What the french toast....

Teacher quits - life goes crazy for a while!
We were heading to work last Monday. Typical Monday, a little crazy, trying to pick up everyone, running a little late, dodging chickens in the road...nothing out of the ordinary for most of us on a Monday.  Then, the news hit us - one of the new teachers quit.  It's 8:05.  School begins in 25 minutes.  Just to be clear, there are not a whole line of substitute teachers you can call in a pinch to come fill in.  So, we (by we, I mean Ben) scrambled and rearranged everyones schedule to fill the holes.  The teacher didn't give any notice...just said I won't be back next week.  The news, unfortunately, didn't reach us until the LAST minute!  So, long story short - Lisa is now teaching all 3 forms of English!  To say she's busy now is a bit of an understatement.

Teaching - highs and lows
Teaching has been busy these past couple of weeks.  The principal was out quite a bit last week dealing with some issues and, of course, that teacher quit. So, the rest of us were scrambling trying to cover classes.  I love to teach through experience. If I can go on a field trip, build something, do something, etc... with my students I'm happy. Unfortunately, here I've fallen into the 'ole lecture and notes trap.  I make up all sorts of excuses - lack of resources, language barriers, loads of content to cover in short amounts of time....oh yeah, and the students insist on taking lots of notes!  But, I know there's a better way.  Finally on Friday, we did an activity I was happy with.  We put four eggs on end and stacked books on top of them to show the strength of the shape of eggs.  We kept piling on books (the new textbooks were part of them on top of the eggs!).  Just as the bell rang, the  eggs exploded under the weight of probably 40 books.  The kids yelled and jumped back.  I had egg all over the place. It was great!

Girl Challenges
Girls here have a rough life.  I don't think that's a biased statement.  They are expected to work from the time they get home until well after dark, leaving little time for studying.  They are constantly harassed for different things, but one seemingly constant thing is sex.  In general, they just seem to have additional burdens on their shoulders that males simply do not have to bear.  We lost two girl students from school this past week to some unfortunate circumstances.  Our director has said these girls face a battle every single day of their lives.  At first I thought perhaps he was just a bit of a "women's lib" sort of a guy.  But, after spending some time here, I realize what he says is so true.


Valentine's Day and other Muslim holidays
I know Valentine's Day is not a Muslim holiday. But, whatever we celebrated today was!  So, we did not go to school. Instead, we worked on school stuff in the morning here at the house and at school. Then, this afternoon we went into a place near Arusha called TGT.  There, we played squash, swam and ate nachos.  It was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon!  Unfortunately, I may have hit a few of the speed bumps a tad hard on the drive home (there are about 25 speed bumps between here and Arusha!).  Lisa was not a bit happy especially when we realized something punctured the side of our water jugs and got water all over the groceries and her shoes!  Woops!