Mt. Rungwe, Baking, and Practicals

I live in the foothills of Mt. Rungwe, one of the bigger mountains in
southern Tanzania. A week and a half ago, I climbed it! I went with a
big group of students – between 50 and 100 – last Thursday night. It
gets pretty hot here during the day these days, so someone decided it
was best to start at midnight and hike all night. I wasn't really sure
what to expect, but mountain climbing is my cup of tea so I showed up
at midnight.
I ended up talking with a couple of my students that speak English
really well – Ezekiel and Josephat - about the existence of ghosts,
if the Free Masons are all in on a secret plot to take over the world
(they, like all Tanzanians, are convinced this is very much true),
favorite movies, and my unrequited love for Katy Perry. Our random
conversations actually sort of reminded me of hiking in Boy Scouts
when I was in high school.
So at around 4am, I was informed, for some reason, we were stopping on
the side of the mountain and sleeping for two hours until the sun came
up and then continuing to the top. I still have no idea what, if any,
the rationalization was for that decision. I hadn't gotten the memo
about this sleeping arrangement, so I lay down in a pile of leaves,
propped my feet against a tree so I wouldn't slide down the side of
the slope, and tried to stop shivering and sleep. It was a silly
situation. After finally falling asleep, I was woken by a very, very
strange event. In my half stupor, I thought I heard someone sliding
down the mountain and a bunch of people running. We were very much on
the edge of a steep slope, so what I first thought was someone had
fallen asleep and started sliding, and everyone else started running
after him to make sure he was okay. I didn't actually hear anyone say
anything, just one guy screaming and instantly a bunch of people
running away from me. Very quickly. Like it was maybe 5-10 seconds
between being asleep in a crowd of people to being the only person
within 50 feet of me. Apparently, no one actually started sliding down
the mountain. The guy screaming had a nightmare about zombies, woke
up, started screaming, and ran down the mountain. Everyone else,
without asking why he was running and screaming, just started running
after him. It was so, so strange.
Despite the zombie scare, we successfully made it to the summit a
little after sunrise! It was pretty cool – Mt. Rungwe is volcanic and
you can get right up to the edge of the crater and look down. We
finally made it back to school a little after noon, a little over 12
hours after we left. I slept quite well that night.
What else? I've become a master baker. Well no, that's not true, but
I've attempted baking quite a bit. Today I made chocolate pancakes for
breakfast and some sandwich bread. Just finished a very tasty peanut
butter and banana sandwich! I've also made rolls, soft pretzels,
bagels, and banana bread. I bake on a "Tanzanian oven," a Dutch oven
like setup using charcoal. I have a fireplace, so I can cook inside.
I'm slowly getting the hang of it meaning less burnt bread and less
burnt fingers, which is nice.
In school, I've been trying to do labs (or as they call 'em here,
practicals). I did one yesterday finding the specific heat capacity of
Tanzanian shilling coins (about 400J/kg K, if you were wondering). It
was the first practical I've done that involved anything potentially
dangerous – Bunsen burners. Bunsen burners, for those that don't know,
are those things you hook up to a gas pipe with a flexible hose and
create a little heat source – somewhere between a candle and a
blowtorch. Anyway, I was dumb and didn't do much of a safety talk
besides telling students not to mess with the Bunsen burners. Ah,
mistake. Somehow, a student managed to open one of the gas valves not
attached to a Bunsen burner and light it, creating a three foot flame
thrower. I think I better start doing more serious safety talks.

Okay, bedtime. TTYL.

I have running water and it’s great. I used to have running water in my kitchen, but then one day it slowed to a dribble. It only slowed in the kitchen though. It was strange, but I didn’t really know what to do about it short of digging up the pipes so I set up a bucket faucet thing and forgot about it. Fast forward to a couple days ago.

So I come home from school and my neighbor is digging around my pipes. I ask her what’s up. Apparently the faucet on my house that she uses to water her fields was also not working. A big deal, so worth digging the pipes up for. At least, this is what I thought she meant. My Swahili is still laughable so I wasn’t sure. I understood something along the lines of “there is no water in your kitchen, right? Wait a minute and I’ll fix it. There is a bug.” I assumed I misunderstood the whole bug business.

Turns out no, I heard right. The “bug” was actually a very unlucky frog that got sucked down my water pipe and managed to get clogged right before the faucet in my kitchen sink. I watched as my neighbor pulled dead frog bits (and after a few weeks stuck in a pipe, it really was bits) out of the pipe. It was pretty nasty. Even though it was only a dribble, I had continued to use that faucet. So I was cooking and drinking water infused with the essence of rotting frog. Again, nasty. But now I have real running water in my kitchen!

So teaching is going well. I am teaching physics to Form 5 students. So quick refresher, in Tanzania teachers move classrooms instead of students. High school is split into O Level and A Level – I’m at an A Level only school. In O Level, all the students take the same subjects, but in A Level there is specialization. Students are split into different “concentrations” and grouped into classes (called streams) with students having the same concentration. There are a bunch of concentrations, all with fun acronyms. So I teach the two concentrations that involve physics, which are PCM (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics) and PCB (Physics, Chemistry, Biology). Along with science concentrations like PCM and PCB, there are arts concentrations like HGL (History, Geography, Language – English) and HGK (History, Geography, Kiswahili).

Rungwe Secondary has two streams of PCM’s and two streams of PCB’s. To teach them all, I combine streams, so I’m teaching all the PCM’s together and all the PCB’s together. This makes for pretty big classes. The PCM group is very reasonable – around 40-50 students. The PCB groups is huge, around 100. For the first couple weeks we were able to fit in one classroom, but as students finished trickling back from break, it became more and more difficult to physically fit. Now I’m teaching as much as possible in the lab, just so there will be room for everyone. Teaching with that many students creates a lot of difficulties. For example, when I let students work on example problems, I can’t check most of the students’ work because I physically can’t move from the front of the room without crawling over people and any activity that involves moving around is a no go. But, students manage, and seem to basically be getting the material.

In a lot of ways, I really feel more like a professor more than a teacher. I basically have office hours. My youngest students are 18 (maybe a couple are 17). My oldest – I don’t really want to know – they are older than me for sure. The material we cover is absolutely college level. Students are motivated to learn to a degree that I don’t think I saw until I got into upper division classes in college. Last week many of the students didn’t have their homework done on Monday. (Apparently they had a social at a girls school nearby over the weekend. I’d say a pretty good excuse at an all-boys boarding school.) I really have no idea what an appropriate level of homework is, so I asked the students if they thought the homework load was too much. Literally every student quickly responded that no, they really wanted to have lots of homework! That, I’m quite sure, I never saw anywhere in my education.

So I’ve developed a love of do-it-yourself home improvement projects. I’ve rewired a bunch of stuff in my house. I now have electricity in my kitchen and can switch off the light in my room from my bed, even with the mosquito net tucked in. Which is pretty awesome, because tucking in a mosquito net in the dark sucks. Don’t judge me. I got a big coffee table and kitchen table made and painted a chalkboard onto the wall of my kitchen. Hopefully my next project will be setting up a simple solar heater for my shower, but that might be a pipe dream (pun intended, sorry). Right now I can have a cold shower or a hot bucket bath. I choose hot bucket bath every time, my house gets cooold. So yeah, hopefully I can just pipe my water up onto the roof and let it sit for a while, then get nice hot showers in the afternoon.

A group of my best students comes in to work problems after school a lot. These guys really are the top of the top – not many students make it to A level, and not many that do make it continue to excel. It’s interesting to see where they think Tanzania is going and how they will be a part of it. Though a lot want to get out – find a scholarship to study abroad and then maybe get a job somewhere where they can make real money – most say they eventually want to come back to live and work here. They are really interested in learning about technology and industry and helping that develop in Tanzania. There’s also a strong belief that Tanzania is inherently stuck being a third world country though. There’s a lot of talk about countries like China and India that used to be a lot like Tanzania, but took off. Why Tanzania hasn’t is a tough question.

Okay, I’m tired. We’ve been in the middle of “pre-mock” examinations. The big national standardized tests (called the NECTAs) are super important, so they have a mock-NECTA a couple months before the real deal. Now they’ve started having a practice for the practice, or the “pre-mock.” Anyway, it requires a bunch of preparation so I’ve had a couple of realllly long days. But now it’s basically the weekend, yippee!

Oh yeah, my wish list:

-        Parmesan cheese

-        The packets from macaroni and cheese boxes. Like Annie’s or something. Seriously I miss macaroni and cheese.

-        CD’s of catchy terrible new pop music

-        Suggestions of good podcasts. Listening to podcasts while washing clothes is my new favorite thing to do.

-        Information about scholarships for international students at universities. A lot of my students want to know about this, so I said I’d look into it, but I don’t know where to start. Who knows anything about this? Let me know! Ideally for universities in the states but also Europe, other places. Anyone have ideas?

I have running water and it’s great. I used to have running water in my kitchen, but then one day it slowed to a dribble. It only slowed in the kitchen though. It was strange, but I didn’t really know what to do about it short of digging up the pipes so I set up a bucket faucet thing and forgot about it. Fast forward to a couple days ago.

So I come home from school and my neighbor is digging around my pipes. I ask her what’s up. Apparently the faucet on my house that she uses to water her fields was also not working. A big deal, so worth digging the pipes up for. At least, this is what I thought she meant. My Swahili is still laughable so I wasn’t sure. I understood something along the lines of “there is no water in your kitchen, right? Wait a minute and I’ll fix it. There is a bug.” I assumed I misunderstood the whole bug business.

Turns out no, I heard right. The “bug” was actually a very unlucky frog that got sucked down my water pipe and managed to get clogged right before the faucet in my kitchen sink. I watched as my neighbor pulled dead frog bits (and after a few weeks stuck in a pipe, it really was bits) out of the pipe. It was pretty nasty. Even though it was only a dribble, I had continued to use that faucet. So I was cooking and drinking water infused with the essence of rotting frog. Again, nasty. But now I have real running water in my kitchen!

So teaching is going well. I am teaching physics to Form 5 students. So quick refresher, in Tanzania teachers move classrooms instead of students. High school is split into O Level and A Level – I’m at an A Level only school. In O Level, all the students take the same subjects, but in A Level there is specialization. Students are split into different “concentrations” and grouped into classes (called streams) with students having the same concentration. There are a bunch of concentrations, all with fun acronyms. So I teach the two concentrations that involve physics, which are PCM (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics) and PCB (Physics, Chemistry, Biology). Along with science concentrations like PCM and PCB, there are arts concentrations like HGL (History, Geography, Language – English) and HGK (History, Geography, Kiswahili).

Rungwe Secondary has two streams of PCM’s and two streams of PCB’s. To teach them all, I combine streams, so I’m teaching all the PCM’s together and all the PCB’s together. This makes for pretty big classes. The PCM group is very reasonable – around 40-50 students. The PCB groups is huge, around 100. For the first couple weeks we were able to fit in one classroom, but as students finished trickling back from break, it became more and more difficult to physically fit. Now I’m teaching as much as possible in the lab, just so there will be room for everyone. Teaching with that many students creates a lot of difficulties. For example, when I let students work on example problems, I can’t check most of the students’ work because I physically can’t move from the front of the room without crawling over people and any activity that involves moving around is a no go. But, students manage, and seem to basically be getting the material.

In a lot of ways, I really feel more like a professor more than a teacher. I basically have office hours. My youngest students are 18 (maybe a couple are 17). My oldest – I don’t really want to know – they are older than me for sure. The material we cover is absolutely college level. Students are motivated to learn to a degree that I don’t think I saw until I got into upper division classes in college. Last week many of the students didn’t have their homework done on Monday. (Apparently they had a social at a girls school nearby over the weekend. I’d say a pretty good excuse at an all-boys boarding school.) I really have no idea what an appropriate level of homework is, so I asked the students if they thought the homework load was too much. Literally every student quickly responded that no, they really wanted to have lots of homework! That, I’m quite sure, I never saw anywhere in my education.

So I’ve developed a love of do-it-yourself home improvement projects. I’ve rewired a bunch of stuff in my house. I now have electricity in my kitchen and can switch off the light in my room from my bed, even with the mosquito net tucked in. Which is pretty awesome, because tucking in a mosquito net in the dark sucks. Don’t judge me. I got a big coffee table and kitchen table made and painted a chalkboard onto the wall of my kitchen. Hopefully my next project will be setting up a simple solar heater for my shower, but that might be a pipe dream (pun intended, sorry). Right now I can have a cold shower or a hot bucket bath. I choose hot bucket bath every time, my house gets cooold. So yeah, hopefully I can just pipe my water up onto the roof and let it sit for a while, then get nice hot showers in the afternoon.

A group of my best students comes in to work problems after school a lot. These guys really are the top of the top – not many students make it to A level, and not many that do make it continue to excel. It’s interesting to see where they think Tanzania is going and how they will be a part of it. Though a lot want to get out – find a scholarship to study abroad and then maybe get a job somewhere where they can make real money – most say they eventually want to come back to live and work here. They are really interested in learning about technology and industry and helping that develop in Tanzania. There’s also a strong belief that Tanzania is inherently stuck being a third world country though. There’s a lot of talk about countries like China and India that used to be a lot like Tanzania, but took off. Why Tanzania hasn’t is a tough question.

Okay, I’m tired. We’ve been in the middle of “pre-mock” examinations. The big national standardized tests (called the NECTAs) are super important, so they have a mock-NECTA a couple months before the real deal. Now they’ve started having a practice for the practice, or the “pre-mock.” Anyway, it requires a bunch of preparation so I’ve had a couple of realllly long days. But now it’s basically the weekend, yippee!

Oh yeah, my wish list:

-        Parmesan cheese

-        The packets from macaroni and cheese boxes. Like Annie’s or something. Seriously I miss macaroni and cheese.

-        CD’s of catchy terrible new pop music

-        Suggestions of good podcasts. Listening to podcasts while washing clothes is my new favorite thing to do.

-        Information about scholarships for international students at universities. A lot of my students want to know about this, so I said I’d look into it, but I don’t know where to start. Who knows anything about this? Let me know! Ideally for universities in the states but also Europe, other places. Anyone have ideas?