Tanzania I have Arrived!

I have settled, I'm here in Tanzania and despite major wifi withdrawal, I’m OK! I’ll admit, there was a breaking point on Thursday and I paid the nuns IT guy to buy me my own modem, great excitement when he arrived yesterday but unfortunately it was not to be. So it’s old school desktop PC, bye bye whatsapp and constant notifications, I don’t know what to do now in the mornings without all my updates to trawl through!
Enough of my first world problems....Tanzania........

Yes, the suitcase arrived. Luckily Sr. Annette had asked me to have a letter from my school stating that all the contents were a gift to the Holy Union Sisters School. I was stopped at customs after the bag was x-rayed and sent to the red channel. I dutifully produced the letter and blabbered a bit nervously but with a nod I was let through.

​Sr Annette met me at the Dar es Salaam airport. Along with her driver, they had waited patiently for over an hour after my flight arrival time. Let’s just say the visa processing service at immigration is not exactly efficient! Our exit from the airport was then impeded by a car illegally clamped right behind our car. Finally the driver and his mother returned but they didn't seem to have the inclination or the means to get the clamp removed. Finally the space beside our car came vacant and our driver was able to manoeuvre the car out around the clamped, non-moving car!

The inner garden of the convent.

​An hour later saw us at the Holy Union Sisters Convent, Mbagala. Right next door is the primary school and across the road is the COBET street children project. Little bit of freshening up and we were off again, this time to meet the teachers and see the schools. I was introduced by Sr Annette as a head teacher from Ireland who would inspect the teachers and play sport with the children?! School reopened after its month of summer holidays just this Monday.

​After dinner it was an early night, to catch up on a missed nights sleep.
Wednesday was to be a quiet day for me to rest and get acclimatised to the place. Also Sr Annette was away at another convent. However Sr Mairead took me under her wing and brought me on another tour of the school. This time, school was in session and I was introduced to the children. The school takes children from 3 years and teaches the Montessori Method of preschool. The children all get lunch in the school and instead of going home early; the preschoolers have a nap and go home at the same time as the older pupils. 

The preschoolers!

Next it was onto the computer room to see the computers funded by the INTO solidarity fund and the room prepared from the funds of my own confirmation class.
Rodney, the new computer tutor was there with a few students but unfortunately the electricity had gone and he could only tell the children about the computers for this class!

The computer room at COBET

The next morning I met with Rodney and we discussed ways of introducing the children to ICT. He took a group for two hours and it was their second lesson on the computers. I took charge of the inside room and my little group started with MS Paint. We thought it might be a nice way to get the children used to using the mouse. Rodney had to translate for me as these children are taught through Swahili and have limited English.
It was hot and stuffy; the kids kept talking to me in Swahili somehow thinking that I'd magically understand them. I supposed they are used to the Sisters like Sr Annette and Sr Mairead speaking their language and as they assume I'm a sister too, of course I should be fluent!
We moved on to PowerPoint when I realised the class was not an hour long but two hours long. They got a great kick out of the transitions on the slides, however they really haven't mastered saving files yet and as soon as you would see a child with a nice presentation they would have exited out of it and not saved it!

One of the bright sparks working on his MS Paint

​Yesterday I spent the morning with Rodney teaching the same group of children computers. I thought 2 hours were long the previous day, these kids were timetabled for 4 hours! But we got on fine, we continued with PowerPoint. I had taken photographs of them and their school and they prepared presentations about themselves and their school. We invited some of the teachers in to help on the pretence of assisting me because the children would be writing in Swahili. The teachers in this school are not trained and have no experience of computers at all. The children I realized as the day went on, are of various ages. They come from difficult backgrounds and attend COBET to basically rehabiliate them into school life. They will join the mainstream school in a few years but already some of these kids are 14 years and older. Their standard of reading and writing is very basic so they were very proud to show off their powerpoints at the end when we did a class show and tell. Their school day actually finished at 12pm as it was Friday but nearly all the children stayed on for the extra 2 hours. 

My COBET gang

In other news, I’m here minding the house while the Sisters are at a seminar for the morning. I’m going to another convent later to pick up a nun who was away. The convent is great, really comfortable and airy. A different nun cooks each night and treats so far include freshly roasted peanuts and banana bread. A man arrived this morning with a bucket of honey and Sr Annette is very proud of the cows they have on their farm. We have mangos, bananas, oranges and pineapples every day.
The electricity goes a few times a day, it went twice yesterday during our computer class but you just wait until it comes back. To have a hot shower, you have to heat water separately and throw it over you in the shower. Everything takes a bit longer but nobody is in too big of a hurry either!
And eventhough every Tanzanian tells me it is cold, and the kids are wearing their school jumpers-it’s roasting!