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?