It's been a while...

...but I'm back with internet access.

I've started receiving mail at my new address - keep it up, I live for letters.

Teaching has started and my school is not adequate to hold all of it's students. There are about eighty kids each in my freshman (form I) and sophomore (form II)classes and over one hundred juniors (form III). Each class has a room to itself, but individual attention is impossible with so many students. The seniors (form IV) have it easy, there are only 27 of them and of those 27, only 6 are taking science classes. There's also a pretty extreme lack of teaching materials - my current project is churning out periodic tables for my chemistry classes. Class room management hasn't yet been a problem except for my form I's who sometimes get rowdy when I teach them English (there are hilarious accent differences). A few weeks ago, I was teaching them to tell time in English and walking around the class looking at an exercise I had assigned. One student opened his book to show me that he was done, but it fell open to a page literally covered in English swear words. I took it as evidence that he was interested in the language so I just laughed and told him to show me the exercises.

Class is sometimes like putting on a show because the language barrier forces me to act out things as well as explaining them in words. Demonstrating verbs is my favorite; I almost never give written definitions until I've dragged guesses out of my students by giving examples of (for instance) sliding. They already think I'm so strange that I feel I have an obligation to stir the pot.

Besides the challenges, there are many good things. New class rooms are being built and we can expect them to be finished in the near future because almost all of the materials have arrived. The trouble is not labor; part of school fees are building fees, which most people can't pay so they have to come and work (Tuesday is elder day). Also, the teachers are very motivated to teach and are genuinely interested in the students learning. It's very heartening to see that I won't spend my two years leading proverbial horses to water and waiting for them to drink.

Now I'm at a large conference on HIV/AIDS education in a very touristy city. It's very strange to see white people that I don't know. It's nice just to relax and take a shower - even if it is cold. The variety of food is also very pleasant - there is no pizza except in tourist-y areas and even cheese is hard to come by. It's amazing how I'm living in a country so different from my own and the thing I long for is cheese. It really illustrates the things that are important in life.

So I'm running out of time yet again and tomorrow I return to no-internet-land. A cryptic story before I go: For a while, there was a problem in my house. Jen (who has successfully moved, incidentally) and I were unable to solve it and while waiting for a solution to arrive on the Tanzanian end, we were forced to do something horrible. Something that involved sneaking out of the house under cover of darkness. With tools.

So, until next time, appreciate washing machines.