The seasons just don’t know what they’re doing. The ‘Long Wet’ seems to have started after a very short and wet ‘Short dry’. Heavy rain over night one day last week translated to snow on Mt Meru that was there until lunchtime. Mt Meru is in our ‘backyard’ though it is often shrouded in cloud and we don’t see it for days at a time.
I have spent February and March working on my Community Service Grant project funded by The Planet Wheeler Foundation (The family that started Lonly Planet Guides) through AVI. It has the glorious title Olkokola Centre for the Physically Handicapped Self-Education Resource Centre. The people here call it Maktaba (the library)! And it is a library with the book borrowing going well and (so far) only one book having gone missing. The student monitor in charge of borrowing is very strict!
I use it it as a small classroom. I love my small maths classes - I feel like I’m doing something totally practical. The masonry boys are doing calculatons on how many bricks are needed to build various size walls and houses; the carpentry boys are problem solving on how many pieces of timber of can be cut from various lengths of wood; agrivet are doing seed and fertiliser rate calculations; and tailoring are learning “fractions for inches and decimals for centimetres!” Everyone is learning about time and money. Over the next few months I will need to work out how I can make the learning more student initiated with the new group that start in August - we’ll be down to our last few months here by then.
I’m also getting all the resources I ‘ve been making sorted and packaged so they can be used independently. They love playing with the 'money'.
The centre where Steve works is just down the road from my work so I took our Agri-Vet students on an excursion there last week. ECHO is a resource we need to make more use of. All our students could learn so much about the high nutrition plants ECHO is promoting, and it's information that would be so useful when they return to their villages.
Our centre is very agricultural - this was the view out of the library window on Friday.
Our students, when they leave, take with them the tools of their trade. In February 28 brand new sewing machines and stands arrived and had to be unpacked and assembled. Then they were disassembled and repacked. Carpentry and masonry hand tools have been bought as well and the container is chockers with the gear that students will take home. The carpentry boys are busy making the wooden chests that each student will have to hold their equipment. Everyone is so excited! Though ‘Graduation’ isn’t until June they can see the end in sight.
Today is International Womens Day. On Thursday I put up a little poster saying (in Swahili) “Women hold up half the sky”. This is a quote from Mao Zedong. One of the boys protested. He told me “No teacher, men hold up half the sky!” Hmm. More work on fractions needed!
I couldn't resist this one
We’ll be back in Australia (we hope!) in the two weeks around Easter. The coronavirus could be an issue if the PM and his government are still looking for distractions from their increasingly brazen transgressions - no point going home for two weeks self-isolation, justified or not!
Maybe see you for Easter, otherwise Karibuni you’re all welcome here in Arusha!
Love from Jenny
