Busy and Behind

I am so far behind on blogging it’s not even funny. I can’t complain too much though because I’m so lucky to be experiencing so many new things. Anyway, I’ll start with my day today and slowly but surely fill in the pieces from the past week.

This week I am studying with the 4th graders. This is Victoria’s homeroom class, so I am really excited to work with her this week. After spending the first period on English superlatives, we switched over to Kiswahili. Victoria and I have decided to do a song project where the students here take 4 Kiswahili songs (national anthem, patriotic song, school song, and map song) and write down the lyrics. We will then arrange for them to Skype with a group of Key Schoolers who will hopefully prepare a few American songs to share and have a big song exchange.

[Side note: I am doing this without having arranged with any Key School teachers. I am magically hoping this will all come together, but if you are your students are interested in hearing some beautiful African songs during your first class and maybe singing a few for us here in TZ it would be much appreciated!]

Anyway, today I videotaped each of the four groups in Victoria’s class singing the songs so that I can also share them when I return. Victoria has also taken this one step further, since she is expecting me to sing these songs for the entirety of Key School when I return (yeah right), and assigned 5 students to help me learn the songs. She was far too excited about this for me to refuse. Jeezy peezy.

In any case, the recordings turned out great and the Swahili lyrics are in the mail to Key School today along with the letters for the 3rd graders and some other personal mail that I snuck in envelopes between their letters. I still need to translate the Swahili lyrics into English, but that’s a project for my tutoring sessions, and I have at least a month to complete the exercise before coming home.

After that I went to eat some more goat soup with Victoria and three other teachers before taking a daladala to the post office. At the post office I had to put on over twenty unsticky stamps. It took a second for my brain to remember that I was supposed to lick the stamps to make them attach, but I figured it out and sent them off without too much trouble. The Key School Caroll House should be seeing them within 2 weeks!

What now? I’m off to town with Victoria to buy mass amounts of sugar and cooking oil to make ugi for the orphans. Then I’m going to help cook dinner, study Kiswahili with my tutor for an hour, and hopefully write feverishly into the night about my many other adventures. My brain has an inability to compartmentalize at the moment, so expect this week’s postings to be a major brain dump. Apologies in advance.