Saturday, January 31, 2009

 

Waiting for the rain [but not anymore!]

[this was written two weeks ago. Since then, it's started raining! My buckets are full of water from my roof. Farmers are crowding into agricultural stores in town to buy corn seeds. I can hear the sound of tractors at night, as for some reason people like plowing at night. My neighbors have started preparing their gardens, as have I. Tunashukuru sana kwa mvua]

The farmers here depend on rain. There's no irrigation, and even the village water pipes run
badly when it hasn't rained for a while.

Usually,there are two rainy seasons: the short rains in December, and the longer rains in March.
The short rains should last most of the month of December, and maybe into January. They're long
enough that one can plant and harvest beans before the land becomes too dry.

This year, it began raining at the beginning of December. The water faucets started to run well.
The farmers plowed their fields and planted beans.

By mid-December, it had stopped raining. By January, the bean plants were all dead. No one harvested
beans this year.

It's dry and dusty in my village now. The water only comes out of the faucet quickly in the mornings.
Yesterday it almost rained: the sky grew dark and it got windy, so windy my formerly-thriving papaya seedling
blew over. But then the sun burned through the clouds, and there was no rain.

Now the time for planting corn is coming. The farmers in my area have usually planted
their corn, mbaazi, and sunflowers by the beginning of February. What if it hasn't rained by February? For
a farmer, crops are food for their family, and crops are money for their children to go to school. If it doesn't
rain this year, most of the people in my village will be in trouble.

Tunamwomba Mungu. At every church in my village, from the Catholics to the Lutherans to the Pentecostals,
people will be praying for rain.

 

The first day of school

[note: this was written two weeks ago, but the Internet connection wasn't good enough to post it at the time]

School opened on Tuesday (Jan 13) to very few students. This is normal. Everyone knows teachers don't
teach the first week, so why come the first week? And of course, all the teachers know that students don't
come the first week. So why teach the first week? If only half the students are in class,
you'll just have to teach that lesson again.

It's an endless cycle: students come late because teachers wait to start teaching. Teachers wait
to start teaching because students come late. At my school, it's not too bad: most of the students
are usually there by the middle of the second week. Universities may wait over three weeks until
enough students show up to start.

So there was no teaching on the first day of school. The students spent most of the morning doing maintenance:
cleaning the classrooms, pruning bushes, watering plants. In mid-morning, the academic master posted a notice
to all teachers: let us start teaching even if the students are few. Okay, I thought. I'll
return the biology final exams to my students and go over the answers. I started to gather my
papers together. Then the school bell, an old metal car piece hanging from a tree, rang. Or rather,
was banged on by a student. Bing bing bing bing bing bing bing! If the bell rings many times, it means there's
an assembly.

We all gathered under the trees behind the school. The students sat on the ground, while the teachers sat in
chairs facing them. The headmaster addressed the students about various aspects of the new school term.
After a while, I started drifting off. Then suddenly the headmaster was saying,'Maybe Kristen doesn't know about
this--do people do this in America?"

Me (a bit peevishly): Watu ni watu tu. Wanafanya hivi Marekani pia. People are people, they
do this in America too.

Everyone started laughing. I don't know what I said Americans do, but apparently it was funny.
Maybe witchcraft? (Part of the headmaster's speech had to do with the students' bad behavior and the fact that students
had been paying local witch doctors to make charms that would cause the teachers to ignore their
bad behavior).

We had lunch after the assembly. Usually, students bring bags of corn and beans to school as
part of their school fees. So usually, lunch is a combination of corn and beans: either ugali and beans
or makande (corn kernels boiled and mixed with beans).

This year, no one has beans. Beans are usually planted in December during the short rains. Well, this year
they were planted at the beginning December, when it started raining. And they all died by the end of December, when the
rains had already stopped. The students were told that instead of beans, they could bring mbaazi (pigeon peas),
which had been harvested back in August.

So we had a lunch of ugali and mbaazi. There were two periods after lunch, but few and scattered students. I decided to wait
another day to start teaching.

(A summary of the rest of the week: taught unusually small classes on Wednesday--20 students instead of 40 per class. On Thursday,
all the students who hadn't paid their school fees were sent home, and my classes only had 10 students. I decided not to teach. On
Friday, I had about 12 students per class, and divided them into small groups to draw posters. Maybe next week I'll have enough students
to start teaching new topics?)

Monday, January 12, 2009

 

A new school term begins!

Habari za siku nyingi?

Yes, it's been a while since I've last written. I've been traveling for almost a month now, and will finally be heading back to my house this afternoon. This will, unfortunately, be a very short entry, as the car to my village leaves in twenty minutes.

First: pictures! Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgtanzania to see some pictures from a Christmas hike up Mt. Hanang.

Second: a brief summary of my holiday travels. I visited a Tanzanian friend's village near Babati, then headed over to a volunteer's house in a village near the town of Katesh on Christmas eve. I spent Christmas climbing Mt. Hanang with another volunteer (we got near the top but didn't quite make it due to a storm). Then we headed to his site in Dodoma, rested a few days there, and spent New Years' with a volunteer in Mpwapwa. After some beautiful hiking in the hills of Mpwapwa, I headed to Morogoro to visit my host family for a day. Then it was on to Dar es Salaam, for a week of Peace Corps mid-service training and medical exams. And now? I'm back at my site, and school starts tomorrow morning. It's going to be a quick adjustment from traveling to teaching...though given normal delays in student arrival, I probably won't be teaching until next week.

Third: I'll be continuing with my students from last year, meaning I'll be teaching Form 3 chemistry and Form 4 biology. Form 3 chemistry covers titrations, moles, stoichiometry, electrochemistry, and fuels; Form 4 biology has genetics, growth/mitosis, ecology, and evolution. And since it's Form 4, the last year of secondary school, I'll be trying to review everything from previous years as well so my students will be ready for their exams.

I'll do my best to upload some travel stories and updates on teaching in the next few weeks. I hope everyone had a great New Year!

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