June

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted. The real irony about blogging, for me at least, is that it’s a great activity to pass the time (ie, when there’s not much going on) but when I’m busy it’s one of the first activities that gets the axe. The irony lies in the fact that when there’s time to blog there’s not much material to blog about, whereas when there’s stuff to blog on, there’s rarely time. Unfortunately, my implementation of the third goal of peace corps, telling Americans about Tanzania, relies heavily on blogging. I’ve really sucked at keeping this thing updated… Between guilt trips, emails from my mother and friends, and a fortunate circumstance today, I find myself with a lot of free time. What better way to use that than to update this thing.

The fortunate circumstance I’m referring to is, of course, school-wide elections for dorm leaders, president, secretary, etc of the student body. It kind of irked me earlier as I had been pumped for a full day’s worth of teaching (around 14 periods, with a lot of weird classes doublestacked (for example, first year diploma and second year certificate, first and second year diploma, and other permutations; they’re all on different syllabi and each class is at a different place within the syllabus–extremely hectic to be running between different classes, but a ton of fun when it works, and the students seem to enjoy the groupwork/activities that I have to implement to make this work). Basically for days like this I spend a ton of time planning the night before to make it work. Anyway, I was pretty annoyed at first, but it gradually dawned on me that not teaching meant I could get other stuff done, like finally start making a scheme of work (woot for mostly useless paperwork…maybe if the ICT syllabus wasn’t such a joke), making more lesson plans, doing secondary projects, and oh hello blog!

Random aside: Tanzanians really have a hard time distinguishing between R’s and L’s when they speak (and thus write also…). When I asked a student why no one was showing up for class (yes, I found out there were no classes TODAY; this seems to be a rather common problem at my school and no longer bothers me. Apparently, it’s true for most schools PCVs are at), he told me it was due to school erections. *Doubletake* And sometimes for punishment for not doing some chore or other, the students are sent to dig and fill whores around the school with their bare hands, as my school doesn’t engage in corporal punishment.

Anyway, June.
June was an eventful month, I spent a lot of time away from site. After my excursions in May, I stayed in Mpwapwa for a grand total of maybe 13 days before heading out on the road again. This time I went to Dar es Salaam, for all intents and purposes the New York+DC of Tanzania for PSDN (peer support and diversity network) training, which lasted a week. Training was great, we learned a lot of useful things to help support our fellow volunteers, mostly dealing with mental health related topics. We met the new PCMOs, both of whom were really nice and caring. I’ll miss the old Tanzanian PCMO though, she had some really interesting stories about PC/Tz since she was with the organisation for so long.
I took a leisurely pace to get back home (read my other blog for details that PC wouldn’t necessarily approve of), as 6 days later I would get back on a bus to go to Iringa for Community Theatre training. Community theatre training wasn’t as fun as I expected, although in terms of PC trainings, it was somewhat fun. We learned how participatory theatre works in Tanzania, and how to get a group started. Ideally these groups would address hot topics like HIV/AIDs in the villages, etc, and would be consisted of our counterparts and our community members. Meh. That was a two week training, and ended at the end of June. At least I got to see some friends I hadn’t seen since swearing in again…

I wonder what it’d be like to be in a small PC country, like Costa Rica or Lesotho, where all the volunteers can see each other on a pretty regular basis every few weekends, instead of Tanzania (particularly for Ed volunteers stuck on dissimilar school schedules) and being two or more days away, thus having to rely somewhat on these training sessions to meet up…