Today was an early day! We left by 7am to head to the US Embassy in Dar. When we got there it was an intense check in process: only 2-3 people in at a time, scanning your bags and checking them, leaving them with the security people the entire visit. Absolutely no cameras were allowed. We had an escort take us into the meeting room where the ambassador would enter and greet us. We had these official badges and were told that when he enters we were to stand. He was the nicest guy! He spoke with us for a while standing up then he pulled up a chair and sat down making it real informal trying to help us feel comfortable to talk with him. He went around making us introduce ourselves and tell what school we were teaching at, what we were teaching, and if and where we had traveled in Africa. He told us this would be the best experience of our lives. He was a lawyer b practice but took a break during law school and moved to Nigeria for 2 years and planted beans innovating a new source of protein for the people in that specific village. He loves Africa and he knows we will too and he knows this wont be the last time we are here. He wants us to come back to have a debriefing with him at the end of our service to talk to him about our time here.

After his speech, the U.S. Embassy doctor spoke to us about health in Tanzania. He talked a lot about Malaria and Dengue since it is on the rise. He suggested just like Kim that we get the at home malaria tests for ourselves at home. Dengue fever has no treatment. You just have to let it run its course and know that if you get it once that okay but if you get it twice you could die from it, haha that’s casual. Malaria mimicks everything. He said you could think you have the flu, run a fever, have aches, pains, chills, have digestive issues, and with dengue its more your bones hurt and you have bad migraines, real bad pian behind the eyes. With both of these diseases they are obviously contracted by the bite of a certain mosquito and I thought this was interesting you can not take any ibuprofen. He said only Tylenol! For some reason ibuprofen could be really harmful since the mosquito parasites attack your liver.

After the health session, Laura Shayo spoke with us about Testing, Grading, and Assessments in Tanzania. She suggested which I totally agree that we give our students a pretest when we arrive to see how much they know and what we can build on or what we need to go back and review. This assesses the classes level and tells us how fast or how slow we need to lesson plan. I decided from this session it will be best for me to test after each unit I teach, and to do weekly quizzes for review. I also thought it would be smart for me to introduce science vocabulary first and incorporate some of those terms into the weekly quizzes so that helps them practice their English and it betters their understanding of the subject. Middle of the semester we could do a cumulative exam to model what the national exam is going to be like and I can use some practice questions from the nation exam practice tests that I am going to buy from the stationary shop. The first day too I could do a worksheet with columns saying what I know/what I want to know/what I learned and that will be a good thing for me and the students to let me know what I should cover and what they retained from the lesson. Laura reminded us to always test listening, teachers never do this. So play a song and say what do you hear? Or someone saying something and say what did they say? I will have to figure out how I can incorporate this into science. The grading scale is: 75-100 is an A, 50-74 is a B, 40-49 is a C, 30-39 is a D, 20-29 is an E, and 0-19 is an F.

Laura’s next session was on Long Term Planning. This was very helpful because at each of our schools we will have to submit a Scheme of Work, which is a massive chart of columns, which is basically a year layout of all of our lessons. It is definitely just a sketch but the ministry of education requires this and when they come around to do inspections they want to se each teachers scheme of work. She taught us how to go about forming this somewhat overwhelming task by using the textbook and the syllabus.

Once sessions were over we headed to the University of Dar Es Salaam and had lunch on their campus. It was delicious! I had an omelette (mayai) with a fresh avocado on top, and a mango! Once lunch was over we had some free time to wander around before a lesson from a history professor on campus. We learned about the history of Tanzania. Y’all all know how I feel about history so I didn’t enjoy it so much but other people did.

Once we got back home we had dinner at Mambos. One man was acting so crazy on the street screaming asking if anyone had seen these two guys in Muslim hats selling paintings. I mean he was screaming and was SO angry. Finally he is screaming anyone who can find these men right now will get $10,000 USD in cash they tried to kill my friend. He was freakingggg out screaming. So that was interesting to watch, and there was this precious little girl across the street begging the man selling fruit to give her a mango and he kept ignoring her and ignoring her. Ali was the one who pointed it out and she walked over there and bought two mangos from the guy and gave them to the little girl expecting her to give one to the other little boy who was sitting near her begging for food as well. Well she had so much sas and was so fun to watch! She took her long white skirt off made of cotton and laid both mangos on them and wrapped them up. She carried them around for a while and kept daunting her friend with them, like I gotttt mangos and youu didn’t. Ali walked back over there and was explaining to her in Swahili you must share with your friend and we had to hold her down in order for her to give that second mango up! It was too funny. After dinner we walked back and called it a night!