Sunday, May 11, 2008
On the road again
It strikes me as ironic that the Peace Corps wants us to stay at our sites and integrate with our communities, and that they stress over and over again at seminars that we should stay at our sites and integrate. I want to stay at my site and integrate. Really, I do. You can ask my fellow PCVs: they call me a site rat because I never come and visit them. But while I would be perfectly happy to stay at my site, eat the now ripe corn from my garden, and continue keeping an eye on the papaya tree that's about to have ripe fruit which will probably be stolen while I'm gone, the Peace Corps keeps dragging me away from my site for training.
And so, I'm on the road again. This time I'm going to Dar es Salaam for training. I wasn't particularly happy to get this news: I don't like Dar, partly because it's humid and partly because I'm not a fan of big cities. But since I'm travelling anyway, I do plan to enjoy myself, catch up on errands, and take full advantage of the free Internet at the Peace Corps office. It should be fun catching up with all the other PCVs who will be in Dar, some of whom I haven't seen since the end of November, and some of whom I've never met.
The timing of the travelling is unfortunate: we only have three weeks of teaching left in the semester, followed by a week of finals. Since there are no substitute teachers in Tanzania, I've spent much of the past week preparing work for the students to do while I'm going. On Wednesday morning, during the 1.5 hour religion period, I biked to the catholic mission to get some notes I'd written photocopied for my chemistry students. For my biology students, I gathered together all the biology books I could find, as well as 18 pieces of flip chart paper, 18 markers, and a large amount of masking tape. On Friday I divided these materials between my three classes. If all goes well, I'll come back to walls covered with beautiful pictures of the eye, ear, skin, endocrine system, and reflex arcs. (If all doesn't go so well, there will be no pictures, all my marker pens will be dead, and I'll never be able to recover my books. I expect the true outcome to be somewhere in the middle.)
I'm currently in Moshi paying for internet, so I'll leave this update/rant for now. More news and stories coming when I reach the free internet in Dar.
And so, I'm on the road again. This time I'm going to Dar es Salaam for training. I wasn't particularly happy to get this news: I don't like Dar, partly because it's humid and partly because I'm not a fan of big cities. But since I'm travelling anyway, I do plan to enjoy myself, catch up on errands, and take full advantage of the free Internet at the Peace Corps office. It should be fun catching up with all the other PCVs who will be in Dar, some of whom I haven't seen since the end of November, and some of whom I've never met.
The timing of the travelling is unfortunate: we only have three weeks of teaching left in the semester, followed by a week of finals. Since there are no substitute teachers in Tanzania, I've spent much of the past week preparing work for the students to do while I'm going. On Wednesday morning, during the 1.5 hour religion period, I biked to the catholic mission to get some notes I'd written photocopied for my chemistry students. For my biology students, I gathered together all the biology books I could find, as well as 18 pieces of flip chart paper, 18 markers, and a large amount of masking tape. On Friday I divided these materials between my three classes. If all goes well, I'll come back to walls covered with beautiful pictures of the eye, ear, skin, endocrine system, and reflex arcs. (If all doesn't go so well, there will be no pictures, all my marker pens will be dead, and I'll never be able to recover my books. I expect the true outcome to be somewhere in the middle.)
I'm currently in Moshi paying for internet, so I'll leave this update/rant for now. More news and stories coming when I reach the free internet in Dar.
# posted by Kristen @ 2:00 AM 
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