teaching, sewing, church

Things have been going well here at my new placement. I am so much happier now! Its nice living in the middle of everything going on because it makes it so much easier to see the kids a lot. I have a roommate from England named Trisha and honestly dont know what I would do without her! This is her third time in Tanz and second time at Living Water so its nice to have her answer most questions I have. We get along very well too and are always laughing (usually at ourselves).

I have gotten into a bit of teaching here and learned that the education system is not so great here and has lots of flaws. A few times now I have been in classes where a task that should take 10 mintues tasks over a half hour. The kids have workbooks and then copy all things down from the blackboard as they do not have worksheets here. It seems so tedious. They dont have a lot of supplies so there is no creative learning and everything is done pretty much in one way and it doesnt help students that do not learn well from that one way. Also, they teach in English but English is not a first language for any of the teachers so often vocabulary is misused and grammar is not correct which drives me insane!! haha.

I did get to teach a little bit at both sites at the end of last week; math and english. I really enjoyed it. Spending time in the classrooms I did notice some things different about the children here. They are all eager to learn and want to be in school. They look out for each other and no one laughs or makes fun of another, always making sure no one gets behind the rest and don't care if they have to wait in order for that to happen. You also see this a lot at the center; the children take care of one another really well. The final thing about teaching I'll say is that when we were walking out of class one of the girls said to me "thank you for teaching us." It was so pleasant!

Trish and I spent most of the weekend sewing. We started off with just the tast of replacing buttons to some of the kids school uniforms and it turned into sewing up a lot of holes and rips on uniforms and everyday clothes. It would have been a fairly easy task if we had a sewing machine but no such luck; it was all done by hand. Mom would be so proud! :) We only did the children's stuff from Kisongo (the school off site from where we live) so this week we will do the clothes from the children at the center which just means more sewing fun!

Today we went with the children from the center to church. Just like in Kenya, church doesnt last less than 3 hours. Today reached about 5 hours but half hour of it was lunch that they provided for the children because its was children's Sunday or something of that nature. With it being children's Sunday the kids song songs, did a play, etc. I am glad to got to see them do that but I do not think we will be venturing back there anytime soon. Not only was there the kids part but there also two different sermons, singing, a baptism, and prayer for two different groups of people for something. Most of it was in Kiswahili of course so its just hard because we never know what is going on. There were two other mzungu there though so some things they did translate for us, just not everything which was odd.

Oh yes I must share with you two major pluses of my living situation now. One- not only do I have a shower, but its a hot shower!! yay! Two- I found out yesterday that there is a washing machine here!! Today I did a load of laundry and I could only do about half as much of a load you'd do at home and it took about 2.5 hours and stil have to wait for it to hang dry but hey, its still a washing machine!