July 8th, 2008
Progress
It's been a while, that's for sure! Some of you might think I've fallen off the face of the earth, but in fact I'm still alive and kickin' here in Tanzania. Can't say exactly why I lost interest in posting here, but as I do have some things to write about, I figured it was about time to update this thing.
The biggest piece of news, I guess, is that I will be extending my Peace Corps service here in Tanzania for a third year. So instead of returning to the US for good this December, I will be returning in December of 2009. Why did I decide to do it? Partly because I have really enjoyed my time here, and also because the projects I have been working on will not be satisfactorily completed by the end of this year. In the end, I didn't want to leave things unfinished.
However, fret not - for all of you who are worried that you won't see me for another year and a half, I will actually be back to the US not one, but two (!) times before I complete my service here. All one-year extenders get a one month vacation back in the US between their second and third years, so I will be back from the beginning of December until the beginning of January. Just like last year, I will be visiting friends and family, and enjoying 24-hour electricity, fast internet, the fact that traveling somewhere by road doesn't involve sucking in a metric ton of dust, and all the other wonderful little perks of American life that we take for granted. Oh, and of course eating unspeakably heinous amounts of food.
My other trip back to the US will be from sometime in the middle of June 2009 until the first week of July. But for that trip, I will be bringing two guests with me - a fellow teacher here at school and her son (notice I said *her* son, so all you rumor-mongers out there who think I'm bringing a wife and child home with me can look elsewhere for gossip). They have been my next-door neighbors here at school since I arrived, and have been very much like family to me. The teacher has been like a second mother to me here in Tanzania (or I should say third, my host mother was like my second mother), and her son (who is 12) has been like the younger sibling I always wanted, but never had, when I was growing up.
These are people who mean a great deal to me, and who have made my life here so much more enjoyable. This isn't something that I would do for anyone, given both the amount of money (I'm paying for the plane tickets) and time (getting them passports and US visas) that it will take. We have already finished the application process for their passports - complete with having to give a bribe to a corrupt Tanzanian official - so those should be ready by the end of this month. Once that happens, we will begin the just-as-fun (but hopefully less corruption-prone) process of getting them US visas. Then I can finally purchase the plane tickets, and we will be set.
I hope the trip will be a wonderful experience for them, and I think I am really going to enjoy showing them around my country. Tanzanians generally love meeting new people, so if any of you would be interested in meeting them, please let me know and I'm sure we can arrange it. My neighbor (the teacher) can speak English pretty well, so communication with her isn't a problem. Her son's English is unfortunately non-existent (even though he's been learning it in school for almost 4 years), so I or his mother will need to translate into Swahili for him. I don't have anything like a definite itinerary yet, but basic ideas would be taking them to New York/Philadelphia/DC, the Jersey Shore, and of course to visit people. They will be staying at my mother's house - hopefully the dog behaves herself and doesn't try and bite them all the time.
Otherwise, two of the projects I've been working on here at school are finished - the grant I wrote for installing water pipes and sinks in our science lab was approved, and the work is done. So now our lab has running water (no more carrying water in buckets to the lab), and a safe disposal system for used chemicals (no more dumping them outside on the ground). I'm excited to start doing practicals with the students, in no small part because the prep and clean-up times will be significantly reduced.
The other project was acquiring more computers for the school, and that too is finished. We had applied for, and received, 20 computers from an NGO (non-government organization) in Moshi. The school also purchased another 15 computers for a rather cheap price (about $550) from a different NGO. So now the school has a total of 48 computers, a large improvement from the 13 that were here when I got here. And they're all Pentium 3/4 computers, meaning that we have modern computers to teach with, instead of 486/Pentium 1 computers that can't run much of anything. Plus, no more trying to teach a class of 50 kids with 13 computers, thank God.
Now that we have computers, the follow-up project is getting the internet cafe up and running at the school, which my headmaster has been wanting to do for some time. I've contacted the satellite company, so hopefully by the end of July everything should be set up.
Another piece of good news is that we finally have other teachers teaching computers. One teacher will be teaching Form 1, and a second teacher will be teaching Form 2 (both of which I refuse to teach because the Form 1/2 students' English is awful). I will still be teaching Forms 3/4/5/6, but the number of periods will be much less than it was last year (when I was teaching something like 34 periods a week at one point).
Finally, we've just about finished the grant application to get money to build a new kitchen here at the school. This is something I will be talking more about here on my website, because with this specific grant, anyone can donate money to the project via the Peace Corps website. It's a big project, but given the successes we've had here so far, I'm confident that it will go pretty smoothly.
I think that's about it for now, I hope all of you are enjoying your summer and had a nice Fourth of July. I guess I should send out a mass e-mail to prod people, but it would really be nice to hear from those of you who I haven't talked to in a while!