated, and are working hard to pass their national exams.

In my Form III classes I am currently teaching them how to do calculations using logarithms and four-figure tables. They are not allowed to use calculators on the national exam, but are expected to use four-figure tables. WOW, that takes me back to my high school days. Actually, they are not that much harder to use than a calculator, and I am enjoying it again. Also, it really stress proficiency with logarithms.

I have finished half of a term teaching at an all-girls boarding school. Generally there are 40 students per class, and math classes meet for three 90 minute periods per week. There is one text for every three students, but the students are very good about sharing. Birds and wasps fly in out and out of the classroom, but I am the only one who seems to notice. The students seem a lot like students in the U.S. Some of them take their studies very seriously, and do very well in maths, while others do not study at all, and are failing. Classwork counts for 20% of their grade while their final exam counts for 80% of their grade. Teaching is a lot of fun, and the girls are very helpful, especially with tutoring me in Swahili.

The school starts at 7:45 with a break for porrige for the students and tea for the teachers from 10:45 to 11:00. Lunch is from 1:15 to 2:00 and classes end at 3:30. The students have dinner at 6:00 and must be in bed by 10:00. I really like that I can come back to school at night and offer lessons to help the girls learn material that is difficult for them. One of the real advantages of a boarding school.

We have finished training and have been assigned to a school near Lushoto in the Usambaa Mountains in Tanzania. Go to an atlas and find us on a map. We are between Mt. Kilimanjaro and Tanga on the coast. The school year for Tanzania starts the second week of January, so we are on break now will start teaching the second week of January.

After having completing the training, I am really impressed with the Peace Corps, and would highly recommend it. They are really concerned about my health and my safety in the country, and have given very good instructions on how to stay safe and healthy. Their language training in Swahili has been very good, but I have been most impressed by their cultural training and their approach to development. We are required to fit into the community, and have been given good tools to access the community's needs. We then work with members of the community to develop sustainable programs, which means that members of the community are doing the programs, and therefore the programs will continue even after we leave. In education, that means working with other teachers to develop good teaching strategies, HIV/AIDS education, and gender equality in education. This is a program that works, and is definitely worth the two year investment. In later additions to the blog, I will be talking more about what is like to live in Africa. For starters, we are in the hot season now, and I am thankful that we are in the mountains where it is a little cooler.

The training is very intense, especially with chores around home, like cooking some of the meals, washing clothes by hand, sweeping and moping floors, etc. The training has been heavy duty Swahili, and is now starting to have more emphasis on how to teach. This is really good since most volunteers have never taught before. We have also had good sessions on how to stay healthy and safe and on HIV/AIDS. All in all, it is a lot of fun, and the Tanzanians are very friendly and warm.

We are in the first week of pre-sevice training in Morogoro. Morogoro is near the Ugulu

Mountains, and we have a beautiful setting in which to train. Most of

the training is now centered in learning Swahili (It's really calledKiswahili, meaning Swahili language.) We have also received vacinations, and are taking our malaria pills, and we have had excellent training on how to stay healthy and safe.

Today we board a plane for Amsterdam, and tomorrow we will spend the day flying to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. After two days in Dar es Salaam, we will go to Morogoro in the mountains for 10 weeks of pre-service training.

We just finished our staging event in Philadelphia, which was a chance to get to know the other 38 teachers in our group and learn about the way the Peace Corps operates. The last two days have been excellent. There will be 40 math, science and technology teachers going to Tanzania together and training together. After training, we will be dispersed to secondary schools throughout the country. We are all very excited about the next two years.

We have been very busy. We have had a garage sale, and are currently packing away all of our personal items. We have been very lucky in finding two renters to take care of our house and furniture while we are in Africa. We also have been very grateful to all of our friends and family who have helped us get ready for this grand adventure. Their eagerness to help has made it a lot easier for us to get ready, and to focus on Tanzania.