Random things

You may have noticed my dala dala tales have diminished in part that’s because I haven’t been on that many, mostly though it’s because they’ve been strangely uneventful. In fact today I got a seat and everything – quite dull.

Teaching and learning

I have finished my Swahili lessons which is something of a relief as the archaic teaching methods for two hours every day was doing my head in. Having said that I have learnt some Swahili. I’m not hugely proficient and would probably struggle to engage in a fully-fledged conversation but I can at least ask for things, order food and drinks and make the ladies I teach laugh (I like to think they are laughing with me, I suspect they may be laughing at me). It is quite amusing to try to speak Swahili to the people here as they really don’t expect it so it sort of sends them into a temporary shock which has the effect of everything going just that bit more polepole – not what is needed on most occasions.

My ladies’ English is improving and there are days when I think they’ve really made a breakthrough (these are known as hurrah moments). Then at other times they totally lose the plot (these are known as argh moments). We are currently running at about 2 argh moments for every hurrah moment but considering the ratio was about 5 to 1 a couple of weeks ago, we are moving in the right direction.

Modal verbs floored them this week so I’m going to have to try and find a less tricky way of explaining them (modal verbs are can, could, should, ought, must etc in case you were wondering). They have also told me they want to learn a song so I am frantically going through my ipod to find something suitable. A show tune or hymn would be ideal but I don’t have many of those (surprisingly I do have a few) so I’m hoping the Beatles or Abba will provide a solution. Also two of my better students want to have a debate about whether money is more important than education – phew! I am going to have to do some serious work with the rest this week to even grasp the whole debate concept.

I am really enjoying teaching although it is a real challenge and sometimes if you or one of the students is having a tough day the whole mood of the class goes downhill very quickly. I think I’ll be going back to PR quite quickly, it’s much easier!

I could be Madonna…

well apart from being able to sing, being massively rich and having excessive muscle tone.

The two girls I actually arrived in Tanzania with were so organised before their trip that they brought all sorts of brilliant things to share with the people here (see football blog earlier). They also fundraised back home and both have managed to build two new classrooms for the schools they were working for here, in fact two classrooms is a school so it could safely be said they’ve made a massive difference. Anyway, one of the girls’ aunts got together with chums and knitted loads of blankets and teddy bears and earlier this week we went to an orphanage to deliver them.

It was really kind of the girls to share this moment with me and two other volunteers because the orphanage was such a special place. I wish I could work out the whole uploading pictures thing because you would be able to see what I mean.

The orphanage was very well run and not at all depressing which is a good thing. The fact there are so many orphans or small children whose family can’t look after them, is a bad thing. The main reason most of the children were there is because their mothers died during childbirth which is highly depressing because in most cases that really doesn’t need to happen (this is a bee in my bonnet which I think I may have to pursue when I get back home).

Anyway, we met the nun who runs the orphanage who was a very nice woman and then we were allowed to meet the children (presumably we passed the test that we weren’t going to steal any of them – little did she know what was going through my head…). Put six girls (yes, I am using artistic licence to call myself a girl) together with 30 odd children under five and what do you get? Absolute chaos. Introduce some teddy bears and blankets and you get total absolute chaos!

Although the whole orphanage concept is very sad (believe me almost all of us wanted to cry when we saw a two week old baby), we had the most wonderful time and the children loved having new people to play with. I was very tempted to try to smuggle one of the children out in my handbag but think I probably ought to leave such actions to the mega rich and famous who aren’t scared of a policeman chasing them!

Hospital

No, don’t worry it wasn’t me that was sick!

One of the girls was very ill yesterday and I went with her and her boyfriend to the local hospital. It was all rather scary as she couldn’t feels her arms and legs which had gone into really bad spasms, she was running the most dreadful temperature, couldn’t see properly, was in huge amounts of pain etc etc – really rather horrible.

So one of the drivers went to get the minibus and whilst he was gone the other minibus came back full of happy volunteers who had been on a day trip. Cue many rather worried girls shouting at everyone on the minibus to get off as soon as they could, then shouting at the driver to stay in the minibus and keep the engine running followed by boyfriend carrying girlfriend, launching her into a seat and us setting off at rather break neck speed to the hospital – it was all very ER! Well ER in Tanzania so decidedly more bumpy!

Got to the hospital and all credit to them they responded really quickly. Unlike the UK you don’t have to get past the rottweiler recpetionist, the triage nurse and then wait for half of eastern Europe to be seen with colds and sniffles before being seen by a doctor. Which is just as well as things were not going well.

Now you will have guessed by the fact I am blogging about this that everything turned out alright in the end. Turns out that the girl that was sick had been to the hospital earlier in the day because she’d had stomach problems and she was actually allergic to the drugs she had been given. This took the doctor about 5 minutes to diagnose – phew! Most of her symptoms were due to severe dehydration so she was put on a drip for a few hours, given some valium to calm her down and Robert – as they say – is your father’s brother. In fact the valium worked so well that she was cracking jokes after about 20 minutes and boyfriend and I were quite keen on getting our hands on some as well!

I don’t know if St Joseph’s in Moshi is a flagship Tanzanian hospital (I suspect they don’t have quite as much bureacracy as the NHS) but it was a jolly good place. Very clean, really nice people and reasonable facilities. Okay I wouldn’t want to have anything really wrong with me here (in fact I fully intend to make this the only hospital visit during my time in Tanzania) but I am feeling slightly reassured that they don’t boil needles to sterilise them and the doctors don’t try to prescribe healing stones and spells to fix things.

Actually one very peculiar thing did happen whilst we were there, a priest came round to bless my sick friend. In most places this might be taken as a very bad sign but as they have almost 100% religious attendance in Tanzania, it’s probably just routine – like someone asking you if you want a cup of tea!

Football

So I’ve been and done something even more frustrating than writing with slow internet speed ie visiting the cashpoint (yes, still only one working in the whole town) and in the mean time, things seem to have speeded up considerably – hurrah!

So went to a football match on Wednesday. This was largely down to the lovely Anne Marie who had persuaded her brothers to part with their old football shirts and she brought them over to give to one of the projects here. So we all went down to see them train and play and I have discovered a way of increasing female interest in the game…Basically because the team don’t have a strip of their own they play one team with shirts on and one team with shirts off! It’s a fabulous idea, well it’s a fabulous idea with lots of fit young men, possibly not such a great idea with Sunday league beer bellies etc.

Blog lite

I know I haven’t been my usual regular blogger self but we’ve had all sorts of electricity problems this week. Now we have electricity but the connection is SO slow which is somewhat irritating. Also can I make a complaint about webmail? Virgin webmail never works at the weekend – grrr! Thank goodness I have a back up email or I would be tearing my hair out.

Given this problem I think I may have to do several shorter posts rather than one enormous one.

I’m getting very annoyed with sod’s law as well. I have taken to carrying my camera around so that I can photograph randomly amusing things specifically the rather strange things that people seem to carry on their heads. Even more specifically I really want to take a photo of someone carrying a single shoe on their head as every time I see it I want to fall about laughing. However there is a conspiracy. Usually I don’t have my camera and then when I do…lo and behold the B**** battery has died.

I will get this photo if it kills me.