Welcome to my Africa Travel Blog

Yesterday I would say I read for the majority of the day. In the morning I woke up at my regular time, but everyone else was sleeping in, so I had some free time to read. It was a day of chores. I did my laundry and luckily it wasn’t raining—I think it’s just now turning into the raining season.

With Jovin I was finally able to play some soccer. Both of us have been so busy, but we got out and were able to kick the ball around a bit. It used to be us two versus kaka, but now that he’s gone it’s a bit boring with the one-sided match up of just us two. Thankfully, a couple teachers stopped by the house for lunch because they had been working at school (on a Sunday!!!) and they joined in on our football shenanigans for a bit.

Not much else went on; I almost lost my Duolingo streak, but I am now 33 days into Swahili! The mangoes around the grounds are starting to show the right colors for picking; yesterday we harvested many and let me tell you, fresh mango is quite the delicacy.

Jovin had some homework throughout the day, so I sat with him to make sure he was staying focused. I was able to read and nap a bit during the two hours it took him to finish a few math and science questions. These younger generations have it bad, there’s no ability to sit still and focus unless a device is sitting two inches from their face. With Jovin, he could only spend a couple minutes on work without getting frustrated and needing to run around.

In the late afternoon a storm started to roll in. It’s pretty cool how you can hear the thunder from miles away and slowly watch/hear the clouds and clapping get closer and closer. I was worried all my clean and mostly dry clothes would be getting a second wash, so I rushed to take them down. The storm ended up just being dark clouds and loud thunder, no rain or lightning. It reminded me of the tropical storms in Hawaii that can never make up their minds. I’m very excited to be going back to school today. As much as I love the rest and reading of Sundays, staying busy is when I’m at my best.

Yesterday was slow until it wasn’t, and then slow again. I woke up around 6 as I do on pretty much every day. Abby and I left for school at 6:50ish to go on the bus route to pick kids up for remedial classes. We didn’t have to walk, thankfully; our driver picked us up from home. We were very late in getting to school after collecting all the kids because we had forgot that on Saturday’s we needed to pick up the pupils who lived far away. It was the first day of Global StoryBridges and the four kids had showed up (we lost on of the original five), none of the other teachers were there by the time we were supposed to start. During this time I played some basketball and hung out with the students to pass some time.

Eventually, everyone showed up and we started an hour and a half late. We mainly let the kids play around with a camcorder. Our session with them is only to last from 9:00 to 11:00am but the kids have to stay there the whole day because they come and go on the busses with the other kids who are there until 3:30pm. So we finished our task for the day quickly and the poor kids were bored and wasting a Saturday, so we let them play on the computers for a while. One was smart enough to start up a movie!

Around noon, Lucas came to school and said he was taking me to Monduli, the town where he grew up. We left a couple hours later and on the way made a few stops. Lucas left for Nairobi last night and will be there for 10 days with a safari group, so he was very busy squaring things away here for while he’s gone.

I didn’t have any clue what we were going to Monduli for, but on the way I learned that his aunt, the lady who raised him, had died 10 years ago and his family holding a memorial of remembrance for her. We were only there for an hour or so, but it was a nice gathering.

When we got home it was around 6. I did some chores like washing my clothes and cleaning up my room a bit. Lucas took off for Nairobi right after we got home, but not before present Edith with a new car for Valentine’s Day. The house was really quiet. People were resting and relaxing. I ate dinner with Jovin and didn’t see anyone else before I went to bed around 9:30. I think the extra school day is really tiring for everyone, I know it was for me!

In the mornings we’ve been having to do two trips with the school bus. At the start of the week our regular bus was taken to the shop for some repairs and we were stuck using an extra small bus (both extra and extra small, suffering from the first because of the latter). Our regular bus has since been repaired, but in that time, another route’s bus experienced some unfortunate problems and they have more of a need for a large bus, which has left us stuck with the small bus for the whole week. Two trips are necessary because we reach capacity about 3/4 of the way through our route. This capacity is not a standard law of maximum riders set by the government, but a very subjective and ever-changing estimate of how many kids can squeeze into the metal hull without having to rely on strapping some to the roof. The two trips means some kids get to school early and some kids, along with Abby and myself, get to school quite late. Today we arrived during the parade.

After parade I joined Ezekia in music. The first period we didn’t have any kids, so I finished my art project of drawing out some guitar chords and then taped them up. For the rest of the regular classes I was in music, teaching three classes of 8 year-olds three separate songs. The first got Twinkle Twinkle, the second attempted Mary Had a Little Lamb, and the third raved over Baby Shark. It’s very difficult because these young kids have almost no coordination with one hand on the fret board, let alone two trying to do two different tasks. It’s more of a learning experience for me than it is for them!

After lunch was sports and games (so it’s a bit of a half day for most grades) but I was oh-so fortunate to be given the task of supervising and marking some more exams. In all truth, I don’t mind it much, but I wish I was given some heads up so I could plan my day better around it as I’d made some commitments that I then had to back out of.

I didn’t go with the after school bus route because I continued marking papers. For an hour I buried my head in A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s, and E’s, finishing my exam grading much quicker than any other teacher. I took my little tea and bread afternoon break for a couple minutes, head high, all excited I was done, just for the academic head teacher to tell me there was one more exam to finish marking. I went back to it and watched all the other teachers finish theirs, one by one, and start chatting away with nothing to do. It was fine because remedial classes were about to end anyways, but it means that after breakfast this morning I have some weekend “homework”! I went with the remedial route home. On the route I bought some peanuts for the kids—prompted by the driver because we were running very late, and just yesterday morning he was chewed out by a parent for being late, so I think he needed a good word from some kids. In the end I got home fairly on time, right around 7:30. Every once in a while a couple kids are absent who really help with cutting down the route time (which is nice), but yesterday was not one of those times.

Once home I took a shower, had some dinner and worked on marking the exams a bit more. I’d say in total and if I’m working at maximum efficiency, it takes between one and two minutes to mark and score one exam, depending on the test. So when I have 80ish exams, thats about two hours of marking. Today I’m going to school and I’m excited because we’re having a meeting with the Global Story Bridge kids.

For not being very busy, I haven’t been finding much spare time. Yesterday was one of those days where you blink and it’s over. Pretty normal morning; woke up with some stretching and a news podcast, then a nice breakfast. Abby (a school teacher taken in and living with Lucas) and I were quite late arriving to school for the bus route. Abby has been my route companion for the past few weeks, taking me along in the morning and the two after school routes, but I think it’s beneficial for her because if she doesn’t want to go she can take the day off because I’ll be there. Our purpose is to make sure the kids are safe getting on, inside and getting off the bus, but in reality we are just doormen, opening and closing and ushering.

We got to school a bit after 8:15 (15 minutes past the start time of 8:00) but classes don’t tend to begin until 8:30ish anyways so we were fine. Every morning the kids have porridge for breakfast and it’s funny because I used to join them and only this morning I noticed that I hadn’t been taking any. There is this one young boy, maybe 4 or 5, who either has some cognitive issue or is extremely malnourished and it was about the point when I started escorting him from the bus to porridge then to class that I stopped drinking it myself. But anyways, my new buddy is super cute, maybe today I’ll get a picture of/with him.

I started my day off waiting to meet with the head teacher so he could give me my daily schedule. The waiting took a while and when I finally saw him he didn’t have anything for me to do. I was glad of this; I had to organize the computer rooms for Riveting Results because we were splitting the 70 kid class into two 35 kid classes (a new room had finished being equipped with power and desks). I spent about 2 hours doing that before breakfast. I’m really enjoying the morning black tea and a few slices of plain bread that we have every morning. After break the head teacher, Pius, found me and said he needed me to teach his English class because he had some meetings he wanted to do. I read some poems and asked some questions and the kids did a lot of copying notes. At lunch I learned that the school time table (class schedule) had been altered in the morning—as it tends to do—and all my time organizing for the days RR program was for not.

The most important event of the day was organizing these 5 kids to introduce them to Global Story Bridge (GSB)—the program Maggie and Sarah introduced to hope two weeks back. What was intriguing to me is that these kids were picked because they are in relatively unfortunate circumstances; they either suffer from poor grades or their families aren’t well-off or both. And this is interesting to me because the program will require the parents to pay a bit more in school fees for them to attend GSB on Saturdays and so when we asked the parents later in the evening about having their kids join, many (as I had expected) were reluctant and said no. So now we have to find some more kids, but this will be good. We need more than 5 anyways.

The two evening routes were great. They went quicker than normal because some kids were out sick and a few parents had come to pick up their kids directly from school. In between the two routes I was able to play some guitar in the music room. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to practice and I missed it quite a bit. Yesterday when we finished the evening remedial route, Abby, Praygood (the driver) and I got some ice cream on the way home. I think it’s going to become a bit of a routine, but I don’t know how I feel about it; I’ve been eating so healthy here and I don’t want to ruin those habits with a daily ice cream bar. At home Jovin and Rebecca were “doing homework” which consists of looking at their books for 30 seconds then getting distracted for 15 minutes with something else. I went to get ready for bed pretty early but didn’t fall asleep until 10:30 or 11:00 because I was so addicted to my book.

Yesterday was great. Grace, the housekeeper, and I have gotten into this habit of me going over to the main house around 6:35, I sit down at the table and write my little blog, and she cooks me a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs. I don’t remember how or when this started, but I’m glad for it. Not many people here eat big breakfasts—normally just a bite or two—but I need a hearty breakfast to start my day off right. At first I felt kind of bad for being served this way every morning, now I’m beginning to look forward to and expect it every morning. I went with the morning bus route. I enjoy starting my day off that way and only miss the route if Lucas and I go walking.

It’s beginning to turn in to rainy season. A few days ago my clothes almost got a second rinse—thanks to Grace they stayed dry—and the rain is seeming to come more frequently. One thing that’s nice about the weather is that it’s fairly predictable. The mornings tend to be a bit fogged over and cool, during midday the heavy air burns off and then around 3 the clouds roll in. With the rain, farmers are beginning to plant crops. Over the past week or so the ground has been sprouting baby plants. The farm land is pretty sporadically placed, any plot of land could have a house or some crops or both, there doesn’t seem to be much of a zoning system.

At school the head teacher had me go through some documents in his office to do a bit of a spring cleaning. These were things like intake forms dating back to 2020, copies of job applications, and so much more random stuff. By the end I probably threw away 100 pounds of paper and a lot of other junk too. It didn’t take too long to do that, so with the rest of my day I worked on preparing some things for the kids in music class. Around 3:00pm each class had a “debate” scheduled. They are supposed to do this every Wednesdays, but plans had got jumbled and moved around so this was the first one of the year. I like the idea of a weekly debate, but having young kids sit still and listen to one another for 50ish minutes is asking a bit too much.

After school ended I went with the bus route. We were still stuck with the small bus again (hopefully today the big one is fixed). I got back to school then waited for the next route of remedial kids. After everyone had been dropped off, another teacher, the driver and I got some ice cream bars. The driver insisted on buying it for us and I felt really bad for letting him do so. Earlier in the morning someone had also given me a loaf of bread. I don’t know why I am being treated nicely, I hate taking things that I haven’t deserved. At home a shower, some dinner, a little homework help, and to bed. The homework was tough, both Jovin and Rebecca are behind where they should be and things are moving very fast in their classes, so they are falling behind. I help them mainly with math, and many of their basic principles are lacking, so that’s where we’re trying to fix things, but they get frustrated because they think it’s too simple and below their level. Overall, yesterday was the type of day I enjoy. It feels a bit sad to be falling into a calm routine; the first month was so exciting and new so this is different.

Another wonderfully dull day yesterday! Lucas and I went on a walk in the morning—the last one for quite some time, as he busy with business the couple weeks. Normally we chat a bit, but we were mostly quiet yesterday morning. It was nice. For how simple my life is here, I really appreciate the rare moments I get to be alone and with my thoughts.

School went smoothly. Tuesdays and Fridays are my new favorite days for one reason. Music class! I really enjoy Ezekia’s company and I’m learning quite a bit of guitar myself. There’s on kid who’s doing really well with guitar, and I think I’ll be spending extra hours with him every other day or so.

When school ended at 3:30 I went with one bus route to take all non-remedial grade students home. Unfortunately, our normal bus is having some issues so we had to cram into an extra one they had laying around.

After the one bus route, I went back to school to help in English class. At 5:30 everybody left school and I went with the second bus route. The regular driver had gone home with some sickness and we were given a fairly new driver. It was his first time driving this route, but it was surprising how well he knew the kids names and where they lived. For the most part there were no hiccups, well until we took a wrong turn and I had to provide some directions—yes me, the one who had barely any idea where we were.

Like the previous day, I got home and had no time for anything but a shower, dinner and some reading. Jovin is starting to get pretty sad I’m not around to play with him these days. And just two days ago Kaka (brother), the groundskeeper, took off with $200 he was supposed to transport for Edith and his clothes and hasn’t been heard from since. Kaka was Jovins other playmate, so now he seems to be out of luck. Maybe today we’ll have a chance; I’m starting to miss the football and think I may have been taking it for granted.

Yesterday was a wonderfully boring day! First of all, I think the sickness has, for the most part, left me. I was still very sleep deprived, but for some reason I made it through the day with a lot of energy. Maybe because meals weren’t passing straight through me, maybe because I’m now used to sleeping a little less, I don’t know, but I felt okay. At school they were still dismantling the wedding venue in the morning.

I finished marking all the exams from last week pretty efficiently and had a good portion of my day left to work in the computer room. I made sure all the computers had the proper documents the kids would need and replugged in all the computers because the kids had made the room very disorderly and disorganized. Nothing exciting really happened; with the rest of the day (after school had finished) I graded some work, went on the bus routes, and got home around 7:30.

At home I was able to practice a bit of guitar. I haven’t played for a while (been sick while also busy is terrible for hobbies) and today I need to teach the students some songs, so a refresher was much needed. I had dinner and got to bed fairly early, but spent a long time reading and didn’t get to bed until around 11. Although yesterday was fairly boring, I’m very glad for it and needed the rest!

Yesterday started off very slow. I spent most of the day wandering about, feeling useless. Ally and his new wife stayed at Lucas’ house yesterday night as some sort of tradition. In some way Ally’s parents aren’t present and Lucas has taken him in like a son, so I guess that is why Lucas and his family are so involved with this wedding. Many people were coming to the house throughout the day, visiting Ally or simply taking refuge before the long evening of festivities. I was quite antsy and getting a bit bored—it was about 3 and I still hadn’t done anything—so Lucas gave me the job of transporting people between home and school (where the wedding celebration was). There weren’t many people to drive so this kept me entertained for about a whole 30 minutes. Luckily, by about 4, we started moving like we were going to be leaving. It wasn’t until 5:30 that we actually got to the celebration ceremony at school.

When we got there some set up was still being done. I really have no gauge for weddings or ceremonies; the only ones I’ve been to were when I was really young and I don’t have any memory of them. So, I’ll let the pictures speak.

There’s so much more that I didn’t capture, but it was a great evening. We got home around midnight and I went straight to bed. I wish I wasn’t so tired this morning so I could put more effort into describing the celebration, but this is all I’ve got. I’m excited to be going back to school, I’ll have calm days and be able to get good sleep each night.

Ahhhh. A month! And what a day yesterday was to mark this milestone. Because remedial has began for class 4 and 7, meaning school is now held on Saturday from 8:00am to 3:30pm, I went to school yesterday morning and did some exam marking. It worked out perfectly, I was able to get some work done and then Ezekia met me there so we could head to town together. Figuring out transportation to town was a whole mess, but in the end we got lucky and got a ride with mama Edith (Lucas’ wife)—not many people have cars, so most people use public transport.

Once in town I was swept up and stayed that way for the better part of the day. I really wish I had taken more pictures because it’s so difficult to describe how confusingly quick everything went. We started by going to a clothing vendor. The shop was packed to the gills with packaged button ups, slacks, and jackets. Some were in boxes, others just in plastic packaging, and a few were laying out loose. One lone light hung down from a wire to illuminate the one foot wide walkway through all of the articles. The shop was more of a stall than anything else (as are almost all other shops, seemingly); it was 8 feet wide and 20 feet deep from the street—and when I say from the street, I mean from the street, the products were pilled onto the sidewalk and some even spilled into the road. There was no door to enter, it was just an open facade (imagine the whole process as opening a hoarders garage door and trying to navigate that space, that was the feeling of the shop). And then to try on my clothes I went to the back of the room (which may be a better term than shop), the owner held up a bedsheet for me, and there it was. The whole process took about 10 minutes but I was so engrossed by everything around me that I had no clue if we had just got there or been there an hour. We left the store without the clothes, the owner had to tailor the pants length. For a shirt, trousers, and a tie, I paid 62,000 Tanzanian shillings which is about $25.

Walking through this shopping area, every other store was the same way. Their products spilling out into the street, packed so tightly that there was barely any room inside for costumers to walk around. We walked through Arusha for a while, waiting for a friend to come and join us, when we stumbled upon the Arusha soccer stadium.

It was pretty sick to be able to go into, there were some referees doing training, but pretty quiet other than that. After a bunch more walking around, Ezekia and I met our friend, Pamela. Us three then got my clothes and went out of the city center to a nice ice cream shop. There was so much I saw in between all these main events, but I feel like I wouldn’t do any of it justice without pictures to accompany my descriptions. Ezekia left us after ice cream and Pamela and I went to a fast food place called Cossi’s where I got a fried chicken sandwich! And then, without knowing it was the plan, Pamela said “come we need to go meet my friend for her birthday”. So we hopped into a daladala (the public transit van) and went to a nice restaurant called Leon’s.

Nothing much went on other than 9 of us eating this platter of food. After we finished we went down the street to a place called Kelly’s lounge where there was some live music and football.

I was very tired at this point, it was around 8:00 and I was still a bit sick. So, I called Lucas, he said he would have someone pick me up, and I thought my day was over. But no. My buddy Hussein picked me up and started heading the opposite direction of home. He doesn’t speak great English, so there wasn’t much information I got from him about where we were going. When we pulled into a mosque parking lot, I finally connected the dots. Lucas and his family were attending the first ceremony of Ally’s wedding (my friend whose second wedding ceremony I’m attending today) and I would wait with Hussein until it was over. But no, we got out of the car and started walking the away from the mosque—neither I would have expected.

We started down these very quiet and poorly lit alleys between houses. We walked for maybe 10 minutes and in that time I got completely turned around and lost. Eventually we came to a house and Hussein ushered me to go in. There, being held, was Ally’s Muslim ceremony of taking the bride from the parent’s house. I felt like such an intruder because people kept urging and pushing me to go into a room where it seemed some holy ritual was being performed. I was a bit relieved when I finally saw Lucas in there taking videos and pictures.

The whole day was a blur, and there is so much I’m leaving out, but this was one of those days I will never forget. It was such a a whirlwind, but the moments I can clearly pull out are so beautiful and unique.

Yesterday I woke up feeling under the weather again. Luckily by midday my stomach pains straightened out, but I was still moseying on to the washroom quite frequently. During the day I supervised more exams. I was lucky because I got the classes to finish early so we had time to join the school for sports and games.

I was supervising basketball, which isn’t much of a sport in Tanzania, so I wasn’t having to wrangle too many kids which was nice.

Most kids were playing football (not the American sort) or just running around.

I gave my friend, teacher Pamela, my phone for the sports and games period because she was the designated photographer.

It started to rain only 30 minutes into the activities, so kids were pretty bummed to have to go back to classes (as was I). The rest of the day was pretty unexceptional; I went on the late evening route, got home around 7:30, and went to bed after dinner. Today I’m heading to town to get some appropriate attire for a wedding tomorrow!