Travel!

Yeah yeah, it's been a long time, my bad. My computer broke, but that's not really an excuse as it happened like a week ago.

So lets see, what's happened? I've done a lot of traveling, a lot of vacationing on beaches, and even a little productive work for Peace Corps.

First up, Thanksgiving. Since I have a really nice house for Peace Corps standards (aka running water, electricity, and a fireplace), I had a little gathering of volunteers to eat, drink, and be merry together for Thanksgiving. We felt positively American eating macaroni and cheese and pie (albeit mango not apple). We felt positively Tanzanian when we bought a couple chickens, brought them home still alive on public transportation, killed 'em, and ate 'em. The killing process involved hanging them by their feet to a tree and cutting their heads off with a kitchen knife. I think I screamed throughout the ordeal more than the chickens. Though chickens squawk, not scream. Just saying. Anyway, by the time it was done I was covered in chicken blood and knew I was finally a man. 

While we're on the subject of chickens, I'll mention that I spent a significant part of both Christmas day and Boxing day chasing around a rouge chicken named Freddy given to us as a gift. Chickens would make excellent capture the flag players - they are so quick on their feet. I truly enjoyed eating that chicken. 

What next? I went to Peace Corps In-Service-Training, a two week conference for volunteers after they've spent a few weeks by themselves at their site. Everyone brings a "counterpart," a Tanzanian from the community (or school in the case of Education volunteers) that is interested in being involved in any projects you do. We had sessions ranging from ways to put on AIDS awareness events to how to start a permagarden to the impact of corporal punishment in schools. It was great to see everyone and hear stories about how they are settling in at their sites. (Well, almost everyone - of the original 47 volunteers in our class, we're down to 41. Six went home, either for medical reasons or because, well, they wanted to go home.)

By the time the training was done, school was out so I was on vacation! I went up to Moshi, a touristy and fancy town in northern Tanzania, and stayed with a friend who has views of Mt. Kilimanjaro from her house. We were only there for a couple days, but we did get to walk up to the gate of the park and sneak in for a couple minutes. To actually spend a day in the park is expensive, $60 aka over a week of pay, so we didn't really go into the park. I'm sure I'll be back though! 

Next, to Tanga, a beach town on the northern coast of Tanzania. It was HOT, but we got to swim in a pool and the ocean, and eat hamburgers for a dollar, so all was well. We stayed in an old German colonial era mansion converted into a hostel. It didn't have running water, but I got a giant room on the corner of the second floor with giant windows with a view of the water all for three bucks. What a deal!

After Tanga, we got on a plane (yes, you read the right, I flew on a plane!) to Pemba, the northern most island in the Spice Islands archipelago (which, for those interested for some reason, also included Zanzibar and Mafia Islands). There's a scuba resort there that gives a great (like, really great) deal to Peace Corps volunteers, so a bunch of us took advantage of it and got our scuba license. It was crazy awesome. The water was super blue and clear and beautiful and the coral reefs were incredible. We dived down to around 60 feet and saw some awesome fish and stuff. Its hard to describe, its just a whole different world down there. I highly recommend it. So come visit me and I'll show you some awesome scuba diving, for cheap!

Let's see, next up, Christmas. After heading back from Pemba to my house I went back to Tukuyu, my closest town, for Christmas. My closest Peace Corps neighbor, Hannah, lives there in another nice house and she had a gathering for Christmas. Just like Thanksgiving, we cooked a bunch of food and killed a chicken. Stupid Freddy. And we got a Christmas tree! Tukuyu is cold enough that it has quite a few evergreen trees so we went out in the afternoon of Christmas Eve with a saw looking for a tree to cut down. As we walked down a street we happened to see a kid up in a tree cutting down, you guessed it, Christmas trees. Christmas trees don't seem too popular here, but apparently somebody wanted some. We asked the kid to cut us one, and boom, we had a tree. Easy peasy. 

After Christmas, of course, is New Years. I spent New Years on Matema Beach on Lake Malawi. I've been there once before, but this time a couple other guys and I decided to hike in from the mountains northeast of the lake instead of just taking a bus in. It was a really cool trip. We spent the first day hiking through Ruaha National Park. It was really beautiful but we ended up basically just walking along a road the whole time, so it was more like being bad at hitchhiking and less like really hiking. The second day was  much more interesting. We started off hiking through a these little tiny villages (or rather groups of five or six houses near each other) way up in the mountains. We were up at around 10,000 feet so it was fairly cold. Around every corner we'd get groups of kids on the side of the road staring at us - you got the idea they didn't get a lot of international visitors. Then finally, we got off the road. We finally stopped climbing up and headed down towards the lake. Even when we were way up in the mountains we could see the lake in the distance. To get there, we walked on a tiny trail through the rain for about six hours. It was really muddy and steep and its a minor miracle we all made it down without any major injuries. We were all exhausted by the end of it for sure. Though I shouldn't complain - our sixteen year old guide we hired promptly turned around and headed back up the mountain when he'd delivered us to the lake. It was quite a day - starting shivering in the wet and cold way up in the mountains and ending getting sunburnt swimming in 80 degree water. 

And there we go. You are caught up in the life-o'-Willie. Hongera sana. Look it up.

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?

First Day of Class

Hello friends in the cyberspace. So it’s been awhile. I did some stuff. Here are some of the things I did. I made my house into a home (cute), people visited me and I tried to show off my kite but it wasn’t windy, I met some folks, and I taught some kids, sort of. This is my introduction. Now I will transition.

Right, so I did a bunch of home improvement. Sadly, IKEA hasn’t made it to Tanzania yet so I’ve been going to little dukas (shops) to buy stuff for my house. Mostly cooking and cleaning equipment and buckets. Lots of buckets. My water here is inconsistent so big buckets are good for storing water. I also use buckets to shower and wash clothes (they’re multifunctional!). So to buy stuff I have to go into Tukuyu, about 20km away on a crowded bus/van thing, which is even more fun when you are carting all your home improvement stuff with you. Needless to say, I took many trips. And I bought a bike! It’s way too small and possibly a girls bike, but it works. Oh, I also cleaned a lot. My house was kinda gross. Tangent, speaking of gross. So I got a brand new western style toilet, which is pretty sweet. Except it’s a cheap plastic one and it doesn’t really work. Yesterday I took a nap and woke up to a layer of water covering most of my room and the entire bathroom and a couple other rooms. I spent the next few hours scooping up poopy water with a dustpan. I eventually dumped out 6 buckets of water. It was impressive. Anyway, home improvement. I bought a two burner hot plate, which means I won’t be cooking by charcoal stove, wee! My school is big enough and out-in-the-middle-of-no-where enough that we have our own school fundi or carpenter/handyman/plumber. So, I had him make me a bed, a coffee table and a kitchen counter thing. They’re awesome. Oh and I got a mat. It’s a nice mat, as far as mats go I guess.

Next up: People visited me and I tried to show them my kite but it wasn’t windy. So yeah, a bunch of people from my “class” of education volunteers that live around me came to visit! I got to show them my giant house with electricity and (sometimes) running water and my school’s monkey. Did I tell you about this, dear blog reader? My school has a pet monkey. It’s a mini monkey (scientific name) and we fed it mini bananas. Find something cuter, I DARE YOU. But it is missing a leg cause they used some nasty trap to catch it and it’s in a fairly tiny cage, so its sorta sad. BUT SO CUTE. But yeah, I tried to fly my kite a lot but it didn’t work. It was sad. But I’ve gotten it to work other places and it’s great. Be happy.

So I met lots of folks at my site. I actually sorta became friends with the student teachers who used to live at my house. The first couple times I went to Tukuyu to buy stuff one of them came with me to help, which probably meant I got things for half the price I would have paid if I was by myself. Pretty cool. Now they are back at university but many of them live around here so I we’ll meet up again at some point. I’ve spent the most time with the family of the Secondmaster (like assistant principal) of my school. Before I got a kitchen of sorts set up I ate at their house, and still occasionally piga hodi, which basically means show up at someone’s around the time they usually eat in hopes that they will feed you. I attempt to speak Swahili with the Secondmaster’s wife and kids and they laugh at me and its good times. And I buy eggs and firewood from them. A couple days ago I gave them a watermelon. I felt pretty good about myself.

Last but not least, I taught! So I’m still getting used to the way schools work around here. Everything seems to happen slowly and in a disorganized fashion. School “started” yesterday, Monday. I still didn’t know which classes I’d be teaching, or have the syllabus – the list of topics I need to cover – so I couldn’t start teaching. As it turns out, none of the teachers started teaching and only maybe 15% of the students were at school the first day. Today we had maybe 20% of the students and learned what I’m teaching! I’ll be teaching Form 5 Physics. So there are 4 “streams,” or classes of Form 5 students that take physics and each class has 10 periods per week. Peace Corps says I should start by teaching only around 20 periods per week, so I guess the plan is to combine the streams into two double sized classes. Today there were so little students though that all four streams easily fit into one classroom. We shall see. Anyway, I still don’t have a syllabus but I went ahead and taught anyway! We just did introductions and all that boring stuff you always do on the first day of school. I had the students ask me questions and got quite some interesting ones ranging from intense (“What is different about the people of Tanzania and America that makes America much more rich than Tanzania?”) to way too personal (“If you have no wife here how will you live for two years without being with a woman?”). Those were fun to try to answer! But yeah, the student’s seemed great. They seemed to have a good grasp of English, seemed motivated and interested in physics and most importantly laughed at my stupid jokes. Now these were just the 20% that decided to show up on the second day – they might be the cream of the crop. We shall see.

And that’s it. Time for lesson planning and bed and maybe some Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia. I just started watching that. It’s a good show. I highly recommend it. Over and out.

Swearing In and Move to Site

16/8/12 – 2:45pm

I'm on a very long bus ride to site, so I figure it's as good a time
as any to get my blog on. So let's see, the big news is – I'm now
officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. Before I was a Peace Corps
Trainee, but I passed all my exams and survived training so Peace
Corps decided I can stay on another two years. Speaking of tests, we
had a bunch – medical exam, technical (aka teaching) exam, written
Swahili exam and oral Swahili interview. The fact the I passed the
oral interview is a testament to the existence of miracles.

Swearing in was a fancy ol' ceremony at the Ambassador's Residence. I
guess we aren't quite important enough to make it to the actual
Embassy, but the ambassador's house was pretty cool. We all dressed to
the nines; lots of people had Tanzanian dresses and such made here,
but I went with a more "used-car-salesman" look. Speeches were made,
songs were sung, oaths to defend the constitution were taken, and
tasty apps and zerts were eaten. Actually there weren't any zerts I
just like saying zerts. Zerts. Anyway, it was fun. We also discovered
the ambassador's house is like a block from the beach, so I got to see
the Indian Ocean up close for the first time. It looks wet.

After training got done in Morogoro we spent four days hanging out in
Dar Es Salaam before swearing in yesterday. We had some more info
sessions and learned some money matters. I think I'll be making
somewhere around 300,000 Tanzanian Shillings a month, so like $6 or so
a day. I also just hung out with our training class and took a mini
vacation to America for $20. Well no, that would be impossible unless
maybe you knew how to apperate. Which I don't. But I did go to Subway
and a mall, went shopping at a grocery store with checkouts and
conveyor belts and baggers, got ice cream and saw the Batman movie in
a theater. It was pretty great.

So now I'm on a bus to move to my site for realzies. All our school
principals came to Dar to learn how to deal with us odd Americans and
are now heading back on the bus with us. Let's talk about
transportation in Tanzania, since I'm experiencing it currently. So if
you have money, there's charter domestic flights that can get you
between big cities or you can hire a car and driver. In the city,
taxis are pretty common in the cities.

If you want to be cheaper, you ride dala dalas around town, which are
basically 9 person vans or sometimes small busses. They can get VERY
crowded – like 20+ in a 9 person van. Usually you are standing up, but
it's okay, you aren't going to fall down since there is nowhere to
fall. Personal bubbles do not exist. Another option are piki-piki's or
motorcycles. There are LOTS of motorcycle-taxis that'll take you
around the city. They are pretty dangerous though, and Peace Corps
doesn't allow volunteers to use them. Going between nearby cities you
can take coasters, which are larger, slightly less crowded dalas. Then
there are full on buses to get to different regions of the country.
They are more less crowded and more organized than dalas or coasters,
but are still crowded. Most of them pack 5 rows across instead of the
typical 4 in the states. Also, the trips are looong. I think my trip
from Dar to Tukuyu will be somewhere around 13 hours, though we've
been going through a bunch of construction so it might be a little
more. The roads in my area are pretty good – they are mostly paved
though there are lots of random speed bumps and stops for police check
points and construction, so it's pretty tricky to sleep. So you blog.

There are two interesting things about bus rides that I have learned.
First, the art of "chimba dawa" which literally translates to "dig for
medicine," but actually means peeing. These buses don't have
bathrooms, and they don't like to stop more than every five hours or
so, so you either have to be in significant pain, pee in a bottle, or
dehydrate yourself. Most, including myself, go with dehydration,
though I have seen all three being practiced. Often when the bus does
stop, it just stops by a patch of woods – one side of the bus is
designated "boys," the other "girls." Second, food. Though you might
have to pee, you won't go hungry. At any stop of any kind (including
police checkpoints and construction), there are a bunch of guys that
will run up to the sides of the bus and sell everything from bananas
to jewelry to watches. From my experience, the food is really, really
good. Today I had an excellent breakfast of chapatti, samosas and a
banana, all bought out my window, and for maybe $1-$1.50. It's
actually pretty fun to buy stuff.

So what's driving like here? First off, for anyone thinking about
coming here, don't even consider driving your own vehicle. I would
instantly crash if I tried to drive here. Lanes, stop signs and
lights, and distinctions between road and shoulder are not followed to
any significant degree. The best way to describe it I think is a sort
of complicated dance. Vehicles honk and flash their lights to
communicate, but also generally have a guy on the passenger's seat
just to signal other drivers. Buses tend to pass pretty recklessly and
often have to squeeze in between vehicles at the last second to avoid
being hit by oncoming traffic (hence the signaler). They also have a
nasty tendency to pass on blind curves with their horn blaring to warn
opposing traffic. Fun times.

So my school starts up on September 10th. From now until then, I'll be
setting up my house and prepping for school. Unless things have
changed drastically since I last saw it, my house has a bed, dresser,
desk, and some chairs. All things considered, that's pretty good, but
I've got lots to buy. I'm still not totally sure what classes I'll be
teaching, but once that's figured out I can start prepping lesson
plans and such. I'm also hoping to get a bike ASAP so I can get to
town easier. Next week I'm headed to Peace Corps's Mbeya Super
Regional Conference, which I think is focused on HIV/AIDS prevention
stuff. We shall see. It'll be cool to meet all my Peace Corps
neighbors as well.

Oh, I'm getting a new address soon, so if anyone is thinking about
sending anything in the next week or so, maybe just wait until I get a
P.O. Box set up – I'll get it faster if it doesn't have to go through
the Peace Corps office. I'll post my address when I get it.

Righto – time to attempt a nap again. I must bid you adieu dear readers.

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.