Experiencing Patience and a “Hooked on a Feeling” Dog (Wed 6/17)

The regular morning ensued: Paul woke me up, boiled myself water, and then got ready to go to the office. When I arrived, Eli and Michael were already there and made sure to remind me that I was late (it was a little past 9am). There’s no official time for us to start work, but before 9 is the most common. I didn’t realize that the only router we had was the one that I brought home last night so they didn’t have any WiFi to start working. I will make sure to get there earlier to not have them wait on me to work! 

I settled in and got straight to work. I wanted to be productive today for once and that meant staying focused and working even when it was monotonous. My work extensively consisted of working on teaching materials for Google Classroom. Henry arrived short thereafter and he’s finally feeling better! Miraclin, on the other hand, did not show up today as our sicknesses finally caught up to her. 

We all worked until it was time for tea where we had the regular mandazi and tea, no eggs this time around. Our tea time conversation was about guns for some reason which was interesting since guns are strictly forbidden here! Michael, being from Texas, has quite the armament! 

Right before we finished, Michael was chewing on his Mandazi when out of nowhere he said that his tooth cracked and swore there was a small stone in his mandazi. I dismissed his claim. Walking back to the office, we all crossed paths with Paul which meant it was time to take a selfie for memory sake. On WhatsApp there’s a feature that allows users to post stories similar to Facebook or Instagram; Paul frequently posts pictures there!

On the walk back, Mr. Chesco discussed with me what I would be doing the next couple of days. At first he was trying to get me to teach, but considering I had no materials prepared for any sort of lesson I was confused how to do that and had to refuse. I don’t want to get up in front of a class and not do at least a decent job. In general, it is very difficult to communicate with Mr. Chesco as he speaks so fast and never answers the question you ask him. If I were to ask him, “What form would I be teaching?” he would respond with something completely unrelated or dismiss my question. I’ve gotten to practice my patience to say the least! Also organization is not a strong suit of his which can also make things hard. I’m not complaining but just stating that teaching and teachers out here are very different from the ones back home! Mr. Chesco is a lot of fun to hang around and is always up for anything from playing hacky sack to cards.

Back at the office I continued to work while Eli and Henry went to teach (Eli usually does science and Henry math). Mr. Chesco came in with 5 Chromebooks so I could get them working and charged. There were hardly enough chargers to get them all charging, but all of them were functional at least. If you didn’t know, Chromebooks are extremely cost effective laptops which are great out here but means they require a lot of patience to use!

Henry and Eli got back from teaching and began to team review Math Club materials that we’ve put off for so long. When we generated the PDF documents we briefly looked through them for any glaring mistakes, but now it was time to go in depth with our reviewing to prepare them for use in the classroom. Holy moly this process takes forever to do! We could just pass off most of the documents as okay but we want to make sure they’re all really good. This means adding and changing a lot of things for the students: better wording, easier to understand examples, diagrams, etc... We did this until lunch time where we had chicken (a really great piece) with beans, cabbage, rice, and this type of tomato sauce. It was all delicious as always! My favorite part of the meal was the Embe that was served afterwards! 

During lunch Mr. Chesco told me that tomorrow I will need to teach the students how to not only use a computer, but also the Kolibri program. Digital literacy isn’t prevalent here at all (electricity was only put in 5 years ago and tech is expensive) which means even turning on a computer is something that can be foreign. With only 5 Chromebooks this may be extremely hard to do if I have to teach a lot of students, but it’s a challenge I’m willing to take on, after all I do love computers!

Towards the end of the meal, Michael pulls out a bloody finger from his mouth and it turns out he did crack his tooth from eating mandazi this morning. Luckily it was only a small chip and nothing serious, but I felt bad for dismissing a claim that turned out to be very true! On a side note, I can’t imagine dealing with a serious medical issue out here like a broken tooth or appendicitis (one of our lunch conversations).  

Before we knew it we were back in the office reviewing more documents. We reviewed for another 4 hours (a couple interruptions here and there) and didn’t progress that much (Michael is the only one to not review documents as he has mechanic and school work to do). This may be a problem as we have hundreds of documents to review and it takes at least 30 minutes to review a set of two documents. I’m not sure if we’re going to make the deadline of July 6th, but we’ll sure try hard to get it all finished! I make it sound like horrible work, but it was honestly a ton of fun. Henry and Eli are quite fun to work with and there’s always some sort of joke being thrown around. At one point we were looking up and inquiring how much it would cost for Mines to host Diamond Platnumz (Tanzania’s most famous artist). “Only” $500,000 all said and done…

Even though we made the boring work fun, we did get sick of it and figured we should go enjoy the fresh air outside before the sun set. Somehow Eli forgot his hacky sack at his house so we (Henry, Eli, Michael, and I) decided to play Cardi on a small table out front of the office. We played for the next two hours! It was a blast. We listened to music on my phone and joked/talked about so many things. At one point the village dog came by and we pet it a ton with our feet. The moment you stop petting the dog, he will playfully nip at you to get your attention back and continue the rubbing. I’m not a big fan of a random village dog nipping at me but it was funny to see him nip everyone else. For some reason, the moment “Hooked on a Feeling” came on my phone, the dog got hooked on a humping feeling and started to run around and hump everyone. I got a video of it all and it was hilarious. All in all there were a ton of great moments, wins, and comebacks the whole time. Michael took a bullet for me and took on an addition of +10 cards, a sacrifice I’ll never forget!

It eventually got too dark to see the cards and honestly quite chilly as well so we went inside to pack up before Henry suggested we play a game of chess. We play all of our chess games on a website called chess.com and there are a ton of fun variants of chess to play on there, one being a 4 way chess game mode! Eli, Michael, Henry, and I went head to head and I ended up placing second. It was chaotic and definitely pushed my chess skills!

All of the hosts started to show up at the office which meant it was time for everyone to go home. In fact even Paul was outside of the office waiting for me, but needed to stay at the office a little while longer to finish up some sort of work. I walked back to the house and John was inside making dinner in the dark. At first I thought it was some sort of weird preference, but it just happens to be that the light inside of the cooking room does not work!

To be some sort of help, I held my flashlight while he cooked. The food looked amazing until he put in a packet of small fish; yuck! I did see how ugali was made, which is a very simple process. You boil a pot of water, then add corn flour to the water until it becomes a sticky, dough-like consistency. To make it less sticky, add flour, to make it more sticky, add water! When I get home I hope to make some ugali! 

During the cooking, John was on the phone with Paul and ended up handing the phone to me. The speaker was so quiet and I could hardly hear Paul spark. I was instructed to set up the speaker system so we could listen to music. Following instructions, I go inside of Paul’s room to find everything packed up in suitcases! For a moment I thought that Paul was leaving soon and I would need a new host. Thankfully when Paul eventually came back, he assured me that he was just testing to see if everything would fit in his bags for his upcoming travels. The last time he saw his family was in 2023 and he finally has an opportunity to go see them again once I leave back to Bukimau. This means I probably held him back from going back weeks earlier! 

It was time to eat and I was worried that I would have to eat the fish (I just don’t want to feel sick again!). Thankfully, Paul made me some spaghetti noodles earlier that evening so that I would have something to eat. Eventually we got talking about avocados and it turns out Paul bought an entire bag full of them! They are so common and cheap out here that 20 avocados will only cost a couple of USD. I got to eat a whole one all by myself which paired well with the “naked” spaghetti noodles.

While eating, Paul and John were having their own conversation so I whipped my phone out to look at some pictures I took during the day. This caught the eye of John and he wanted to see all the photos I had on my phone and ask (through Paul), how much everything cost. It always feels very weird to talk about the cost of things out here. The cost of my phone could buy me a wife or start a business out here! It makes you immediately realize how much we have in the States and how our daily amounts of money could be life changing beyond belief out here. It made me feel kind of disgusted how much money we spend on things. 

During the exploration of my camera roll, Paul and I had a small heart to heart moment. He was telling me how happy he is to have me as a guest and that we've become good friends. Paul does not want us to forget each other and keep in contact after this summer! I’ll certainly make sure to have my WhatsApp notifications on to keep in touch.

As dinner finished, Paul and John were called up to go help with changing a tire. I hung out until they got back and relaxed some more with them when they arrived. I was feeling tired so I excused myself to bed and blogged before going to sleep. I’m hoping for a good night’s rest as I think I’m catching a cold or at least what Paul has been ill with… Prayers for good health!