First few days of teaching...

Teaching:

We started our teaching duties on Monday. I was assigned Standard 0 (little 5-6 year olds) for morning lessons; Standard 3 (about 9-10) in the afternoon. My first morning with the little ones was a nightmare! We had moved to a covered classroom to keep out of the sun, but that only increased bad behavior from the little ones. Every time I turned my back, they were chasing each other, slapping each other, or trying to ride each other. Marwa, our boy with polio, is in Standard 0. As I did not know the routine with him (they forgot to tell me) he did not get to the toilet in time, and so he started sobbing after he peed his pants. Two other kids hit each other, and all the while I'm trying to gamely teach them body parts in English. It was exhausting, frustrating, and of course I felt awful about Marwa.

Thankfully, these last two days have been decidedly better. I lesson plan at night, and find that the extra time then is well worth a more organized day following. Right now were working on basic math in Standard 0, and fractions and world geography in Standard 3. Next week I will get new classes. We all end up teaching all the standards once or twice in the 11 weeks that we are here teaching.

The Orphanage:

Hisani is about 1/2 acre of land or so. There is a main building with a living type room, and dorms for the kids. The bunks are handmade, stacked 3 high. They sleep two or three children per bed. Most kids have a couple changes of clothes, and maybe a pair of shoes. They have a squat toilet inside, and two outhouses. They are building a showerhouse, but right now they just scrub in a bucket in the courtyard. The children eat porridge, ugali (a Tanzanian dish, basically a cornmeal type stew), and then they get some vegetables and fruit. They are very sweet (most of them) and have the best smiles in the world. Their life is not easy, but I don't know if they know this.

The volunteer compound:

We actually have quite a nice house, by local standards. We do have running water (no hot) and get electricity a couple times a day for a few hours at a time. We have some tatty old furniture, and a hodge-podge of eating utensils/cooking ware. Enough to get by.

The bugs continue to vex me. Last night we waged war on 2 giant cockroaches. I swear they hissed at us, and were stubbornly defiant when Tom bashed them with a magazine. After he severed one, the leg kept twitching. I yelled so loud, our Masai guard (whose name is Jackson!) came running in, spear in hand, to make sure everything was okay. When I finally went to bed, I was woken up out of dead sleep to a mouse making noise in my cupboard.

We eat fairly well, and drink bottled water. We have a girl who will cook for us a few nights a week, and the food is quite good: rice, beans, cooking bananas, sweet potatoes, cabbage, maybe some eggplant. Breakfast is usually bread or fruit, and lunch is whatever you can forage.

I feel tired and lethargic all the time, but I blame that primarily on the heat, and the incredible amount of mental and physical energy it takes to accomplish things around here. Walking to Hisani is a feat unto itself. A little over a mile, often in sandy and muddy conditions. It's lovely though, little kids running everywhere, people carrying things on their heads, bicycles etc. It's actually quite rural and peaceful up in our village, compared to the relative city frenzy of Mwanza.

More soon.