First week of school is finished! Wow what a week. So many things happened I don’t even know where to begin. Things I never dreamed I would ever see or experience in my life. In one week.

Where do I start to process?

There were the school beatings. That was hard to deal with and I don’t think it will ever be easy. Children here are caned for misbehaving in school. For any minor thing, for arriving late, for getting bad grades, for not bringing water to school to water the plants (yet half the country has no water to use/drink in their home including me), etc.) Boys can be caned on the back and girls can be caned on the arms. This rule is not always followed. The rule is 3 times, that is not always followed. If the parents give permission then they can get more canes. The students have to be on their hands and knees while they receive the beating and sometimes they don’t even flinch they are so used to it. It kills me. The beatings are done in front of the entire school to teach everyone a lesson about discipline. The sounds of the whips are the worse. I always turn my head or walk away. I can’t stand to watch. In the staff meeting this week the head mistress asked me in front of the ENTIRE faculty if I would beat the students when I was teacher on duty, I said No. She laughed, and said then what will you do when the kids arrive late and their uniforms are not tidy? I said I will talk with the students and the entire faculty laughed. It made me so angry but I didn’t say anything. Emily told me when she was on her way to school this week with her headmaster, they passed one of her students biking to school and the headmaster says, “ah look one of our students, he will be late to school, how lazy of him.” Emily and I were saying that night how crazy it is that he would label that child as lazy. He is biking to school, which is 8 km away from home. Probably woke up before the sun came up to cook breakfast on the jiko for his brothers and sisters and to do cleaning for his parents. The child is the farthest thing from lazy and is doing the best he can. In my staff meeting (which was conducted in English so I could know what was being said, thank God, I was very appreciative they accommodated me.) the head mistress pushed that the children need to be beat for speaking in Swahili at school. That this is an English only school and she really needs the cooperation with the teachers on this (with the discipline) that the discipline master cannot do all the discipline, teachers can help too. This was crazy to me, because none of the teachers at this school teach in English. They are supposed to, but their English is so poor they teach in Swahili. This is a disadvantage for the students because the NECTA exam is all in English so how can these students succeed if they are constantly taught in Swahili? Anyways, my blood was boiling at this point in the meeting because I’m thinking you are going to beat these kids for speaking there native tongue yet you do in every class?? That is so HYPOCRYTICAL. So I told them that. I raised my hand and said I was confused at this policy they wanted to enforce with the students, because as teachers we are supposed to set good examples and if we are going to beat students for speaking Swahili then why is it okay to use this language as the language of instruction in the classroom? They all were very silent and the headmistress said she was very embarrassed. She sees my point and maybe the English thing is only something they will have to work on over time. I was thinking, yeah.

I am teaching Form 3 Biology. So I have 7 classes a week. I realized a lot very quickly about my students. First of all my school has little to no resources. I couldn’t even get a syllabus/curriculum to see the material I needed to cover this term. I finally realize it is shared between 3-4 other biology teachers. I tried to go make photocopies for myself but the electricity is so sporadic that when I went into town there was no electricity so that was a fail. They only covered THREE topics last term. That is literally nothing, and on top of that they cannot recall any of it. I gave them a review quiz the second day because the first day the headmistress makes them clean the environment aka clean the school grounds, sweep the dirt, etc. On the review quiz I picked out questions from the three topics they covered in their notes and in the book. It was 18 questions. I bought flip chart paper so it is the size of poster board. I wrote the questions on the flip chart so I could tape it on the chalkboard. I made true/false questions, multiple choice, and fill in the blank questions. My kids had trouble answering a true/false question and a multiple-choice question. I had to walk them through it and they are form 3, which in America this would be equivalent to juniors in high school. I had torn white printer paper in half and passed it out to my students for them to do the quiz on. I soon realized after class that grading assignments would be quite tedious with 60+ kids. The class average on the quiz was 7.8/18 so 43%. In Africa, I realized this was a C not F. 20% is passing. Crazy I know. But I am holding my class to a higher standard and they need to do better. Only 1 person made a 15/18 so I rewarded the top 3 grades with stickers and lollipops. I decided from the quiz outcomes that there is no point in starting new material if we don’t know any of the previous material. I came up with an idea that I would divide my class into groups and assign them different topics within the first chapter. They will use the flip chart paper to display their information and will teach the class about their topic. This is how they will review the material from last term. I will give them a grade on their project and on their presentation. This is a great way to get them up and moving and get the students thinking outside of the box and using their creativity. You should have seen some of the things they came up with the last two days (I have two different streams, so it is neat to compare my two classes). They were drawing the human body, the brain, diagrams; I was so impressed!! We will see how they finish up and present next week! I will try and take a video for y’all!

The teachers at my school are mostly men, with a couple women. I love the women teachers. They are so kind and warm. We talk each day and they are so welcoming. Some of them are Muslim so they fast during the day. We other teachers aren’t much different we just get to have water and they don’t. There is no lunch break or tea break because my school cannot afford to provide that. Sometimes there is tea but we have to pay. I do enjoy the fact that when I am done teaching you can leave school, you technically don’t have to stay the whole day. So if I teach morning classes then I can leave early, my headmistress is pretty lenient about that. There are also a lot of student teachers at my school from universities around Tanzania. There universities send them to different schools to gain teaching experience before they can get their teaching certificate. I’m so glad World Teach does not allow a student teacher to work with me, because as for the rest of the teachers they are basically without a job for 4-6 weeks. The student teacher just teaches there class for that time and the teacher sits in the teachers lounge and has to stay at school and do nothing, the teachers say that it creates a lack of motivation for their job. I would definitely feel the same way.

I get to school by a piki each day. My driver’s name is Martin and he is the best! He speaks no English though so we do struggle, but he takes me to wherever I need to go after school whether it’s town or the stationary store. The school wanted me to bike each day but it is about 10 km (about 7 miles) from my house to the school, so that would be 14 miles a day and we barely eat as it is so I opted out of that one! I know they bike hours each day but I honestly don’t have the energy to bike 14 miles a day I would have to work my way up to that not just tomorrow be able to bike 14 miles no problem!

On Tuesday I walked to the hospital in town. I wanted to see if I could volunteer after school. Bariadi has 1.5 million people but only 3 hospitals. The Somanda hospital is so close to my house. I can walk there in about 10 minutes. After clearing it with the District Education Officer and the Hospital Administration I was cleared to volunteer. The Somanda hospital has 150 beds and 5 wards. Labor/Maternity, Pediatrics, Women Surgical, Male Surgical, and Infectious. There is very little electricity with frequent power outages, no A/C only open windows and lots of patients sharing beds because of little space. In one area there are probably 9 beds, then you move to the next area and there are 9 more, so no one has there own private area or room. The hospital does not provide food or water for their patients, family or friends have to bring that for them. Mostly there are patients with malaria, sepsis, cholera, AIDS, tuberculosis, lots of motorcycle (piki piki) accidents so tons of broken femurs, lots of burn victims from burning the trash or cooking and the wind causes a bad fire, lots of babies dead in utero or complications/sepsis due to C-sections. I have learned so much this week it is unreal. To be a doctor here you have to go to school for 5 years. Meaning four years of university plus one more. Crazy I know.

I went to the hospital after school on Wednesday to start volunteering. I was mainly in the labor/maternity ward for the afternoon. I saw a lady who was having contractions and was prepped for delivery. They do not give any pain meds here to the mothers only oxytocin to induce contractions. I was working with Dr. Mponya and we had just finished with another patient. He looks over the patient; she was barely dilated which I thought was a bit off. He thought maybe we would need to do a C-section due to her previous caesarean scar. He examined the abdomen and just as casual as could be stood up and was like well her baby is dead. I was like what?! And he said yep there is no fetal heart rate, her baby is dead we will need to send her to surgery to get it removed. He started to speak in another language. I was like does she know that her baby is dead? Have you told her? And he said yes I just told her. She didn’t show any emotion, she just remained expressionless, and just laid there as the two women beside her gave birth. The doctor walked out. I just stood there.

They have no hospital blankets or sheets for the beds here, just kangas, which is basically just a patterned piece of fabric. The mothers use it as a sheet and the nurses use it to swaddle the babies. They have one light to warm the babies under in the entire hospital and I haven’t seen them ever bathe the babies once they are born.

In the male ward there are tons of fractures. I was so amazed at how they repaired fractures for femurs. They stick two hollow needles in their calf. They are very large and hollow this has medicine going into it on both ends. Also it is connected to string, the string is wrapped around the foot, then it is connected to a giant bag a soil which hangs off the end of the bed. This keeps the leg completely straight and unable to move. They stay like this for 8 weeks. This allows the bone to heal but causes bed sores underneath the leg because the leg is unable to move due to the heavy weight of the soil keeping the leg in that tight position.

I saw a man with previous abdominal obstruction. He had had surgery to repair then came in with complications, they did a second surgery to repair then on the 15^th of this month he came in again complaining of lower abdominal pain. Dr. Mponya once again thinks it is due to complications. He says adhesions have occurred in the intestines and if progression doesn’t occur in a day or two a third surgery will have to be done. At this point the patient is screaming in pain. Dr. Mponya prescribes him some Panadol. Panadol is equivalent to acetaminophen or Tylenol. That is all he gave him as he is screaming in pain. They have no morphine or no strong pain medicine. It amazed me how freely he chose to operate that many times on a patient, if there were so many complications occurring.

Thursday when I came in after school I went to the pediatrics ward. There were so many children with malaria. A little girl probably 4 or 5 was shivering under her kanga and was burning up with a fever!!! Her entire body was on fire she was so hot. I called over one of the male nurses and was showing him how hot she was and how much she was shaking. I asked if we could give her some Panadol and he said No. her fever wasn’t high enough he said. At this point I was so angry. I wanted to walk around the hospital and pass out Advil that I had at my house that I had brought from home. Why are they letting these people suffer? Help them!! I wanted to say. I look over and this little boy is convulsing on his bed. His eyes are rolling back in his head and he is foaming at the mouth. What would be the first thing that would pop in your head if you saw this? It was a seizure for me. I got the nurse and said, this little boy is having a seizure! And he says no he has pneumonia. PNEUMONIA????!!! WHAT?! I’m like? Are you serious? No way, this is not pneumonia. He picks up the little boy and takes him over to the oxygen machine and gives him oxygen. He is not conscious at this point still convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Lets plug up another airway and make it harder to breathe!! I was so upset. This is not pneumonia!!!! This little boy is going to die I thought, how is this pneumonia. I held his hand and just prayed for what felt like forever. God please don’t let him die. Take care of him, lay your hands on him and heal him Lord. Give him the strength to make it through the night.

I walked to maternity/labor and watched a young mother give birth to her first child. I was encouraging her and telling her everything was going to be all right. She was all alone and very scared. When the baby was born the nurse asked if she wanted to hold her and she said no. That literally broke my heart. I didn’t understand how you could just have had a child and not want to hold it. She turned her head and didn’t even look at it. She was emotionless. The nurse just let the baby lay on the table for the longest time why she tended to the mother. No one paid attention to it but me. That took me a while to process. Emily told me later that night when I went home that the child survival rate is so low here due to so many diseases. People here in Africa don’t name their baby until the age of 1 because so many children die before then. So if they survive the first year then they will get a name. Mothers don’t want to get attached to their babies because of the high mortality rate. Or she suggested it could have been a pregnancy due to rape. I will never know the answer but to see a mother respond that way to her child was heart breaking.

On Friday school gets out at noon so I had lots of time at the hospital. I worked with the orthopedic doctor for a while looking at lots of fractures, then I went back to the maternity/labor ward. If you guys aren’t noticing yet I tend to like that ward a lot. When I walked in the back room, a mother was on the table looked very pregnant and was complaining of feeling super full. They took a nasogastric tube and started shoving up her nose so the tube could eventually reach her stomach. They did this procedure with no numbing spray or anything. Normally there would be a bag connected to the end of the tube to collect everything coming up from the stomach but the mother immediately started vomiting all over herself. It didn’t look like food or anything you knew it was from the inside of her body, directly from her stomach orange and black. It was all over her I felt so bad. They didn’t have towels or anything to clean it up only little pieces of gauze. So we got gloves on and started to clean her up. She was so helpless and had no energy left to move. We moved her to a clean bed and she just laid there lifeless. When she was doing okay I left to go check on the little boy Emmanuel, he was the 3 year old who supposedly had “pneumonia” last night. Today he had a feeding tube up his nose and looked a lot better thank God. I said hello to his mom and held his hand for a long time. I thanked God for keeping him safe throughout the night. I asked the nurse why he had a feeding tube today and she got his chart and said he has been rediagnosed with Meningitis and has started treatment; you treat Meningitis with 1g of Ceftriaxone. They also had previously given him treatment for Malaria, Lord knows what they gave him for his supposed Pneumonia I think they gave him two different antibiotics. This little boy was so sick. Meningitis is just not common here so I just was confused at how they came to this conclusion. They said due to his eyes still rolling back in his head and the convulsing last night is a sign of meningitis. His neck is stiff which is also a sign. His little arms were stiff too last night. He was doing better today though since his treatment started. I hadn’t seen one Doctor look at him though since last night or since I had been there today, which didn’t give me much comfort. His mom would look at me with her eyes full of questions and I couldn’t answer her in the local language of Sakuma. I went and got Dr. Ntelemko. I wanted to make sure this was the right treatment plan for Emmanuel. I told him I wanted him to come look at the 3 year old who had meningitis, he says, “no one has meningitis in this hospital.” I said, well your nurses sure are diagnosing someone with meningitis. He came with me to see him. I was hoping he would say they were wrong but he agreed that he thought Emmanuel had bacterial Meningitis. He took me to the infectious ward after seeing Emmanuel and showed me a girl who was about 15 who suffered from Meningitis. Her parents had waited too long to bring her in to the hospital to get treatment and the meningitis began to attack her brain. She now cannot speak. She can move her eyes so she knew we were there with her but she cannot make any words.

The Doctors were very excited today because they got their first ultrasound machine in the hospital. They had an extremely old one but it broke a long time ago and they never could use it. Little did I know after an hour or two of playing around with the machine they let practice on patients! It was so neat! We got to look at a pregnant woman and measure the birth weight and the femur size, and all kinds of stuff! After the overload of ultrasound fun I went back to the maternity/labor ward to check on the nasogastric patient. The nurse, Jen, said she was sent to surgery to see what was going on with her abdomen. I said “What about her baby?” She said, “Oh she lost her baby.” I’m like “what?” and she says, “yes she lost her baby already on the 16^th, the baby was transverse in the abdomen, so they went to do a C-section and the baby was dead in utero. She delayed too long to come to the hospital. Sepsis occurred after C-section.” Another death. They didn’t know whether the sepsis in the abdomen now was due to the C-section or due to the length of the dead baby in her abdomen that caused the sepsis. Jen went to retrieve her from surgery a little bit later, and due to the over crowding in the hospital she was put directly in the middle of all the new mothers who had just delivered. All I could think was how difficult that must be. Her baby died yet everywhere she looked she was surrounded by crying babies and breast-feeding mothers. I hold a lot of the babies to give the moms a break. You never see any men in the ward. So it is only the mom and the baby.

I was sitting down and one of the male nurses came over to me from pediatrics. He said Madame your patient, your patient. I said what? What patient? He said the boy.  What about the boy I said? He is bad condition he said. I said what do you mean bad condition? He is good he said. I said is he bad or is he good? Nothing he was saying was making sense. There was definitely a language barrier. I said I am coming I will come to check on him.

I enter the ward and I immediately see a green curtain put up around his bed. I walk around the curtain, and a blanket is over him. I don’t think anything of this because when children or babies are cold here they cover them all the way up here even their head. I uncover him. I grab his hand and it is freezing cold. My heart starts to race. I check for a pulse but I don’t feel anything. I look into his eyes but they just aren’t with me. I look for the nurse, and he’s a few feet away. I say, “I don’t feel a pulse, I think he’s dead. Is he dead.” Tears filling my eyes. He says so nonchalantly yes Madame he’s been dead. Look, and starts pulling back his eyes and I just cant look. I try to find his mom and I finally see her. I just grab her hand and hug her. ‘Pole sana” I say. It means I’m so sorry in Swahili. She just has her head down. I start to cry, which no one does here. I walk away and one of the nurses sees me, she says, “Pole sana, it is always so hard.” I walk outside and just walk past the hospital and lose it. He was just fine? He was just fine! How can life be taken away so fast. He was 3 years old. It isn’t fair. It made me uneasy how comfortable everyone was with death here like it was no big deal. They are so accustomed to it. That made me so sad. I was so sad. Jen walks up to me she was trying to find me. “Why are you standing out here alone” she said. Then she saw I had been crying. “Why are you sad?” “Im okay” I said. But she kept asking me, so I told her, “the little boy died.” She said, “Ahh Im sorry, do you have a pen?” Death is just another part of the day here. But to me I will always be affected by it. I will always remember the look on Emmanuel’s face. I will always remember that he deserved a chance to live. I walked in to the maternity ward and held a baby that was just born tears streaming down my face I looked at that beautiful child and wondered if they would be lucky enough to live past age 3.

The next day Sam picked me up to take me to his village in Ikoloko. Sam works with an NGO called Well Share, which deals with public health. He works with the 3^rd hospital that was just built. He wanted me to come to teach the head of the hospital how to use an ultrasound machine that was donated to their facility. It was a 2 hour drive out to the village. He is 14 miles from the Serengeti. I could see the mountains in the distance! The hospital is smaller than Somanda but nice. I taught Helen, the head of the hospital how to use the ultrasound machine. It was portable and pretty easy to use. We practiced on Sam, Emily and one lady who was complaining of abdominal pain. We practiced looking at different organs and arteries and veins. We drove back in the dark and had some car trouble so we had to stop at his friend’s house to borrow his car so we could make the rest of the trip home. Long but fun and rewarding day! I would love to volunteer there more but the trip out there is so far!

This week has been one week that will be ingrained in my mind forever and it was the first week. Now onto the second.

I finally have the chance to sit down and reflect on my time here in Bariadi. What a whirlwind of emotions. What a change of lifestyle in so many ways. I have had to learn how to adjust very quickly. It is definitely a love hate relationship. The children are what give me the strength to wake up each day. They bring me so much joy it is unreal. They teach me so much about life and they are so young. They teach me how to stay strong and how to persevere. I live literally 10 feet away from Bariadi Secondary School but I teach at Kindinda Secondary School. So I have become close with some students at the school right by my house. 30 students board, meaning they live at the school. So I always see them. They always are helping me with things. We don’t have any water right now so they help us get water from far away and they always come over to check on me. They have Bible each night at 7 and they have asked me to come and run one of the groups. I have gained so much wisdom from reading the bible and singing and praying in Swahili with these children. They are precious, innocent children of God and they are so special. They thank God each night for letting them survive in this country. It is so eye opening for me to listen to their prayers in comparison to things I pray about. It brings me to tears. I help them study after Bible and school isn’t even in session yet. They are so dedicated to their studies it is unreal. The other day I was invited to one of my students families home. I posted a picture on Instagram with all the little kids. That was an entire family’s kids. They had so little yet prepared a feast for me because I took the time to come eat with them, they were so honoured. I offered to pay for everything at the market but they would not let me. I bought soda for all the kids and they were so happy. It amazes me how generous everyone is here and how they welcome you with open arms. The mom made sure all her children had food then with the little food that was left she made her plate. All the children from the street gathered around me after lunch and couldn’t stop touching me because they had never seen a white person before. Some of these things I just can’t comprehend. Its times like this that it hits me that I am in a third world country…or when we are walking home and babies younger than my brother who cant walk yet are crawling in the dirt, and have runny noses and torn clothes and no parents are around to care for them. That’s when it hits me…when my neighbour who is 4 years old plays with a ball that is made of plastic bags sewn together because that’s his only toy he owns. I feel so helpless, I want to help everywhere I turn but I am only one person. How do I fix this? One of the students, Johnson, who is my good friend got Malaria yesterday. He is really sick and got medicine from the pharmacy, but asked me for bug spray. I probably went in five shops in town looking for bug spray not one shop had it. How do they not have bug spray here in a place surrounded by malaria?! Another student has a bad infection on her leg but wont go to the doctor because she doesn’t have the money. Yesterday I went to an orphanage where the children were mostly infected with HIV and were found on the streets. A priest started this orphanage and it is very nice. I was getting research on why there are so many street kids and what could be a solution to this. He said the main solution would be education and the main reason is early marriage and lack of religion. I loved being able to spend time with the children and he said I could come back anytime. I learn new things about myself and others each day I am here. This truly is such an adventure and I have been in my new home 1 week today! It honestly feels like one month. It’s crazy what the time feels like here. One thing I definitely have done this week is lavishly loved on others and I can say that I have lavishly been loved on in return.

Where to begin...I am in Bariadi, my new home. I miss my old home though. Life is so easy there. People truly struggle here. I truly struggle here. I am without water and food is so far away. Without refrigeration it goes bad very quickly. Life is hard. We have one bucket of water, yes one bucket, for three of us to shower from. There are lizards, bats, bugs in my house, frequent power outages. The only thing that keeps me going is The Lord above and the sweet children that visit me every day and bring tears to my eyes begging me to bring them back to America for a better life. 

I woke up this morning SO tired! I did not want to get up. Maybe it was because I didn’t eat a big dinner last night. I had a half a mango and some cucumbers, with chapatti. I went to breakfast and then we had a session on the role of the volunteer/field director. A local doctor from Morogoro came and spoke with us about local diseases/sicknesses that we need to be aware of. She was really nice and I loved her discussion. It was not a lot of new information. I was blown away at the lack of health care they have here in Tanzania. In Morogoro, which is one region of Tanzania, they have 2 million people. They have 312 dispensaries, which are what they call pharmacies, 54 health centers, and only 14 hospitals. 14!!!!! For 2 million people. That is crazy to me. I take for granted our health care so much. Yesterday, we were learning dates in Swahili class and Chuma our teacher asked us to each come up to the board and write our birthdays, then one person would volunteer to say it in Swahili. I asked Chuma how to say Happy Birthday in Swahili and then how people here in Tanzania celebrate their Birthdays. He said people here do not celebrate Birthdays they celebrate the fact that they survived their birth, that they are still alive today. The whole class got really quiet. We were all just like wow. It’s times like that when I am reminded to be thankful for so many things in my life. I am able. I am blessed. I am grateful.

            After the health session we had tea break and Swahili at 1. Then we had a cooking lesson where we prepared tonight’s dinner for all the guests. We made mandazi (which are small little doughnuts), ugali, pilau (brown rice), okra, chapatti, machuzi (vegetable stew), chicken, and homemade juice from a fruit called Rosera. Our vegetable stew had sweet potato leaves and kasava leaves with coconut juice from real coconuts that we mashed up! It was my favorite by far out of all that we made. We also made a banana stew! It took us over five hours to make all of this and the ladies making it had definitely started hours before we got there. Not including getting all the food from the market or heating the jikos up. I now see why women in this culture stay at home during the day to prepare the meals. It took us this long with 9 people! I cannot imagine only one. It makes me nervous with how we are going to prepare our food or if I am going to be living off of fruits and bread with peanut butter. We will see how it works out! The whole no refrigeration thing is going to be really tough.

            After we prepared dinner we waited for our Swahili teacher to arrive and we enjoyed our last meal together. We had so much food and it was all so delicious! The teachers from the language school who helped in our class came dinner as well and afterwards they presented us each with a flower and a certificate. They were cheering and so proud of us! Chuma said he would never forget our group. He is such a wonderful teacher.

            We had one last meeting as a group and exchanged pictures from cooking today. I headed back to the room to pack up last minute things. I leave bright in early in the morning for my 18 hour trip to my new home so every one say a prayer for me that I arrive safely and I survive this torturous journey!

It’s Monday! Two more days until I move to my home in Bariadi! We started off the day with a session on Classroom Management. We had to come up with a plan of how we were going to implement rules in our classroom. I said I would call them out for noise, give them a warning and the next warning I give them I would make them come sit at the front of the class. Maybe do the “if you hear my name raise your pencil,” stuff like that. Obviously I will not be implementing corporal punishment but I am really nervous that I am going to have a super hard time with that. They say that the sounds of the hitting are the worse, and there are instances where if teachers know they can get a reaction out of you they will do it longer in front of you on a student. They always give beatings in front of the school or teachers in the teacher lounge and the students have to be on their hands and knees. Kim said all the volunteers had an extremely hard time with it last year. I already prefaced her that this is something that I am realllllly going to struggle with. She said the worst part is while the student is getting beat are the teachers are laughing and so are the students. They honestly think it is funny. So I am sure I will share many of my experiences on this with you, I honestly hope I never have to experience it.

We discussed how it is difficult to classroom manage students when they are tired, hungry, and thirsty each day. We talked about how we could do stretched with our class if one day everyone seems tired. Because they do not get fed anything all day from 7-2 and after school they go home and work on the field or in the home whatever jobs there parents have given them to do. School is also really far away for most students so if they don’t eat breakfast before school they get to school very tired from their walk and thirsty from it being so hot outside. We also discussed because of the different distances to the school we can’t really punish the students for being late. Some teachers definitely beat them for this, but I am not. We suggested having them wait outside of the classroom until we stop talking and then having them enter. These were all rules for us to consider.

We had a session on the teacher quality program, which is lesson plans, and modules we have to submit via email to the World Teach office so they can track our progress each month. That was pretty quick. Then we had tea break and some time free until Swahili at 2. After Swahili, I met my THIRD roommate! Her name is Laurel and she is in her sixties. She is a returning volunteer, and is the sweetest! She taught a year in Micronesia and a year in Tanzania in a very rural area. She is back this year teaching Math in Bariadi! I cannot wait to learn so much from her and use her as a wonderful resource in my teaching. She has such an upbeat personality and gave Emily and I a giant hug when we walked into the canteen to have our second tea break of the day. Hopefully the three of us will have a wonderful year together.

After free time and dinner, we played jeopardy in the common room. I really didn’t think it would be that fun but believe it or not I got super into it. We got into three teams, and the categories were about World Teach, Tanzania, about Volunteers, Swahili, it was a lot of fun! Anddd if you got the Daily Double questions right you got awesome prizes right like colored chalk or thermometers haha which are such big deals for us we were racing and getting so into it to win them! I won colored chalk, magnets, which supposedly kids love to play with even as toys here, and stickers which I am so pumped about!!! Stickers are such great rewards here! After jeopardy Emily, Shana and I stayed up talking about how long it has already felt like we have been here and it has only been two weeks! It honestly feels like it has been two months! A lot of people say that this year feels like one of the longest but shortest times of your life. Tomorrow is my last day here before my long bus ride!!