You Gotta Help Me Out, Yea-eah

I have a couple requests for assistance today, no stories about death spiders or bad English or anything.

First, our campus is pretty large, maybe the size of an average high school campus. Except where other schools have parking lots and sports fields, we have grass. Now, most schools also have groundskeepers (sometimes of the Scottish variety) to keep what grass they do have at a reasonable length. Ihungo is lacking two things in this regard: a groundskeeper, and any sort of lawnmower. Instead, we allow a travesty to occur. I'll elaborate. Every day, after classes end and the students get lunch, it is time to do what we call "usafi". This means general cleanliness, but is especially related to how the campus looks. So what ends up happening is that every day, a shocking number of students are sent to cut the grass for an hour or two. Yesterday, it was the entire enrollment out there cutting. The reason this bothers me so much is that the kids are using hand sickles to perform their task. Not sickles with long handles, no the little crescent kind that are less than a foot long. So I walk around campus in the afternoon to be greeted by hundreds of students bent over the grass, working. It is a monumental waste of time. I imagine yearly, tens of thousands of students' hours are spent cutting grass alone. This is no overestimate. So what I'm thinking is that, if my school could get several, maybe five or so, of those old rotating push-mower things, they could do this work in a small fraction of the time, and this would free them up to do things like study or rest. I don't know the logistics of finding a way to get those grass-cutter things over here, but if anyone has a benevolent soul and wants to save these kids from an insane amount of time-wasting work, any information would help me. I don't want to get a gas-powered mower because it would not last for as long, there are too many working parts. But these old things, they would be perfect... Let me know.

The second thing is again with my library. I'm in the process of writing some organizations which coordinate shipping books to African schools/libraries, but I don't really know the process, and I'm not sure how they will respond. I was talking with a girl teaching at a school nearby, and she gave me a great idea. She said she wrote home and asked her family/friends/associates/people-like-Davis to try to plan book drives, especially at places like her old elementary and high schools, churches, and local libraries, etc... What she called it was "Book and a Buck", and each person that donated a book also gave a dollar, to help pay the shipping cost. I thought this was a pretty dang good idea, largely because of the response she said she received. She has gotten dozens of boxes of various types of books, so many that her library is running out of shelf room and she had to write and say "No more!" For those of you who are looking to help me out in an easy way, this would be it. If you don't know anything about old lawnmowers, then maybe you know something about rallying people for a small book drive. If you are wondering what types of books to send, anything is good, really. Our library is really shoddy now, the most recent books were printed in the '60s. I have talked to students about it, and they are pumped. They come into the library, look around for something to read, and end up disappointed and leave with empty hands. So yeah, I don't really know what else to say. If you want to help, drop me a line if you have any questions. Thanks a lot (preemptively) for any of you who even try to help. Its much appreciated. Really. Thats it for today, lets do the thing and create some readers. Maybe this will help their English skills huh?

Meet My New Lads

So the first day I introduced myself to my new form 5 students, I wrote a list of questions on the board. These were "getting to know y'all" questions, as I deftly put it. As I went through them, I thought that some of the answers were pretty interesting, in different ways. These 'kids' are mostly between 18 and 22, and have already had four years of instruction in the English language, if not more. That being said, here are some of their answers.

Question 1: What is your name?
For this one, there was a pretty awesome range. First, there were the cool traditional African names (Magesa Nwizambi, Lameck Cleophas), then there were the names where the parents must've been quite religious (Innocent Charles, Pious Paul, Praygod Bernard Sawe...awesome huh) and last were the hybrids (Colodatus Cosmos, Mgeta Danger). Yes, all of this names are amazing. But my favorite, just for the sound of it, is Shwalb Yusuph. Really just the name Shwalb. Roll it around on your tongue, see how it fits you. I hope I have given you married couples some ideal names for your future little ones...

Question 2: What are your hobbies?
By and large, all the students wrote "playing football" (Davis, this is soccer in countries other than America). But some of the more unique responses were- "Running marathons." I guess this is Africa, they've got some good runners here. "Playing music and reading novels." That's cool. I got one of my basketball players hooked on Harry Potter already. "None outside of school." Pretty fitting, these kids do study a lot more than we did in high school, but its kind of sad too. Here's my favorite- "To understand what is going on." What a wonderful hobby. I can imagine some guy who is always confused, walking around like Mike Hardesty, except when its "hobby time", when he finally understands what is going on (for Hardesty this is in math class).

Question 3: Why do you like physics? (I know, ridiculous question...)
I got a lot of responses centered around future employment. Most wanted to be engineers or doctors (one wrote "doctor of the human heart surgery"). Others maybe forgot their English a little bit- "I want to be a pharmician." and "To understand earoplanes." I'm not sure if he meant "physicist", but another who he wanted to be a physician. I guess that makes logical sense, if he is studying physics... Some clever fella also wrote he enjoys physics because it is "the simplest subject." I wonder if he is either very smart or very sarcastic. Or maybe he doesn't know that I'm about to drop the physics bomb on him. Figuratively, not like Hiroshima...sorry...

Question 4: Why do you dislike physics?
I forgot that Tanzanians don't like voicing complaints when I wrote this question. The result was that 95% of the answers said something like "I like physics only" or "I like to not dislike physics" or were left blank. One said he doesn't dislike it as it will be the "the basis of [his] life". That is a hardcore student. But the most accurate answer is because it is a "headache subject." I really couldn't agree more. Luckily when I was studying it at UW, I had a little headache cure brewed by my friend, Mr. Pabst.

Question 5: Any comments/questions/expectations?
This was the part where their English skills really shone. I'll write a few verbatim.
"I'm great to meet you Robby AKA Masanja." "My coment to you tearch I request you to have more effort, so as to make me perfect in it as you." "Your expecation is not bad is good." "I comment that it is so sweat because does not need speculated answer." Those are not my typos, I double-checked. I suppose its bad that I am highlighting my students' lack of English skills. I doubt I'm helping them with little phrases like "What's crackin" and "Are you illin?... Like a villian." One last request: "Mr. Masanja, I have a comment about getting the one who can tell me more about the world. And I would like you to be with me, in all things, so that I may learn more from you. And if possible, I would like to get more friends from your country. Thank you. The end." Isn't that kind of sweet/cool? If any of you would like to be friends with Mr. Daniel Banyanka, let me know.

Twerking

Back to the grind...last week I had a conference in Mwanza, the second largest city here in Tanzania. It was awesome, just for the fact that I ate Chinese or Indian food every night. They even had a casino, but there was no Hold 'Em table for me to destroy people like Brandon. In total, over the last month I've been at my house for about one week out of the four. It was nice to walk in the door on Monday and realize that I'm stuck here until June, no more packing and unpacking, taking crazy buses or ferries. So on Wednesday I got back to work after a month and a half hiatus. When I returned from Mwanza, my headmaster informed me that the number of periods I'm teaching increased from 20 to 30, making me the second busiest teacher on campus (after Aaron, computer skills are in high demand in these parts). The reason for the addition is that we got seventy new form 5 students. The headmaster explained to me, "Robert Masanja, you could teach 50 or perhaps 60 students in one classroom, but 70 is too very much, so we must split them." Keep in mind the rooms are equivalent in size to our American high school classrooms. I wanted to ask him how 60 was cool if 70 wasn't, but since he has the laptop which I was borrowing and I want it back, I simply agreed with him, in a very obsequious manner.
So for now, I'm back to doing why I was sent here in the first place. I'll be teaching and coaching, and, if I get some time, working on the library. Excepting a short break in June, I'll be living the 9-to-5 style working man's life until September, when the first term ends. It really is nice to be working again. Without the distractions of America easily available (TV, movies, internet, video games, etc..) having vacation sometimes felt like a battle to kill time. A returned volunteer told me once that she got really skilled at "staring at the walls for way too long." I'll stare at a book instead (right now: The Brothers Karamazov...) but even that can get tiring.
And since blogs don't require segues, I feel no shame in switching topics to my plans for when I finish here. I don't mean long term plans, like grad school or the like, but immediate things. For example, when I get to Seattle I will eat a Big Cheeseburger with Ivan, then paint a house for Sasha or something. But before that, I'm making plans to do a world tour of sorts. I've found that there are sites which sell multi-stop tickets to anywhere you choose, so I've been trying to craft an itinerary for after the Corps. I'm hoping my brother will come, but the tickets aren't cheap and he is (dude, just kidding, quiet down now). The places we've talked about going are (in longitudinal order, thats right): Paris, to see some artistry; Croatia, the new Prague of Eastern Europe; Istanbul, capital of both the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the Ottoman Empire...history, yo; India, its a subcontinent. That's my only reason. Oh, and food; Thailand, Scott Boyd went there and rode an elephant. Its also very cheap; Seoul, cuz I've got Seoul but I'm not a Seoul-dier; and Japan, there's this cat I once knew who lives there, name of Kento. I heard that he has learned how to "ball out of control" and that he will teach me (got you, player). That and Andrew has wanted to see Japan for like 10 years. So yeah, those are the major plans. Does anyone who knows anything about air travel have any advice? Or are there any globe-trotters (not from Harlem) who can recommend other places? I'm still in the early planning stages, but it sounds like it might be a pretty awesome trip. Oh, we're thinking of going for 2 or 3 months, dunno yet. That's it for today.