Apologies, many apologies, for my failure to keep up this blog. I can’t guarantee that I will become any better at updating this in the next three months, but I certainly feel and will continue to feel exceedingly bad about my gross negligence. I’ve found myself far more busy than I expected.

Over the last month and a half, Lisa and I have:
1. Established a reading corner, wherein each week one of fourteen NTC-sponsored high school girls reads children’s stories under a mango tree in front of the village leader’s house. As the group of girls walks from the high school to the mango tree, they call out to the children they see to follow them. Word spreads like wildfire, and by the time the group reaches the mango tree there are usually around forty children waiting. Nothing like this has existed here. A huge success.
2. With the help of members from the small non-profit organization Smallbean, created a solar powered computer lab of ten Dell netbooks. The three volunteers from Smallbean also taught the very first computer class here to a select group of eleven students with particular English acumen and potential. Unfortunately, it only took a week before a student, seeing that I had my laptop open, handed me a flash drive and asked me to open up a series of three files named “Wet and Wild” 1, 2, and 3. I stared at the files, choosing not to believe that the student would be asking me to open up porn at school, and very foolishly double clicked. The students will be receiving a very harsh talking-to about inappropriate computer and internet usage, with regard to both searches and downloads on school computers. Also, we have had some problems scheduling computer time for the students: the academic master (a fucking idiot) is not living up to his promise to create a consistent computer schedule, forcing us to heckle him every day to create and post each day’s lucky group of computer-accessing students. However, despite these problems, a huge success.
3. Hosted one of the more intolerable adults I’ve had the displeasure of association with. I’ll leave it at that.
4. Begun work on a research project for Lisa’s sister, studying the ability of young children to associate physical objects to pictures of the objects. The study concentrates on children under three years old who have lacked any real exposure to pictures. It’s very interesting work (the children are generally making accurate connections between image and real object), and Caren arrived on Thursday and will be with us for a week to oversee the end of the study.
5. Begun researching large water cisterns (tanks) for the purpose of eventually creating a 90,000 liter cement cistern to provide water to the community. Water is a huge problem. The local water is horrendously dirty (thick, yellow, and murky), and runs out frequently. Lisa had been working on drilling a well to provide the community with clean spring water from rain run-off, but the three drilled wells provided only salty water and the loose dirt around the holes caved in and created enough pressure to cinch the pipes too tight for significant water flow. This massive cistern project looks promising, albeit expensive.
6. Designed a playground for the primary school, which will include a swingset, monkey bars, two see-saws, and as many tire swings as we can wrangle up tires. Construction begins on March 31, when a group of twenty-six American volunteers comes to work for us for eight days.
7. Designed a library for the primary school, which involves turning a shell of a building into a functional academic room: window frames, window bars, window netting, door frame, door, plaster walls, cement floors, paint inside, paint outside, locks, repairing the ceiling, and creating bookshelves, tables, and chairs. Construction begins later this month, to be finished when the group of group of twenty-six American volunteers comes to work for us for eight days.
8. Begun making the necessary arrangements for this group of twenty-six American volunteers. It’s a very strange situation—a group from Brooklyn who wanted to do something voluntourismy, and contacted NTC. Because it would mean a significant profit for NTC (which would make the water cistern project more feasible) and because of the cultural exchange opportunity that this would create, Ross invited them to come out, choosing to hire an outside company to help feed and generally accommodate the guests during their stay. The group bought their plane tickets, and then took far too long follow up with the fundraising necessary to hire this outside company. As a result, Lisa and I have had to take on the responsibility of hosting them ourselves, which is really really frustrating.
9. Introduced many games to the students, including hopscotch, jump rope, hula hoop, juggling, four square, and connect four. I’ve also played a good deal of football (soccer) and netball (basketball-ish). The math and physics teacher at this school stole the last seven donated footballs to the school (and yes, for some reason, he is still employed), but I brought two and we had a generous random donation of four additional balls last week, bringing our total to six. We are hoping to continue to accumulate, and hide them from thieves.
10. Begun fundraising for an NTC facility in Kwala so that we don’t have to live out of the headmaster’s house. This is a huge deal. The headmaster’s house has absolutely no ventilation (which ain’t peachy keen when the coolest part of the night is around 85˚ and humid, and during the day it’s over 100˚ and humid); there is no lighting in the back yard where we are forced to cook; we store food in our rooms resulting in bug problems; we have no chairs to sit on or tables to work at; our rooms’ windows are large, directly face the school, and are right on the path of the students walking to and from school, resulting in some infrequent peeping-tom action; the other members of the house (two teachers and the headmaster) love to blast their radios and televisions (at the same time), especially when they leave or sleep; and the $1100 was stolen from me out of that room after Lisa and I repeatedly explained to the headmaster that the door’s lock was not unique and that someone had already stolen a key that would open that door. He then spent some time insisting that this was a huge problem, and that nobody could have imagined it happening. I refrained from slapping him.
11. Taught two English classes every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and three on Thursdays. This is often the best part of each day. Our students are wonderful, and Lisa and I play off of each other very well. She is far more awake and alert in the mornings while my brain is still dragging, and she’s utterly pooped by noon for our second class when I’m wide awake and energetic. And I now know enough Swahili to effectively teach by myself when need be—my lesson on simple present tense verb conjugation this past Thursday had students standing in front of the class dancing and laughing, and the class gave me a standing ovation at the end. The random third class we have on Thursdays is an English discussion with the Form 4 (senior) class, where we have discussed such topics as cultural differences, war, and football (soccer) terminology (and then we played football).
12. Cooked our own food and washed our clothes by hand. I think that my most-missed piece of technology would have to be the washing machine.
13. Begun writing a children’s book. Based off an idea of mine, Lisa and I have submitted our first draft to a local publisher in Dar Es Salaam that publishes textbooks and fiction books in both Swahili and English. The publisher liked what we had and is waiting for our second draft, and a friend of ours here might have found our illustrator. Very exciting stuff.
14. Other stuff that escapes my mind currently. I assure you though, lots of stuffs.

So, as our little vacation from all of this work we’ve been plowing through, and to do something fun with Lisa’s sister (who, as mentioned, arrived Thursday), the three of us are currently lounging at the Tamarind Hotel in Zanzibar, a beautiful hotel with adorable duplexes with for its guests, a gorgeous swimming pool, and a breathtaking beach. This morning, we woke up at 5:30 and drove for an hour to swim with dolphins. It was a hilariously frantic exercise. We were one of about five boats scanning the water for fins, and as soon as any were spotted, all five boats would plow towards the target spot while the passengers—flippered, goggled, and snorkled—would line up on the edge of the boat, ready to jump off as soon as the boat began to slow down. We would jump off and immediately start splashing towards the fins, hoping to follow and, if lucky, touch the dolphins. Once they would pass the boats, the captains would frantically usher us back aboard (requiring us to take off our flippers in order to climb the wire ladder back inside), and then take off again towards a different destination. We made around ten dives in about an hour. On the last one, I managed to touch a dolphin. According to the captain, I’ll now have 200 years of good luck. Sounds nice. The rest of the day has been lovely, lounging around in and around the water.

Weeks in the village are exhausting. A day in the life:
7:00 : Wake up, get dressed
7:15 : Show up at school for morning assembly
7:30-8:50 : Class
8:50-9:30 : Breakfast
9:30-11:30 : Errands
11:30-12:00 : Lunch
12:00-12:40 : Prep for class
12:40-2:00 : Class
2:00-4:00 : Errands
4:00-6:00 : Errands, football, netball, meeting for scholarship students, or literacy project
6:00-7:00 : Prepare for next day morning class
7:00-8:00 : Dinner
8:00-9:00 : Unwind in hammocks, complain about which village idiots pissed us off most today
9:00 + : Sleep

(Errands entails walks to village for groceries and drinks; checking and answering time-dependent emails; grading homework and tests; meeting with headmaster regarding half a billion school and NTC-related issues; meeting with community members; learning Swahili; fixing the computer lab’s netbooks and solar battery system; washing clothes and dishes; writing our children’s book; etc.)

After class on Thursdays or early on Fridays, Lisa and I ride piki-pikis (motorcycles) down the 18 km dirt “road” that separates Kwala from actual civilized society, and then hop on dolla-dollas (somewhere between a bus and a van, but with up to about forty people crammed inside) for the last 62 km to Dar Es Salaam. The whole trip takes between two and three hours. The weekends in Dar allow us to conduct business and make purchases unavailable in Kwala, but more importantly give us a chance to breathe and unwind after the lunacy of each week. We spend our nights at the YMCA hostel, but spend a good amount of each day enjoying the wonderful air conditioning and wireless internet of the Holiday Inn across the street (luxuries almost unavailable here) or pool hopping at a hotel next to a peacock park. For our sanity, these are necessary excursions. And I adore that 18 km piki-piki ride.

I've finished a third of my stay here in Tanzania. Here's to another two-thirds.

Kwa heri, watu wote.