Nkoaranga Baby

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We are now living in our house and have already started teaching, its been less than two weeks since I left home, this is just crazy! We left the outpost early on tuesday and whent to shoprite, the local supermarket, to stock up on pasta and beans. That was fun and didn't take long so soon we were on the road and driving up bumpy hills to Nkoaranga village on the slopes of Meru. We had seen it before but it was still daunting, the idea of being left alone on the hill and teaching 50/60 kids english everyday! OH MY GOODNESS! Anyway... Mads (the CW rep) came up ith us and took us to the schgools to have a real look around and meet the head teachers. But, being Tanzania, neither of the head teachers were around so we were told to come back tomorrow. We had a look at the school then headed back to unpack. That night when it came to time for dinner we went to statt cooking then found that we had no pots or pans, we looked everywhere but Mads had forgotten to give us them! So we had cheese sandwiches for dinner. The next morning we all headed up to the secondary school to meet mama Mbise the head mistress of the secondary school. She talked to us for a while and then we went up to meet Mr Ulomi at the primary school who we also talked to about what he needed. We told them that we would have three of us at each school and that which ever three it was would see them tomorrow morning! Most people wanted to do both, Martyn didn't mind and I wanted to do Primary so the others argued it out between them and we decided that we would start off with Martyn, Amalia and Jon at the secondary and Dave, Ellen and I at the primary. So the next morning we headed off to school! We had been warned that it might take a while for us to get into teaching but that couldn't have been further form the truth! On the first day we went to Std 5 with Mrs Nsari who let us watch her and afterwards she asked us to prepare a lesson for the next day which we were fine with, she gave us the text book and the teachers book and everything looked good. Mr Ulomi on the otherhand took us to his class (Std 6) and started off nicely, he set them an exercise out of the book then handed us the teachers book and left... we weren't sure what to do but they seemed to just get on with the exercise so we didn't have to do much. The next day was Thursday and we taught our first class altogether, there are two Std5 classes but they needed the same lesson so that was easy enough. We weren't sure about what to do with Std 6 but we set a follow up excerscise out of the text book so that was okay too.
On Friday we went in with another lesson plan involving puppets which the kids seemed to enjoy playing with although wether they learned anything is another matter! I had bought a Kanga on thursday evening (a piece of material that you wrap around you to make a skirt) and when i wore it to school today i asked them to translate the message written on it, it says: i know you are jealous of me... not the best message to be sending out to africans when you are a mzungu. Oops!I haven't been wearing that since then! Also today we were talking to a volunteer who was leaving today and she said that wear should be wearing petticoats under our skirts because they are too see through! Not a good day skirt wise! Today also we got a timetable for next week and class 6 are scheduled at the same time as class 5a so we decided to split up!! I have taken class 6 and dave and ellen are doing class 5 b and a respectively. So we each planned our lessons for our impending classes on monday then went home to get ready for the wekend!

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