Tuesday August 16th

            The first lesson of the day with 6B wasn’t too successful because I was trying to teach them how to use the word “whose” in a sentence:

            Ex: “This is the man whose daughter is in the hospital”

but the lesson was pretty unexciting.  So when I taught the same lesson with the next class, I tried to make it more visual and the class seemed to understand much better.  Making as many body movements as possible was really beneficial for the kids.  We had extra time so I went over Peter Piper with them (this was the first time B had learned Peter Piper).  Wakuru came in when I was teaching it to them and she really liked it.  I got her to try and repeat it out loud after some of the students had gone and it ended up being pretty fun.  The kids got a chance to laugh at their teacher – but she was laughing too so it was all in good spirits.

            Later that day

            The group on this trip is extremely varied.  Most of the people that came in on the same start date as me haven’t really traveled too much before this trip, and everything seems foreign to them.  They haven’t grasped that the Tanzanian world is different from other worlds, they are so surprised when things are different from what they are used to. 

            Ex: people were amazed/couldn’t believe that the Maasai were going to kill a goat.  One girl even went over to the goat and started petting it.  I just don’t think you should do that. 1. It is disrespectful to the people who are about to slaughter it for us, 2. It is a sign that you are not willingly accepting the new culture you are in and 3. It makes the Maasai think we are even more crazy than they already did…Caitlin seems like she has a pretty good idea of the world and everything that’s going on in it, but I can’t really say the same for everyone else.  PJ gets so frustrated with her placement that she slams down materials in front of the kids and runs to the back of the room.  Obviously nursery school is a hard thing to teach and it is quite the challenge to keep the attention of a four year old more than 10 minutes even in the United States where you are at least speaking the same language, so what is she expecting from these Tanzanian kids?  Kids that don’t speak English, who wear the same pair of clothes to school every day, who might not have parents?  Their goals (which Caitlin knows) should be to get the kids to smile and have fun before anything else.  The fact that they are utterly incapable of drawing a circle shouldn’t disrupt the whole day’s plan.

            The other teachers at school are really great.  They always want to talk to me and ask me questions and find out about my life.  It is a very strange thing to be in a room where everyone is talking about something but you can’t understand anything.  Like right now.  But what is extremely challenging is that as I am sitting here children are getting whipped for misbehaving, and the teachers just sit around and watch because it is no big deal to them.  It is hard for me to believe that the woman who just invited me to come to church with her on Sunday thinks that this is okay.  Would I think this was okay if I hadn’t been exposed to a culture that prohibits corporal punishment?  I would hope not, but the reality is that yeah, I probably wouldn’t know anything different.  But I do still wonder how someone could slap a stick upon the open palm of a crying child and let their conscious remain silent.