April
Well it’s been a while since my last blog post… Almost 2 months?
So lets just hit the highlights:
I spent the beginning of April winding my way back to site after having spent the end of March in Manyara fixing up computers and setting up labs at a couple secondary schools. The second week of April, my students returned from either break or btp (it’s hard to keep track of which one). Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the third week of April that my school came out with a time table for teaching schedules. This of course, conflicted with my In-Service Training. Apparently it was possible to switch trainings between the March and April ISTs, but no one told me of this, so I ended up missing classes. Oh well. For better or worse it also turned out that my counterpart wasn’t even scheduled to teach ICT, and the rest of the ICT department were out of town at various other conferences and trainings! Those poor students got to take their final national exams the first week of May, so I bet they were pretty pissed off too.
IST was two weeks long, the first week mostly consisted of the volunteers getting together and swapping stories/complaints and reflecting back on the first 4 months of service. The second week was with our counterparts, and we did a lot of HIV/AIDs related activities. Given how I feel about HIV/AIDs, this was a real drag…Kind of depressing to spend 8+ hours a day talking about how people die too.
There were only 2 really memorable parts of PEPFAR, one involving a rep from MoEVT, and the other involved a Tz medical doctor–who somehow started talking about female circumcision as a way to help prevent HIV. Ummm…
Good parts of IST:
1. Seeing everyone again, well, almost everyone, except for the people in the south and the A-level teachers
2. Digging in some dirt making a garden
3. Meeting other people’s counterparts
4. Learning how to write grants
5. Food was pretty awesome 
6. Talked with the CD about my placement and discussed teaching possibilities in the future, including possible reassignment, teaching at secondary school near TTC, going to the hospital and essentially becoming a health volunteer, traveling a lot
Bad parts of IST:
1. see above
2. 2 weeks straight of training was a bit too much
3. It was in my banking town–ie I didn’t get to see any other part of Tz
Oh, and before I forget, I bought a solar panel+light so now my choo has lighting. Yay! for not having to pee in the dark ever again. I also started making plans to go to Kili region on a work related trip to set up a few computer labs and teach the PCVs up there how to manage labs/repair computers…Tentatively set at the end of May.
