Hello all! It feels like a very long time since I've written to you all. I'm at my site now (been here about two weeks) and have been busy setting things up, and learning my way around a new school and community, and cleaning my house, and about twenty million other things.
As I told you last time, I'm living in Singida region. The provincial capital is a town that is also conveniently named Singida. I'm in a little village that's about a two hour bus ride from town. Physically, we're actually not all that far from town, but the road is bad (meaning unpaved, super bumpy, and littered with sand pits) so it takes awhile. It's a rural area so the houses are really spread out (lots of room for farms, cows, goats, sheep, and what not), but the 'village center' is compacted into roughly two rows containing a handful of shops, a bar/restaurant, a tailor, a church, a mosque and a few other buildings that run some sort of business that can't be easily observed /my Swahili isn't good enough to grasp yet.
Then my school is about a 15 minute walk from the village center, along a path that probably gets treaded more frequently by animals than by people. It's a relatively small school, with only about 400 students spread across four years. But they're not evenly distributed, so there's about 120 students in form one (equivalent to freshmen year of high school), but only about 50 students in form four (equivalent to senior year of hs). And they aren't split up into different groups at all, so you teach all the students in a form at once. Which isn't too bad if you've got for three or four, but with forms one and two....well it's a challenge. The whole country's got a severe teacher shortage and my school's definitely been effected. We've got five teachers, including me. And each form studies nine subjects. So each teacher ends up wearing a lot of hats. I'm teaching English to all four forms, and will probably add a form or two of math when we start the new school year in January (the school year follows the calendar year here, which makes so much sense) and I'm slightly less clueless about everything.
And finally my house! I'm livng at the school, which is what all the teachers at the school, and most in Tanzania, do. Since there is a teacher shortage, the government pumps out new teachers (usually young, single men/women) and then assigns them to different schools across the country. And it's a lot easier for them to pick up and move to a new school if there's teacher housing there waiting for them. I've got a pretty big living room, and three bedrooms. Then I've also got my own enclosed courtyard, off of which is a choo (squat toilet), and outdoor bathing room, kitchen, and storage room. So plenty of space. The house has concrete walls and floors and a tin roof, which makes cool noises when the wind picks up (it's really windy here). There's no electricity or running water in my house, or the village for that matter. I have water delivered by a guy with an oxen cart (like Oregon Trail!) and use lights that run on batteries (which are called 'Chinese lights') at night. The house was completely empty except for a bed and a table when I arrived, so it felt kinda barren. But it's slowly starting to feel more homey as I get more and more settled in.
On an unrelated note, I touched a dead lion. It was eating people's cows so the authorities shot it. And then I convinced the men with large guns to let the amazed white person touch it. It's paws were as big as my head. No joke.
Ok, well I'm sick of writing, wihch probably means that you are sick of reading. Stay tuned for next time, where I'll probably devote a considerable amount of time to the subject you've all been waiting to hear me complain about: bugs. Though I think more meaning is conveyed by the word in Swahili - mdudu. Till then.
"I ain't in it for the glory of anything at all, and I sure ain't in it for the wealth. But I'm in it till it's over and I just can't stop..."
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