Site Visit Etc

Pictures! Check my facebook! Here's a link that should work even if you live under a rock and don't do facebook: Pictures!

K so - my site. My nearest banking town is actually Tukuyu, not Mbeya. I spent most of my week of "site visit" in Tukuyu shadowing a current volunteer, Hannah. Another new volunteer, Mandy, and I were shadowing Hannah. Basically, we just sat around cooking (mostly them) and eating (mostly me) American food and watching movies. It was awesome. Hannah has a really safi house. "Safi", by the way, translates to "clean" but also is slang for like "really nice" or something. Anyway, spent a lot of time making the house nice, and has a mini refrigerator and oven and such, its super nice. So yeah, I felt like I was in America. We also got to walk around Tukuyu and see the area. Its really beautiful - hilly and green, with lots of evergreen trees. Its also pretty chilly - maybe getting down to the low 50's at night. At first that doesn't sound so bad, but then you have to remember my house has zero heating or insulation, so its low 50's inside, which is a bit chilly. But I like it! Cool is way better than hot in my book. OH! I got to fly my kite for the first time in Africa! It was quite excellent. The wind wasn't great, so I had to run around like an idiot. When we started there were like 3 kids on the field but within a couple minutes probably 50 kids were running around chasing the kite. It was literally the greatest thing.

I just spent one night actually at my school - my house is still being used by student teachers and the students are in the middle of exams, so there wasn't too much for me to do. My school seems pretty great. Its about 16km down the main road from Tukuyu, then 5km down a dirt road. The school is a boarding school sorta out there all by itself. I'm somewhere around 10km away from the nearest village with a market. There isn't any public transportation from the main road out to the school, so I'll need to get a bike or make friends with someone with a car ASAP.

So I just finished all the language exams yesterday. I did my final written exam a couple weeks ago. Just got the results back, and I did way better than I thought! 92%, yeehaw! The oral interview was yesterday, which I'm sure I did a lot worse on, but I didn't feel HORRIBLE about it, so that's good!

Training is finally really slowing down. Today all we did was practice singing the national anthem of Tanzania (and the U.S. one as well. never gonna get those lyrics down.) and "Don't Worry, Be Happy" which we translated into Swahili. We're apparently going to be singing a lot for our Swearing In ceremony. Which, by the way, is next Wednesday! We're headed to Dar on Sunday, then go directly to our sites on Thursday the 16th.

I'll start teaching probably around the 7th of September. Yesterday I got a bunch of books for A-level physics and math. I was looking through them, and there is some pretty intense stuff they go through. I've got a lot of review (and lets be honest, first time learning) to do! I'm excited though, it will cool to really know my stuff physics wise after two years of teaching it.