This is Africa

The last few days have been a learning experience - welcome to the african way! I am meant to be assisting for the time being in english classes every morning at primary school, and teaching 2 classes for adults every afternoon. However, despite my very professional advertising (posters I made with some of the guys from class), attendance at the afternoon classes hasn't been great so far. I had one man on monday, a maasai family (complete with breastfeeding baby) on tuesday, so hopefully more today! I am finding it quite frustrating the way things are organised here - yesterday at school the teachers told me the school might be shut today for exams - but they wouldn't know until today!?

So...this morning i got a text saying school was on. I went in as usual, and the class i was meant to help in had no teacher and no-one was looking after the children or could tell me where the teacher was. So I improvised and taught them something which I thought might be relevant. The teacher showed up half way through - no apology - and then asked me to prepare a class for tomorrow! So the next period I had my favourite class (standard 5) and yet again there was no teacher. Luckily I had been in their class yesterday so knew what they were learning and was able to make up an exercise based around it. Then onto class 3... yet again no teacher! I am happy to take the classes but it would be nice (and coutesous) to let me know in advance so I could prepare a lesson, not just be thrown in at the deep end! But as the saying goes, 'TIA' - this is Africa!

However, despite the frustrations I am really enjoying being in Longido. As I said before, the family is great and I feel very at home here. The kids at school are great, they sing a song at the beginning of every lesson and every time I am walking down the road I have a trail of kids behind me like to pied piper ! I have also had some clothes made in the local style...pics soon I promise! I went into Arusha last weekend and met some of my extended african family and met up with some of the other volunteers at a mzungu cafe where the prices are sky high but you can imagine that you are back home again for a couple of hours!