Goodbye Magulilwa!

I cannot believe it's over! I'm really excited to come home, but the last days at school were amazing. I feel like I took a million pictures of the students, but I know when I get home it won't seem like that many.

On Monday night, they threw us a little party in which the (new) headmaster made a speech about us (nice, but weird since he was only with us for like 2 weeks) and then the students did a bunch of entertainment stuff. Some choirs sang, some performed skits and we were asked to give a "short speech" to them. Emily went first, and so she covered most of the bases, and I thought I was in danger of tearing up so, all I managed to say was (in Swahili) "I don't have much to say, but I'm happy to see you all, and don't laugh at me if I cry later." At which point they all laughed.

This whole week, every chance we got was spent talking to students. My Form Is were full of questions about the US (I showed them pictures I took last December of the snow. They were shocked. "Teacher, if you go outside, will you die?") and my flight home, and when I would come back. I told them maybe I'd make it back when they were in Form IV, when they had all grown tall.

With our Form III students, it was all jokes as usual. I'm going to miss the Form IIIs and a few Form IVs the most because of that. We have more of a relationship outside of class probably just because we've been with them so long. It's hard to think that I once hated that class so much. (They were certainly dodgers right up to the end, but some of them got better). We just finally found our groove with them in our teaching this term (thanks to the boys wearing skirts essay in part), and that just made everything easier. I'm going to miss them so much.

But! I'm still happy to be coming home. I'm sure that education will forever be in my future in some capacity, so I'm excited to explore my potential locally as well. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you all soon!

Morogoro

So our "Spring Break" of sorts we have spent in Morogoro, which has been a good change of scenery. We got to spend tons of time with Mario because in TZ Easter gets 3 public holidays, so he had Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday to just hang out. The only sort of exciting thing we did was visit a waterfall and climb on the huge rocks along it. We saw some boys swimming in the pool under part of the waterfall, and they were using the huge rockface as a waterslide, which both looked super cool and painful.

Otherwise we've just been bumming around. Morogoro is cooler now than it was in January, but it still feels like MN in July when the sun is out. The difference is that it actually cools off at night. Emily and I are going to welcome Magulilwa's cool, dry weather with open arms. Having to reapply sunscreen all the time is not only annoying, but just gross. We're greasy, sweaty, and dirty for most of the day, every day. I can hardly believe I got used to feeling this gross all the time when I lived in Dar.

So after we head back, we'll start teaching again for a week and a half, but we will leave Magulilwa on May 12 (to visit Mario again on our way to Dar), so not a lot will get done. The school calendar is pretty stupid that way, but oh well. Hopefully it'll be a good final period. See you all soon!

Midterms

Well this week our students finished up midterms so now we're on a "spring break" of sorts. Supposedly they'll open the school next Wednesday, but Emily and I are banking on students not showing up until at least the weekend, which is when we'll head back.

We're going to spend the vacation in Morogoro with Mario again, which should be fun. It's getting into the "winter" again now, so hopefully it won't be so painfully hot (it's only 3 hours outside of Dar and barely cooler). This is the last time we'll leave Magulilwa until we leave for good! It's so crazy to think about.

On Wednesday (the last day of exams), we played a soccer game of boarding versus day students (I played with the boarders... we lost, but only got scored on AFTER I was out..). I asked Emily to bring my camera because I really hate taking pictures, but I love having them afterward, so she forced me to take a picture with all of them which was great. One of the notorious guys, George, encouraged everyone to strike a pose "kama Ulaya," like Europe. haha. I also got a couple good small group ones of some of those notorious players, including one of Crazy Charlie on the captain's shoulders. CC said I should sell the pictures in Minnesota. I expressed doubt that anyone would want to buy them ;)

Leaving

Yesterday we told all of our students we were leaving. I explained to my Form I class that they all needed to come back from Easter break early because I'd be leaving a week after that (we all know they otherwise would wait two weeks to show up and maybe still will). They asked where I would be going, and when I said the U.S., they all gasped. One girl said in Swahili "We will all go!" It was the cutest thing.

Then I had class with Form III, reviewing for their midterm. So once again we had to do "if clauses" and Normal Charlie (as opposed to Crazy Charlie) said "If Teacher Eliza was fat, she would look good."

Of course I said, "You mean I don't look good now, Charlie? That's not very nice." So he changed it to "she would look better." Hahaha. Then we told Form III and they were all sad, too. We took pictures with each of the Form III classes, and then some smaller group ones with the boys doing ridiculous poses. I'm going to miss them.

The White People

Well yesterday the white people came, and I guess they're only staying three days, but they did bring us chocolate! A ton of it!

Yesterday was hilarious for so many reasons. We weren't super excited about the WP coming because we didn't know them, but everyone expects us to show them around and stuff because we have this unspoken white people bond, or something. So, we didn't go out of our way to greet them. We had class with Form IIIA while they were touring around, and we would make comments to the kids like "Who are these white people?"

At one point, they looked like they were walking toward our classroom, and we said, more to each other than the kids, "Oh no, they're coming!" They all laughed at us, and asked if we were afraid. I just laughed. But later, one of the kids said "Madame, they are coming. They are in that class now." And when I looked confused, he said "I thought you were afraid." Hilarious! He was warning us in case we actually wanted to run away!

Then, we were reviewing "if" clauses, and one of the kids, Vicent, wrote "If the headmaster was tall, he would be crazy." Now, first of all I just laughed because it's a funny statement, but then I asked him why the headmaster would be crazy. Now, Vicent is a tiny kid. His voice hasn't changed and he's seriously I think 4'5" and really giggly. So, when I asked, he immediately starts laughing and says because tall people like Walter (a notorious Form IV) are crazy. So I asked him if all tall people, and by extension me, are crazy, and he between fits of laughter "Somewhat." I had fun the rest of the day telling other tall people what he said and they would all run after him.

New guests

So this week, one of the teachers at our school named “Dany” is hosting his cousin. Dany told us his cousin, Reagan, is applying to university in the U.S. So we asked Reagan about it, and discovered that he’s applying to Augsburg, Luther, and St. Olaf. How weird! I don’t know what his chances are of getting in, but we’re going to help him with his application later today.

The only other fun news I have is that Mario is coming soon! Hopefully we’ll see him on Tuesday. He only has a week off for spring break (all the Iringa universities have 3 weeks… figures), so he’ll only be here a few days, but it will still be a welcome change. Emily and I are very excited.

In other news, 3 more Americans are coming this week. They’re supposed to leave today from the US, so they might show up in Magulilwa around the same time as Mario. We don’t really have solid information on who they are, what they’ll be doing, or how long they’ll be staying. Hopefully they won’t disrupt our life balance too much. At least they’re bringing us chocolate.

Game Day

Form IIIA was 2 periods ahead of Form IIIB because of stupid schedule problems, so on Friday last week and Monday this week, Form IIIA had the pleasure of Game Day and an American English class while IIIB was catching up.

Game Day included 3-legged races, Simon Says, and the human knot. 3-legged races kind of failed, but Simon Says was a hit. We used it to practice action verbs and prepositions, and it was great to have the “but Simon didn’t say!” caveat thrown in to make them think. Emily and I acted quite juvenile when people did things wrong, pointing at them and yelling “OHH!!” so that the rest of the class would see them doing whatever it was wrong, and laughing at us and each other helped them get into the game actually. We’d never get away with that in a U.S. classroom, but here it works out.

The human knot went really well too. It has little to do with English, but it works on logic, something that sometimes is lacking from this education system. Groups stand in a circle, and grab the hands of two other people across the circle from them. Then they have to maneuver themselves so that they are untangled. That’s the best I can explain. But they did it really well, infinitely better than my Form I class did the first week of school. The best part was when a normally very quiet girl was totally taking charge of her group and telling them what to do (and rocking it), and then when they had finished she went around to other groups to help them.

Our American English class was completely hilarious. We taught things like “What’s up?” (which, as one of our students pointed out, makes absolutely no sense), and “How’s it going?” We also taught them to pronounce things in a more American way. Instead of saying “good morning,” we say something more like “guhmornin.” But by far the most hilarious part was explaining all the different ways to say “yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know.”

Yes. Yep. Yup. Yeah. Uh-huh. Mhmm.
No. Nope. Nah. Nu-uh. Uh-uh. Mm-mm.
I don’t know. I dunno. Idno. (and then the sound we make similar uh-uh, and the one similar to mm-mm, accompanied by a shoulder shrug).

We had them repeat all of them, and then all of the similar sounds (i.e. all the mm ones) in succession. A lot of them thought it was hilarious, especially “yep” and “yeah,” and now whenever we ask them at the end of class if they have understood, someone always answers with one of those. It’s pretty funny that now we sort of have a bunch of inside jokes with that class. Anyway, that’s all that I have for today.

Ok, elaborating...

I’m loving teaching Form I because it’s a perfect storm of me knowing what I’m doing this time around with their syllabus, and them just being awesome. They’re just totally willing to humor me in my seeming craziness, and will ask clarifying questions instead of giving me blank stares (ahem… Form IIIB). Just the fact that they will actually say “no” loud enough that I can hear it when I ask if they understand, is huge.

But in an interesting turn of events, half of Form III has turned out to be fun as well! We had an excellent period with Form IIIA this week.

We were teaching past tense “if” clauses, which are for “unlikely situations. First we had to teach the meaning of unlikely, so me being who I am, I had to give them some sassy examples like “if all the dodgers of Form IIIA came to class, that would be an unlikely event.” It was hilarious then to see the light bulbs going on because they would get this smirk like they were thinking “oh, wouldn’t it be funny if I said this?” When we asked for examples, then, some of the students threw some sass back at us, which I loved. One said “If boys at MASS wore skirts,” a delightful throwback to our essay lessons.

In the middle of the lesson, we taught the grammar of these “if” clauses by making chains, starting “If we all CAME to class, we WOULD LEARN more. If we LEARNED more, we WOULD PASS our exams,” etc. Changing those tenses was pretty tricky, but they understood the idea. To end the class, we did chains like that starting with “If I had a billion shillings” (the rough equivalent of a million dollars), and had a good time with their answers. My part of the chain ended up being “If I moved to Dar-es-Salaam, I would wear trousers every day.” Hehe.

Form I

I love Form I!!

This is a chorus that Emily gets to hear 4 days a week when i come back from teaching that class. I teach this class, as I said before, using a lot of Swahili (I'm a bilingual teacher! how cool is that?), and because the class is very elementary English, it's stuff that we can do fun activities with.

This week, I was teaching adjectives describing character, and I gave working definitions in swahili and then just had the kids act like a rude person, or a generous person, etc. and they ate it up. And all of them come to class EVERY DAY. It's amazing. Sorry time's running out, but hopefully I'll be able to elaborate next week.

Groupwork and boys wearing skirts

At the very end of last week, I gave my Form Is a test, which most did fairly well on, but some of the stuff everyone really needed to know 100%. So, I decided to spend all of Monday having the students work in groups of three going over their tests. I divided all of the kids up based on their score, and I had the person who scored the best be the "teacher." The teachers' responsibility was to ensure their two students could get 100% on a certain part of the exam (an impossible task in some cases, but they had to try).

I don't know why exactly, but when I've done groupwork before I've usually gotten mixed results. Some groups are very active and discussing, and others just sit there silently, staring at their assignment. But this time, (maybe because I chose the leaders) all groups but one had a very clear teacher and all were making progress. Only two of the leaders had gotten 100% on this particular part of the exam (and one got 100% on the whole thing. I love him.), but when I gave the class a quiz on the same material, all the leaders but one (so six) did. And most of the rest of the students improved significantly. A good teacher day.

With the Form IIIs, Emily and I are teaching persuasive essay writing. We started with introductions on Friday, and had to come up with some examples. While essay structure is a pretty boring subject (required by the syllabus), we were pretty desperate to get these lumps-on-the-long to pay attention. So, we decided to make our example essay about why boys should wear skirts for the school uniform. That woke them up, for sure.

Our points were pretty straight forward. 1.) The point of uniforms is for everyone to look the same, so the bottoms should also look the same. 2.) Skirts are cheaper to make. And 3.) Skirts stay cleaner longer because they don't touch the ground.

Needless to say, the students were pretty amused, but had to admit we'd made a good argument. The dynamic we have with them is so odd. They seemingly hate answering our questions, so I end up doing ridiculous things like this in class just to get a reaction out of them. And I know one of my professors would hope that us arguing for boys wearing skirts might encourage them to think about why boys don't wear skirts. I highly doubt this will happen, but you never know I guess.

Weekend Splurge

Last weekend Emily and I were living it up in town. We decided to splurge and stay at a place called the Lutheran Center, so we paid like $15 (instead of like $2) each and got hot western showers, western toilets, and omelets for breakfast! It was amazing. The shower was by far the best part. Definitely not a necessity, but nice once and a while for sure.

Now Emily and I just took on another class because another teacher left. So we’re team teaching Form III together, our old Form IIs. We were not super excited about this initially because we had so many behavioral problems with them last term, but we’re going to do our best. Now that we know how everything works, we might have a chance.

Netball news is that we found a staff person that loves to play the game, so she can coordinate the girls, and we just bought a ball. The court has yet to be made because last week, the universe decided Magulilwa did, in fact, need rain, so it rained almost every day. But only ever for like an hour each day, so the conditions are still pleasant.

We are certainly looking forward to being a bit busier with the additional classes, and we will hopefully be able to harness our creative juices for this class as well.

Miscellaneous

Man, I cannot believe we've only been back in Magulilwa for a week and a half! It feels like a month already.

I'm having a lot of fun with my Form Is, and Emily and I both feel much better prepared for everything this time around. We are being much more imaginative with our lessons, and it's fun being unorthodox. I had another teacher come into my classroom twice last week because he thought there was no teacher and the kids were just being loud. We were playing a game in which they would have to run up to the board and translate something I said.

I also got to play frisbee three times last week with some students, mostly because the soccer ball was broken. But it was really great because then a bunch of girls told me they were interested in sports, they were just intimidated by the boys. So, hopefully we'll get that netball court soon just so they can have their own space to play. Having the frisbee around is also really great because it can't be used for soccer, so the boys can't co-opt it for soccer like they do with netballs. We'll be pestering the person in charge a lot this week to see what needs to be done to get started on that court.

This "rainy season" has so far been really mild. Everything is green, so we know it must've rained a decent amount in December, but it's been dry all week this week. The villagers are worried about their crops because the rains came late this year, and January wasn't very wet. I guess January and March are supposed to be the rainiest, so now it might be a while before it starts to rain regularly again. We hope it won't be too dry.

Anyway, that's the miscellaneous update I have for this week.

Netball and New Freshmen

Well, Emily and I both started teaching this week, and there are so few students that I now only have one class of Form I and she's teaching one class of Form II. Things will probably change as more students trickle in, but I like teaching Form I by myself. They really don't speak English at all, so I've conducted class mostly in Swahili so far, which is fun for me. I will have to try to remember to use both languages.

Besides finding better ways to teach this semester, I'm also excited about the prospect of getting a netball ground for the girls. Netball is a really weird game that sort of resembles basketball, except there's no contact and no backboards. And you don't dribble, so you can't run with the ball.

Basically, a netball ground is really easy to make because you don't need cement. You just need two poles with hoops on top. I asked the director of the school while I was home about building one and whether there was money, and he said it wouldn't be a problem, and just to ask the TZ staff. As far as I can tell, the only reason the school doesn't have one is because no one's ever asked. Almost all of the staff is male, and it's usually girls and women who play netball, so no one's ever thought of it! I'm guessing. I'm not certain of course, but it seems that way.

So, we're excited to have something stick around here because of us.

I'm here -- again!

Hello again!

I'm currently in a city called Morogoro visiting my friend Mario. He is studying at a university here, so unfortunately he won't be in Magulilwa anymore. Emily and I will leave for Iringa tomorrow probably, but it's TZ, so making too many plans is just silly.

Morogoro is quite hot and humid, but not as bad as Dar. The mosquitoes seem to like Emily and I better than the Tanzanians for some reason... annoying. But apparently they won't be nearly as bad in Magulilwa. Being here has been great, but I'm looking forward to having my own space and not being sweaty all the time. It's like Minnesota in July right now, with no air conditioning. Except in this lovely internet cafe :)

Emily and I are pretty much ready to get back to Magulilwa, even though unforetold challenges will undoubtedly be waiting. As of Friday, there were 12 form I students and 25 form IIs. So we felt justified in being late, as school technically started last Monday. Hehe. But the whole environment will be different, as it's the rainy season now. Apparently everything is going to be green and muddy. It will definitely be interesting.

We will be two of six teachers that we know of right now, unless the school has been more aggressive in hiring new people than I'm expecting. And the headmaster got fired, so pretty much everything is going to be up in the air. What an adventure, right?? Haha. I would not be handling it like this had I not had a nice long break at home, but Emily and I both feel refreshed enough to handle it right now at least. Anyway, I think that's enough for now. Hope you're still enjoying the snow!