Tanzania!: KA CHINI means SIT DOWN!

Jambo again my friends! I had another great week this week here in Tanzania! Me, Kate, and Heather started teaching at Kitulizo this week! It is going to be an ongoing project for the rest of the summer! Jessie was in Loliando this last week doing a health project but she will be joining us in the future. So the kids at Kitulizo are from 3 to 6 years old and they are CRAZY! We love to teach them though because deep down they are little sweet hearts. There is another volunteer that has taught there for around 3 months now, her named is Verity and she is from Australia. This week we helped her teach Monday thru Wednesday and then Thursday and Friday she was sick so we had to teach by ourselves! It was interesting because we don’t know how to control the kids as well as Verity does since we aren’t familiar with classroom Swahili language. I did have our friend translate some words like “be quiet” and “don’t bite” but when I say it in the class the kidsjust stare and continue misbehaving! Haha…it was funny on one of the days a little boy named Widson told Mama Anna, the founder of this orphanage, that Teacher Verity knows Swahili, but the others don’t. I guess that would be why they don’t feel the need to obey us. Anyway, I guess I haven’t explained Kitulizo very well yet. It is an orphanage but while the older kids that live there are at secondary school they hold primary school for free for kids who come from poorer families. So we go and teach from 8:30 to 11:00 every morning. We teach mostly colors, letters, numbers, and simple mathematics to the kids. There are around 20 kids and since they are a range of ages it is hard because their learning is on all different levels. Our plan for the future is to split the class in half. Me and Heather were thinking that once we split the kids we will teach the younger kids two letters per day and have them practice writing them. Most all the kids know the ABC’s but the younger ones have a hard time recognizing which letter is which when they are asked. Also, because the older kids know the answers and shout them out, the younger kids don’t get the special help and attention they need right now. So, I am excited to be teaching at Kitulizo now! The kids are so cute and they seriously make me happy every day!

With all my time I wasn’t at Kitulizo this week I was working on a sign project for Green Eden, the school we did IOL training at last week. Emmanuel, the director of Green Eden, asked me to paint him a sign to put on the road leading up to the school. Everything here is such a process because we are new to Africa and because we don’t speak Swahili. So on Monday we went on a paint, brush, and board hunt. We found paint and brushes fairly quickly in Arusha with the help of a friend we made in a souvenir shop. And we were able to have the sign made from a place right next to Family and Friends we like to call The Wood Place. Heather and I were pretty proud of ourselves for being able to find all this stuff on our own! : ) So I have started painting the sign and will finish tonight because we are going back to Namanga tomorrow to award our students their certificates and need to also drop off their sign.

We did a lot of other fun stuff this week too! On Monday at dinner at Family and Friends we set up Heather J’s slackline! It is seriously hard but I got better at it the more I practiced! Another thing a lot of us have enjoyed this week is reading Sweet Valley High: Elizabeth’s Secret Diary. This started out as a joke when I started reading the first few pages out loud for a group of us, but now we actually want to know what is going to happen and read from it almost every night! It is seriously a stupid book…but you know how cheesy things tend to hook you. It is comparable to a lifetime movie; predictable yet totally enjoyable. Another fun adventure we had this week we did yesterday…the snake park! It took over an hour to get there on a daladala but it was totally worth it! We saw snakes (obviously), tortoises, crocodiles, some birds, and a baboon! There were crocodiles at every age…little babies and then full size ones! They were so ugly but fun to see. We got to hold a little snake, which was neat but totally nasty!!! I mean, I don’t even like to pet dogs really so touching the snake was almost too much for me. After we were done looking at the animals we walked through a Maasai Museum that was right there in the same area and then we….RODE CAMELS! Now, I have ridden a camel before, when I was in Israel, but this time it was hilarious because it didn’t make sense. Why are there even camels in Tanzania? We don’t know! But it was like a dollar so we did it!

Alright, that is my week this week! Here are some pics!