I went walking yesterday morning with Lucas. We walked through the neighborhood where he lives—the roads are undeveloped and many of the houses are rickety shacks—up to a nearby hill where a new Tanzania Human Rights Court is being built. The views were beautiful as the sun was rising; the top overlooked many different neighborhoods and areas I hadn’t seen before.
I taught my first lessons yesterday. I was supposed to be observing second grade classes, but when I arrived there was no teacher. The other grade two teachers handed me a lesson notebook and told me to get to work. It didn’t go great, the kids were unruly and I had a tough time getting them to settle down, but learning is a process! I also worked again with kids learning the guitar. I’m going to teach them a couple songs by March (when they have to do a performance for the school), but that is only if I can learn the songs as well.
Yesterday we got another flower delivery.
25 new flowers/plants arrived yesterday afternoon for us to pot. It’s really simple to take care of them and it’s inspiring me. It’s making me want to have a house filled with beautiful flowers and plants. I asked Edith how many plants she thinks they might have here and she said at least 1000 pots laying around with some type of flower or plant in it, not counting the garden or large trees/bushes.
I had a really interesting conversation yesterday about technology and social media. Another teacher was saying that within the population of kids that he sees, many are losing Tanzanian morals and not respecting cultural traditions like they should be due to being online and having global access to information. He said all this as if it was a negative influence rather than a positive learning experience and I’m not sure how I feel about that. As a teacher you should be propelling your kids rather than telling them to remain stagnant.