African Time

 For a detail-oriented, checklist kind of person, learning “African time” has been a pretty big adjustment. So Monday was supposed to be the first day of school- which meant for the past 3 weeks I have been trying to meet with the teachers and figure out how I could help in the classroom. My 3:30 meeting on Friday was actually at 3 on Monday- nothing like the (supposed) first day of school to finally make the teachers figure out who is teaching which classes! I sat in on the staff meeting, and listened to the teachers try to divide up the classes for the 400 children in the primary school. The new school building is in the final stages of completion, but the rooms are ready for use and the kids started classes yesterday. In addition to the 100 children who live at City of Hope, over 300 children from surrounding villages make the walk to the City of Hope primary school every morning. Parents want to send their kids to school here so they can learn how to speak English. Once kids get to secondary school, they are supposed to know English, yet English is not taught in most primary schools. A fundamental problem with the Tanzanian education system! The school ranges from “baby class” (3 year olds) to class 7. However, it is not uncommon for teenagers to be in lower classes, because many of them were not on grade level when they came to the school at the City of Hope.

 I left the staff meeting on Monday with a creative arts class to teach to about 150 children, as well as an assistant teaching job in an English 5 class! Trying to draw on my summer camp experiences to come up with some art projects that can be explained using minimal English to large groups of young children- send any ideas my way, please! I am going to start out with self- portrait collages tomorrow- there is tons of tissue paper and construction paper in the art room. Pictures to come! In addition to art and English classes, I am working on reorganizing the library and moving it from the old school building to the new one, and opening it for tutoring and reading time after school. Also working on teaching some of the youngest students to read! Mary, Alice, and I have started “big sister” activities with the girl’s dorms. Another lesson in African time- it took us about 3 weeks to get all the girls together and explain the whole big sister thing. The girls love it though- they made a whole list of things for us to do together, ranging from eating mandazi and sugar cane to dancing to coloring and making friendship bracelets. We are checking things off the list each day!