Saturday, 22nd January, 2011

We've had a crazy week filled to the brim with trips to town, classes at SEGA, and planning for India. It has been very productive to say the least! We have managed to come up with a basic itinerary for India and booked some of the longer train tickets to alleviate some of the stress that goes along with traveling. We have planned for some amazing adventures including a week up to the Pakistan border, a relaxing beach holiday in Goa and a three week ramble in Rajasthan. It's all very exciting! We will be very sad, however, to leave our girls in Morogoro and are looking forward to one great last week with them! This Wednesday saw the arrival of the new non-formal class, and after some very nervous introductions, each girl was taken by the hand by a Form One student and given a tour of the school. Smiles were abundant and everyone had a good time taking pictures and getting to know their new sisters. As they toured, we were busy reading A Cat In A Hat by Dr. Seuss to the Form Twos and discussing the importance of communication. This new school year has brought on a whole new level of focus for most of the students, and everyone seems to be motivated to learn and study hard. Later that day we went out to town with Fran to celebrate her daughter Gemma's birthday but when we arrived at Ricky's cafe, it had just shut! Instead we headed to Oasis to have a cocktail but were informed that we couldn't have cocktails until after 7pm! We settled instead for chocolate milkshakes and a cold Tusker beer.
On Thursday we had a lovely day with the Form Ones singing a song they had made up about the New Year to send to the girl scout group Global Girls Unite in Pennsylvania. We then gathered all of the girls into the new cafeteria and taught recorders. The new students took to the recorders very quickly and we managed to play Hot Cross Buns all together and sing it! Mary Had A Little Lamb is coming along, but we still find it hard to get the girls to understand and remember the line "whose fleece was white as snow"!
Friday was spent in town - we finally managed to get to Ricky's cafe to have real ice cream and a lovely lunch of "tomato, cheese and onion melt" which turned out to be every vegetable imaginable wrapped up in an omelette - not quite what we had imagined but good nonetheless! We managed to post our letters and also made a trip to the sokoni to stock up on fruit and veg. We also managed to find a CD shop that had Tanzanian music - so we bought some to take home with us! We arrived back home at around 4pm and found that we had no power. Again. It seems to be a new pattern of the power going off mid-afternoon and coming back on for breakfast. This means we spend most nights cooking or reading by candlelight and without much to do. Yesterday we'd had enough - we had to do something! We decided to head down to the bar down the road and have a cold beer. We had walked past there at night earlier in the week and had noticed that they had installed a projector and speakers to play Bongo Flava music videos. We each ordered a Safari baridi and waited for the videos to start up. Soon after our arrival, we were joined by the bar man who had decided we needed company, and spoke not a word of English. It took us a lot of smiling and nodding before we managed to get him to speak pole pole (slowly) and we could actually grasp some of what he was saying. It turns out he is a DJ for one of the clubs in town and was responsible for the video projector. We managed to get him to turn on our favourite music and he even lent us one of his CDs of local music that you can't get anywhere! We came home, ecstatic with our new music acquisitions and spent a good time dancing around and eating popcorn!
We have spent some time today in town and are now relaxing before going to SEGA with Polly to have a sleepover with the girls. We are bringing a lot of things to do - movies, music, arts and crafts, and a lot of popcorn for our movie marathon. We can't wait to see the girls!

Eating Chicken Tikka Masala with Fran and Renee at Oasis

The road to our house when it rains = muddy feet

Our little Kahawa

Before his trip to the vet

Watching Global Girls Unite Video

The girls after receiving photos from Sandra

We babysat Mustafa's kid Abdul

The girls in their dorm

Fran teaching the non-formals

Our Girls Moving In

So last Sunday our girls moved into their new dormitory and they are still ecstatic about being able to sleep at the school! We have had a great couple of days with them teaching and have been getting them to listen to songs and then given them the lyrics with gaps which they have to fill in correctly. We have heard Justin Bieber sing 'Baby' about a hundred times today alone. The girls love it though, and the Form Twos have really enjoyed listening to I Gotta Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas. We even managed to upload the video to Baby to show the Form Ones today which made us very popular indeed! Yesterday was our halfway point of the gap year, and we can't believe a) how quickly it has gone by, and b) how much we have done! Anyway, here are some pictures of the girls moving in...

Some very excited girls and their new dorm

Because our internet works...

The SEGA girls in the sea on a field trip to Bagamoyo

Cooking something off a website. No clue why the face paints are there. Food colouring?

The graduating class with headmistress Salome, Dec, 2010.

A quick shot during one of our promo video shoots while waiting for the wind to die down

Our house!

SEGA school, Mkundi.

We made them Congratulations posters for their Graduation

Teaching in action...!

Jumanne. Tuesday.

Morogoro Bus Station (courtesy Elena's Dad)

Elena, Camilla and Babu Jona

So our first day teaching we were supposed to only teach three classes (we say only, but it’s actually quite a lot). We ended up with five.  We arrived in time for tea break and managed to wolf down a peanut butter roll, and a mug of deliciously sweetened chai before settling down to meet with a new member of the staff, Naomi. We are lucky to have two new staff with us at SEGA this year – a guidance counsellor, Pauline, and a communications and library teacher, Naomi. We were supposed to help set up the new sponsorship program and library with Naomi, but were called in at last minute to sub for one of the classes as the teacher was caught up in a meeting. We were subbing as Kiswahili teachers. If standing in front of the class trying to jumble a few Swahili words together while they’re all fluent isn’t nerve-wracking, then we’re not sure what is! Somehow we managed to come up with an impromptu lesson plan, though, and got them to write about New Year’s Promises (we didn’t know the word for Resolution in Kiswahili). It seemed to work out, and pretty soon the girls were busy crafting sentences about how much they want to learn English, or help the new girls at SEGA, or study all the way to graduation without any interruption. We then asked them to come up with three mwisho or goals, that could help them build up to their eventual ‘promise’. This is where things got a little mixed up. Some of the girls knew exactly what to do, and some of them ended up with sentences like Nakupenda Helen na Camel – I love you Helen (Elena) and Camel (Camilla) and Baadaye nitaenda kula ugali – later I will go and eat ugali. Well, at least some of them got it! After a quick lunch of ugali and sauce in the brand new cafeteria, we got back to work on creating a library sign-out book and organised the craft supplies. Later we had a double block with the Form Twos and made postcards about our holidays to remind them of their English. Tomorrow is a public holiday, which is very welcomed in this household – Fran has been working non-stop and is tired and Elena and I have a lot to organise as well. We will, however, still make a special visit to the school to make friendship bracelets with them as we know how much they love doing it and we just got new supplies!           

Sokoni - the Morogoro Market

Our lil puppy Kahawa

Road to the tailors

            

Back to School!

Well, we don't have lovely new outfits, but it's back to school for us! School officially started today, and yesterday we watched thirty ridiculously excited Form One girls each carry a new mattress and pillow to their new dorm room. We almost wanted to move in with them - they made it look like so much fun! We are still teaching a lot of classes for our last three weeks - around four hours of teaching a day. It's great! We had a really good time with our families these past two weeks - Elena headed to Jambiani in Zanzibar for Christmas, and then a safari in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater, and Camilla did the safari first then went to South Africa for New Years. We both had a really good time on safari and saw so many animals up close, and we even got to radio chat each other when our safaris overlapped! But now, after the luxury tented camps, heaps of delicious buffet food and taxis (thanks mama na baba!), it's back to the real world of budget travelling. Our power is out, our showers are cold and we have cockroaches. But we're still very happy to be in Morogoro and home again. We are planning our trip to India and trying to tackle the Lonely Planet while still in holiday mode. We managed to get our Indian visas after much trouble with the embassy. Basically they leave a forty-five minute window in which to pick up your passport, and they arrive half an hour late to that. And the dalla-dallas don't care that you have an urgent appointment and insist on taking ridiculous routes and taking the time to squeeze as many limbs into the bus as possible. The trouble with the Indian visas did, however, bide us time for a (not really) well-earned beach holiday in Kipepeo (butterfly) beach for a few days. We stayed in a tent on the sand with just a mattress and both spent the entire time reading and lounging in the shade. We had expected to swim but both managed to get stung by jellyfish and spent more time running out of waves screaming than enjoying the ocean. Nevertheless, it was relaxing. We also got to spend one last day with our friends Sadie and Belle before their departure back to Vancouver (we'll miss you!) We went khanga and kitenge shopping (big mistake seeing as our bags are already full) and went to a sugar cane juice stand. After a long (8 hour when it should have been 2.5) journey back to Morogoro, in which we saw an overturned bus due to the storm (eee scary), we are ready to embrace our last three weeks in Morogoro. Bring it on!