Bowser Project Update We opened the school this week, and had a faculty meeting about the bowser project. Basically, we decided to form a committee which would in turn decide the particulars about where to buy one, who to send to buy it, etc. The committee members have been chosen – the headmaster, a teacher, [...]
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So my parents came to visit me, which was great, and they have since returned to the US – but not before taking lots of pictures. There are apparently ~1050 pictures in total, and they’ve all been uploaded to my dad’s web site. He put categorized links to them all on his blog. So, if [...]
Hi, all. I’m happy to announce that the bowser project has officially been fully funded! Much thanks to everyone! I’ll get individual thank-you emails and/or cards out soon. In terms of what happens next: Presumably, Peace Corps will transfer the money into my personal bank account sometime very soon, or perhaps they have already done [...]
I realize that I haven’t been posting much lately. A good deal of that is due to being both away from the internet, and busy, while traveling. Abridged version of the travels: 1. Went to Dar Es Salaam (the capital), stayed with friends there, it was great. 2. Went to Mtwara, helped cook and eat [...]
Project Update I just checked the bowser project’s web page (here), and I see that we’re only $200 away! Thanks so much to everyone who’s donated! Graduation Video I also have managed to upload one of the videos taken during my school’s graduation ceremony to YouTube – it’s here. During the ceremony, various groups of [...]
If you’ll recall I’d talked a bit before about my village having water issues. Some of the issues are actually seasonal – each year during the dry seasons, the pumps stop giving water and people have to start getting it by digging in the riverbed. Eventually those parts of the riverbed dry out and they [...]
Just a quick update, a random cultural note that I’d long forgotten is unique here. In Tanzania, people don’t have a first name and then a family name. They have a first name, and it is followed by their father’s first name, and that is possibly followed by their father’s father’s first name. So, for [...]
Graduation My school recently had its graduation for the Form Four students*. One of the Peace Corps staff came as a guest of honor, and my sitemates came as guests of not-honor. It was good. Tanzanian graduation ceremonies are a bit different than American graduation ceremonies. Quick synopsis: 1. Guest of honor shows up and [...]
Hand Sanitizer So from what I’ve seen here, it appears that a very large number of westerners think that, in Africa, hand sanitizer is somehow especially necessary for daily survival. I’d just like to briefly debunk this hypothesis by pointing out that washing one’s hands with soap and water works just as well here as [...]
This post seems to have evolved into me ranting about my teaching problems; hopefully it won’t be too dull of a read. If it is hella dull, pole. Monthly Exams My school has started doing monthly exams (which I believe are supposed to be standard practice, but we hadn’t been doing them due to lack [...]
WordPress is having some issues with that password-protected post, so for the moment I guess it’s unavailable. I’ll see about getting it up properly soon. In the meantime, I’ve got the text of it saved, so I guess if you want it, I can email you.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
There are some cool/important/interesting things afoot that I can’t really blog about without revealing which village I’m in. Peace Corps has a policy where we’re not allowed to publicly reveal our villages on the internet, for fear that someone with anti-American sentiments should use that information to try to hunt us down and do bad [...]
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Yesterday I helped a cow give birth. I filled the role of Assistant Tipper. NOTE: If you’re really squeamish, you may not want to read this. Cow births involve lots of bodily fluids and whatnot. (Though clearly if you’re really squeamish you should attempt to unsqeamify yourself, and exposing yourself to things such as this [...]
Quick Aside First, a quick aside. Corporal punishment in schools is not only legal here, but very common. From what I hear, the British brought it back when Tanzania was still a British colony. Technically speaking, there is a law that limits what you’re allowed to do by quite a bit, but culturally it’s considered [...]
So, this rainy season, my village did not get as much rain as usual, which lead to all of the farmers’ corn not producing any actual corn. This is a big problem. People were hoping to eat that corn, and said people have very little in the way of means to eat something else instead. [...]
It’s been a while since I’ve commented on the local fauna. In that time, I’ve encountered a wide variety of interesting animals here. Here goes: Birds So, aside from the eagles that like to carry chickens off and eat them, we’ve got plenty of sorts of interesting birds. We were briefly visited by a few [...]
Full Car Yesterday, I rode in a Land Rover with 20+ passengers in/on it. There was also the driver and two conductors, and a lot of luggage/cargo. Bows And Arrows Recently I noticed a bow and arrow sitting in one corner of my school’s staff room, and I wondered what it was for – I [...]
Cats My kittens are growing. They are eating a scary amount of food these days. As in, I’m seriously worried about the dent they’re going to put into my income if they keep going like this. I’ve been buying them dagaa, which is disgusting little dried fishes (note: many people do like dagaa, and the [...]
Figure I’ll make a post about various of the small differences between here and the US. Mostly all of us noticed these during our initial training, but have since gotten utterly used to them, but I’ll see what I can recall. Soda Soda here primarily comes in 350 ml glass bottles that require bottle openers [...]
Break Finished this last week of exams. Apparently we decided to have a meeting of some sort on monday, though, so not quite at the break yet. MOOII Found that that spying race that eventually evolved to be quick-enough to mostly not need spies can become considerably faster if its spying bonuses are removed. So [...]
Have some more kitten photos. These ones show more of my house. Someday I’ll get some house photos up. These guys have grown a lot. I feed them dagaa, which is dried some-kind-of-small-fish, and they’ve been eating a ton of it lately. Theoretically Shinobi should finish nursing them in a week or so, and then [...]
New Words “vuvuvuvu” means “neither hot nor cold”. I think it’s pretty good. Also, there’s a Kiiraqw word that I think is spelled “fuk”, and is pronounced how you’d expect. It means that something (for example, the car’s gas) has run out, and it allows for some great (and often unintentional) inter-lingual punnage (in situations [...]
Okay, so I just managed to get a video of one of my classes uploaded to YouTube. As per the post I made two posts ago, this was recorded by my Peace Corps boss a while ago when he came to visit my site. Karibuni: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLIsGdwTEpQ .
Sitting in an internet cafe downloading and uploading stuff, and have some time to kill. So, I’ll make the commonly-blogged-by-PCVS “Day In The Life Of A PCV” post. My teaching days here tend to go something like this: 6:30ish: - alarm goes off - hit the snooze button a couplea times - get up - [...]
MOOII Played MOOII a bit since the last update, and found that this new spying strategy, with a simple modification, is quick-enough to build really powerful ships really early, and can start conquering people without needing spies to take out enemy starbases, which means the spies are free to start stealing technology, which helps in [...]
So, recently I did indeed make the shift from teaching mostly-math to teaching mostly-computers, which means that now _all_ of the students are learning computers, rather than just half, as it was before. The students are pretty happy about it. This has involved dropping two of the three classes I was teaching math to (another [...]
So, we’ve recently been playing a lot of after-school sports. Our school has one officialish (things don’t tend to be particularly official here in Tanzania) team each for netball, volleyball, and football (soccer). Netball, as far as I know, doesn’t exist in the US. Here, it’s a girls-only sport. Its rules are quite similar to [...]
I guess it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. Let’s see. We had a week-and-a-half-long break from school recently. That was pretty nice. Chilled at home, chilled at Karatu, got some grading and other basic work done. I forget if I mentioned back when it happened, but the other ICT teacher at [...]
So, last night I was part of a conversation that involved English, Swahili, and Swedish, with different participants knowing different languages from amongst that set. It got me thinking a bit about language. Back when we all did pre-service training for two months, the bulk of the training was studying Swahili – we studied it [...]
So, about two and a half weeks ago, Shinobi gave birth to a litter of four kittens. Have some photos (hopefully):
Okay, so the alien freak has been identified – it’s an African cave spider, also known as a tailless whip scorpion. Links with information for those who are interested: http://www.zooniversity.org/2010/04/african-cave-spiders-anyone/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk8OY7TfSAQ&feature=related http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amblypygi
Last week, on my way home from Karatu, it started raining heavily about halfway home. That left us in the Land-Rover-daladala with about ten kilometers to cover, driving on the muddy versions of the local roads. It ended up taking about an hour and a half. We did a lot of boatlike driving, and a [...]
So, I’ve been pretty busy lately. What with IST, travelling back to my village, getting back into the swing of things, teaching temporary extra classes that for some reason my school decided to have, and helping to type up a bunch of exams that are going to be given next week. First: a picture of [...]
Actually, before talking about IST: I recently snail-mailed an SD card with a bunch of photos and videos home to my parents. Note that these photos are mostly from the beginning of training, in Morogoro, but a few are from my house in my village. And if you remember that an alien freak showed up [...]
So, from what little I’ve seen, my school is fairly typical of Tanzanian schools, facilities-wise, or probably a bit fancier, what with the computer lab and all. For anyone who’s curious about Tanzanian schools: We’ve got I think eight main school buildings; one office, one bio/chem/physics lab without equipment, one computer lab, one unused building [...]
Perfect Dark So, I managed to watch that new Melee video this week. Holy crap. Everyone who had their minds blown was totally justified in having their minds blown. My mind is so very blown right now. Wowzerskates. If I had brought a GameCube with me, I would be practicing right now, because that video [...]
Ah, but they _are_ link/URLs, which is all I ever claimed them to be. :p They get the job done. That's the important bit. Ill probably bother with linkifying them next time.
Apparently WordPress has been suffering from some DDOS attacks, which appear to originate in China. Don't know if that has anything to do with the problems. Anyway, the rss feed hasn't seemed to suffer any difficulties.
Also, your links aren't links. C'mon, man!
As the title says, WordPress seems to be having some troubles these days. Some of the posts don’t seem to be showing up on the main blog page, even though emails are going out when I post and I think the links inside the emails work. So, I shall attempt to make a post here [...]
So, Tanzanian television seems to generally be rather different than American television. I’ve seen it a bit in random restaurants and whatnot, and a lot in the staff room at my school, which has a television that the teachers like to watch. The programming that I’ve seen the most includes: Music Videos The music tends [...]
In case anyone would like to learn a bit of Swahili, here’s some important words/phrases. Note that the pronunciation is basically like Spanish or Japanese, with the accent on the second-to-last syllable: “choo”: “bathroom” “choo kiko wapi?”: “where is the bathroom?” “asante”: “thank you” “pole”: “sorry” “karibu”: “welcome” “tafadali”: “please” “habari za asubuhi”: “good morning” [...]
So, as tends to be the case, things have been happening here. I shall try to mention a variety of them. The Most Significant Bit I guess I’ll start with the most significant bit: there is one particular lady amongst our volunteer group who is basically an extremely awesome person and a total badass. I [...]
Well, I was planning to just take names and stuff the first day anyway, so meh.
The ICT curriculum isn't too bad; I'd gotten started on it before school started, brainstorming what sorts of things would be useful for students to know and asking other ICT PCVs here what they teach.
Yeah, I haven't gotten to that level of sophistication yet. :p I'm still working on figuring out how to explain things in ways that everyone can understand, which involves going slowly-enough that everyone can understand.
Sounds like you're coping very well with a rather rough start to your first term of teaching. Seems like quite a challenge! Hopefully it'll get smoother as it goes along.
Wow, not knowing what you're teaching until the day of sounds nerve wracking. Is it difficult to make up curriculum for ICT as you go? Are your classes very large? One of the things I've found most challenging about teaching is to go slow enough that all the students can understand what's going on, without completely boring the students who can understand things after a short explanation.
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