September+October

“Ba de ya – say do you remember
Ba de ya – dancing in September
Ba de ya – golden dreams were shiny days”
Well unfortunately my September wasn’t as joyous as Earth Wind and Fire’s.

Week 0: Found out Karl, room mate from sophomore year in college, passed away after drowning in a lake I’ve swam in before. RIP. Horrible way to find out too–was at Bustani TC fixing their solaris computers (by reinstalling the server software) when I decided to go on facebook to kill some time [install was taking forever...] only to find my entire facebook wall filled with “RIP Karl” messages. So did a google search, found out, and here we are. A really downer. Talked to some friends about it and felt a little better. Forced me to re-examine this peace corps and the rest of my life thing, since before I was operating on the principle that after these years of PC, I’d be able to make up lost time with my friends. Clearly, not always the case. The conclusion I reached was that I better make sure what I’m doing here is sustainable, so that when I do return to the US I can look back and say, “I did something; I didn’t waste 2 years,” or something. This was at the end of August.

Week 1-2 of September: ToT in Morogoro, planned PST and PCV of Week logistics, met some new old volunteers, like the girl in Tanga region who lives at 1600 metres elevation; also met a volunteer from the deep south, and re-met sarah r. of Tanga, who I hadn’t seen since my PST, where she was a PCV of the Week twice. The rest of the the PCV of Wks were all from my class, including my buddy Jeff who’s in the deep south. It turned out that he and I would share weeks in Moro, which is kind of cool since he used to be in my CBT too. ToT, Training of Trainers, lasted two weeks, which was unusual. It was kind of cool meeting all the LCFs again, but this time I actually spoke their language… I don’t really notice this at site, but it turns out that in the last year, I’ve gotten a bit better at my Kiswahili comprehension.

Week 2: VAC meeting in Dar: Got reimbursed laki moja between food, board, and travel costs. Was my first VAC meeting, it’s kind of like student government in uni or high school. We talked about various things, including pikipiki riding, the lack of new volunteers’ housing, the lack of new volunteers in singida, etc. I doubt if anything really gets resolved in these meetings, but I guess I’ll find out later. At the very least, it was cool seeing the Ed people in VAC, as some of them it’s been almost a year since we last saw each other.

Week 3-4: @Site because they changed my likizo times.
The last two weeks were supposed to be vacation, but that got shifted back two weeks to coincide with NECTA exam schedules, which were shifted to November due to election madness.
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October, aka “big things poppin, little things stoppin”

October went by in a blur. The first two weeks were taken up by midterm break, during which we were all kicked off of school grounds as private candidates took their form 4 NECTA exams at my school. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea why they used my school rather than a large church like in previous years…
During break, I bounced around Morogoro and Dodoma, went to visit S****** and L******, and made a guest appearance at the Ed PST in Moro to introduce PSDN and talk about diversity in PC/Tz, along with Jayce, a health volunteer in Singida, and Arlene, the mzungu PCMO. It was really cool meeting all the new people, and our session, short as it was, seemed to go over quite well.

Once again, it took the students about a week to trickle back in after the break, so the third week was wasted. I think about 15 students showed up in the one class I had any students, out of what should’ve been 80+ students. Syllabus woes (not enough time to finish despite my best laid plans). I mostly spent my time trying to write my annual exams. I’ve spent a total of at least 12 hours now writing those exams, as they need to be comprehensive, encourage critical thinking, and in “NECTA style” format. Also, they can’t be too hard, since apparently I’m not really ‘allowed’ to fail my students. Yeah… Oh, over the weekend, Kikwete visited Mpwapwa for CCM rally. I miss it intentionally due to PC rules about not being able to go take a look-see. Apparently he had 3 Apache helicopters to ferry him. I wonder what it feels like to have those multi-million dollar vehicles in such an impoverished country. Once again, I can’t make political comments, so I need to censor myself and stop there. I will say though, that I felt particularly mshamba when the helos came, because I couldn’t figure out what on earth was making the motor sounds–not loud enough for pikipiki, the ground wasn’t rumbling enough (so not a bus…). Oh rural Tz, how you’ve changed me.
Oh, we have a travel ban in place–we’re on ‘standfast,’ which basically means we can’t really leave site. Luckily, PCV of the Week makes me exempt from this. It’s just the few days immediately before and after the Tz elections.
A note on elections: Apparently all of the elections happen at the same time: President and members of parliament–which means crazy campaigning since literally every elected position is up for “grabs.” Of course, this also means the infrequent elections lead to lessened accountability…but I’m not allowed to make political commentary on this blog so I’ll stop it there.

The last week of October turned out to be research project week for the second year students at my school, and microteaching for the first year students. This meant that the 2A classes I taught didn’t meet, as the students were all busy writing research proposals or out and about my district doing said research. However, I was able to teach some: The rest of my department is extremely behind in the syllabus, so rather than do microteaching for ICT, they’re using the alloted time to teach. I used the allotted time to review for the annual exam, as the week of review I will be gone for my PST sessions in Moro (again). From review, it appears the retention rate is much higher than I initially expected, which is extremely encouraging… Hopefully this means fewer F’s this year.