Quote of the week from a young Danish friend during a discussion on the various Christmas traditions in northern Europe -

“I don't know if you know it but we have this festival in Denmark, I think it’s called Easter!"

No-one could speak for laughing for about 5 minutes.

Sign of the week

More on traffic/roads/vehicle in Tanzania

If you see a pile of greenery (branches pulled off the closest tree) on the road you know there is (or was) a truck or bus broken down just around the corner.  If there is a rock just past the greenery then the truck or bus has gone but the chock that stopped it rolling away while it was being fixed is still there to add to the exhilarating experience that is driving in Tanzania.

Sometimes, if the truck or bus is still there, there will also be a safety traffic triangle among the greenery.  It is compulsory to carry two at all times when your car/truck/bus is on the road as well as a road safety sticker on your windscreen and a fire extinguisher. 

We carry two extra safety triangles.  I was cautioned by a policeman several months ago because one of my triangles was missing half a side of reflective red plastic.  He said it was a ‘pembe-mbili-na-nusu’ (2½ sided figure) and not the pembetatu (3 sided) required!  He said he would ‘punish’ me  if I didn’t have two complete ones next time!  I fixed the broken one but bought two new ones anyway.  I didn’t like the look he gave me when he said he would have to punish me.

Today we drove to Katoke to visit the maths lecturer at the Teacher Training College there.  We drove along a road that has become worse as the wet season has progressed as the heavy rain washes away the clay and leaves the sharp rock exposed.  Buses use the road and their undersides are scraped on the rock as the 27 passengers (in a vehicle the size of a Ford Spectron) get tossed around inside. 

We approached a tight corner and there was a pile of greenery on the road.  We continued cautiously and around the corner there was a small truck on a big angle with wheels on one side off the road and in a ditch.  It looked like it had tried to avoid the bigger truck which was coming the other way on the wrong side of the road trying to avoid the rocks.  The trucks had collided and neither was able to move.  No-one was hurt but people were milling around and clambouring over the vehicles trying to work out how to extricate the trucks from the tangle they were in.  The millers-around had probably been ‘passengers’ sitting on the loads on the backs of the trucks!

Luckily the road was wide enough for us to safely go by and we had been cautious enough to be going at a safe speed so we had no problems.  Our cautious style of driving though is very un-Tanzanian!

Tanzanians are very patient people, they are never in a rush, unless they are behind the wheel of a car or sitting on a motor bike.  Then there seems to be nothing more important than getting to the next corner or the next town at the fastest speed possible with no thought to safety or the convenience of other drivers. 

Steve has plans to hire a truck with loud speakers (a la election time) and drive around town blasting out Miles Davis and road safety messages – ‘drivers slow down’, ‘pedestrians walk towards on coming traffic’, ‘turn on your headlights’, ‘always wear a motorbike helmet’ and ‘don’t send text messages while riding your push bike on a busy road’  Seriously, he could save many lives!

It’s grasshopper season here too but that's a reason to celebrate!   The ladies at work were busy with a large bagful. I asked “Ngapi?  Milioni?” (How many? A million?) They told me “Milioni kumi!” (Ten million!)

To prepare your grasshoppers:

1. Pull off wings and legs.

2. Pour boiling water over the (still wriggling) bodies to kill them and wash them clean.  Allow them to dry.

3. Fry until crisp in hot oil.  Add salt.

They actually aren’t too bad – we had a feed of some that a young German volunteer Jana had cooked and they went quite well with a cold Serengeti!

Our first African wedding was certainly an experience! 

We arrived at about 3 o’clock to join several hundred others for the reception in the small village where Gosbert and Judith live.  There was a real party atmosphere!  Party goers in their best outfits, many in matching attire showing to which group they belonged – friends of the bride, family of the groom, work colleagues, etc.

We queued with the other invited guests for food prepared by the canteen staff who’d been hired for the day.  The ‘uninvited’ onlookers, mostly curious locals, were catered for too as other, enterprising, locals had set up stalls selling food, drink and cigarettes.

After a lovely late lunch of rice pilau and beef stew we adjourned to the ‘performance’ arena and were led to seats of honour on the groom’s side (I work with Gosbert) just in front of the large bank of speakers!  That was the end of conversation for the rest of the afternoon (and nearly the end of hearing in my left ear).  Luckily there was plenty to look at – the display of cakes kept me entertained for quite a while.

The very enthusiastic MC in a black & white striped jacket (his day job is primary school teacher) kept the DJ on his toes with music and canned applause needed in short bursts.  The bridal party began dancing in and the show began.

This was a bridal party of a size I’d not anticipated! There must have been 30 assorted attendants, including Gosbert and Judith’s four children.  They were all dressed in various combinations of red and white.  The young girls with their tulle turbans and little baskets of flowers were just gorgeous!

 Tanzanian people seem to be born knowing how to move to music.  Each group sashayed and rocked down the aisle then made way for the next.  Lastly the extravagantly animated groom and his demure bride arrived.  They were already legally married, the nuptial mass having been held in front of just close family at the local parish church earlier in the day.

Speeches and prayers followed then a ritual where cakes were presented to various groups – the groom’s family and the bride’s family were given the ‘pineapples’, the Bukoba District Council office staff and the Teachers Union received the ‘drums’, others went to very happy recipients but the ‘Bible’ cake went on to the Bridal couple’s table on the little stage.

The official entertainment followed.  A burlesque piece – two men dressed as a married couple performed a song and dance that was frowned on by some of the more conservative but I suspect was very funny if you understood kiSwahili – and then some lively traditional dancing, chanting and drumming.  The uninvited onlookers enjoyed this too, hanging over the fence watching.

The next ritual was the giving of gifts.  The groom’s extended family paid the bride price with gifts of rosary beads, spears and ‘kitenge’ (lengths of cloth) as well as money.  Other groups then began to line up with their (unwrapped) gifts to hand over the table to the bride and groom.  These included a mattress, an arm chair and several dinner sets which were presented one piece at a time!

I was called on by name (very embarrassing!) to give our present, then it was a free-for-all as individuals lined up to pass their offerings over.

At this point it was time for us to leave – a ½ hour drive on a rough and rocky road is best done in daylight and we didn’t fancy sharing the road later on with those who were continuing to enjoy the ‘hospitality’.

It was a wonderful privilege to be invited to share Gosbert and Judith’s special day and we hope you will get a sense of it too from the photos.  To get the true experience just turn up your music as loud as it will go as you view the pictures!

Being of the ‘if something’s worth doing then do it even if you don’t really have time’ persuasion (anyone surprised?) I tried to fit two days worth of material into one day in each of this week’s seminars.

On Monday this did not work – only two thirds of the invited teachers arrived and they seemed tired, my translator was distracted (he had other responsibilities that needed attention on his mobile phone  and was only with me because the stand-in he’d organised had come down with malaria) and there was no ‘energy’ in the room.  We finished all the tasks but I wasn’t convinced that we were at all ‘on the same page’.

The evaluation sheets declared the teachers to mostly ‘strongly agree’ that they would use the  activities with their pupils, that they would share the new knowledge with their colleagues and that the information received was useful.  They went away happily enough with their signed and stamped certificates but I thought as they departed that I would be surprised if I saw clinometers in use in these schools next year.

I thought about the reasons and it occurred to me that none of the teachers had brought the 10m tape from the ‘equipment to bring’ request – I had foolishly assumed that as the syllabus says ‘pupils will use a clinometer and a 10m tape measure to determine distances that cannot be directly measured’ that schools would have this equipment.  Not so!  The schools could buy 10m measuring tapes with their capitation grant but why would you spend money on expensive items that would be used on 2 or 3 days in a year by a very small number of students when the school community is crying out for basics like desks and books?  The schools don’t have the equipment needed to do the tasks the syllabus mandates!

I had seen a class do a measuring activity sharing one 1m wooden ruler between 70 children.  I suggested then to the teacher that using one metre long pieces of twine, a common & cheap locally made material, would be a way to better achieve the aim she intended.  I applied the same reasoning to the clinometer problem.

Tuesday’s groups measured out pieces of twine 5 m long using my tape measure and used those in the clinometer task.  Instead of needing to measure the distance from the tree to the place from whence its top was being ‘sighted’  we used the rope to stand exactly 5m from the tree and sighted the top from there.  The same aim is achieved and the problem becomes easier as you can work out your scale at the beginning!  So Tuesday we had a happier group of teachers (and a happier mathematics advisor!)

Wednesday and Thursday this week have been Seminar free as teachers are invigilating the Standard IV exams. (All other children stay home from school on these days.)   The results will be known in term 1 next year and we’ll see whether the practice exam and analysis made a difference in the 5 wards where I’ve been working.  My Standard VII practice exam is well underway so I’m hoping for some noticeable improvement over the results from the year before!  World Vision has offered to sponsor the practice exam and pay for photocopying, invigilation and prizes for children who do well.  That will be lovely provided teachers and pupils get the feedback on areas needing revision.

As Steve and I walked home on Wednesday afternoon we intersected with a group of children who had obviously just finished an exam – probably Form II in this case.  The sounds of children relieved that something unpleasant is over are universal!  They surrounded us, chatting loudly in kiSwahili and English (showing off!), then moved on.

Friday’s seminar was for the smallest ward and I expected the least number of teachers.  We started the morning with just 5 and soon were ‘Algebra Snap’ing with a solid understanding of like and unlike terms.  Six more arrived and we moved on to making and using clinometers.  One of the teachers shamefacedly told me that he avoided teaching the topic in Std VII because he didn’t know how to do it – now he does and we are all happy!

One more of this series to go then I trawl through the evaluation sheets and plan a new series for 2011.

On  a different matter entirely ….

Last Sunday we had lunch at a local restaurant with a group of volunteers – VSOs, ex-VSOs and others variously from Scotland, England, Germany and the US.  One of the volunteers, who works at a local teachers’ training college, was telling us how during the week she’d unexpectedly had no girls in her class.  Where were they?  Being compulsorily pregnancy tested by the school’s matron – any found to be pregnant would not be welcome back at the college after the Christmas holiday.

A lot of hilarity ensued on how the male trainee teachers could be tested to see if they had contributed to any pregnancy but then we had the serious discussion on the lack of fairness of the whole thing.

It happens so often – just when I’m feeling comfortably at home here something happens to remind me that I could be on a different planet.  Being in Tanzania feels not just like a change in place but also a change in time back to the 1950s!

What was to be two one-day seminars each for half the schools in Katerero Ward became one two-day seminar for all the schools, co-sponsored by World Vision Tanzania at their Katerero Area Development Program Office.  (This happened on Monday afternoon so there was some swift rethinking and reorganising on Tuesday before the seminar began on Wednesday!)

It was great! World Vision supplied morning tea (beef stew with chapattis and chai) and bottled water for us all each day, and gave each of the teachers a mathematical instrument set and a biro.  They also provided a great venue where we could spread out on large tables instead of the school desks we usually manage on.

Pudensiana, the coordinator at Katerero ADP, told me a significant part of their funding comes from WVAustralia so she was particularly pleased to have me there and to be able to help.

The current seminars are for the upper primary maths teachers and mostly involve the dreaded Algebra!  I had a minor sulk last week when I discovered there is no kiSwahili word for pronumeral but I recovered!  We all now know how to find factors of algebraic terms and how to determine if two terms are ‘like’ – um, sorry, no 4b is not actually ‘like’ 4b².  And we all now know that 4b cannot be 4 balls because the letter always represents a number not a thing!  I suspect Katerero Ward has the only primary teachers in the world who know this and some of them took a lot of convincing.  Go on, tell me I’m wrong!

[It doesn’t help that the text books use 3ð+4ð=7ð and such and I know that you can’t add apples and oranges so why can you multiply and divide them?]

We did an activity making patterns with toothpicks and writing the relationships we found.  The toothpicks were also handy following the beef stew.

We went outside and used our newly constructed clinometers to estimate heights of trees – I was suspicious of one that was 83 m tall but once we sorted out the difference between millimetres and centimetres it shrank back to an acceptable 8.3 m.  We also spent some time eliminating feet and inches (also mistaken for cm!) from our working.

  

"I'd rather poke myself in the eye than do algebra!"

We played card games – more Roman Numeral cards as well as a Positive and Negative number card game – and BINGO to practice fraction/decimal/percentage equivalents.  It’s amazing how competitive teachers can be when there is a cheap ball point pen at stake!

Now comes the tricky bit.  Each wrote on their evaluation form which activity they felt was most worthwhile as I have to cull half before the one-day seminars begin next week.  I am contemplating 20 forms with stuff like “Nimefurahia mbinu na njia zote zilizotumiwa katika ufundishaji, pia malumizi ya zona” written on the back and I recognize two words – nimefurahia = I enjoyed and pia = also!  The rest is a mystery Mr Josiah can unravel for me tomorrow.

Who needs an oven when you can make bread like this in the frying pan.

Fresh, wholemeal, sugar-free bread with New Zealand butter. 

The only way life could be better is if the butter was Western Star!