Kande, Kids, and a Dead Keyboard (Monday 7/13)

I woke up to my alarm as usual, but turned it off instead of snoozing it. Thankfully something inside of me thought the snooze lasted way longer than usual and I woke up a little after 7:50am! I jumped out of bed, brushed my teeth, grabbed my things, and was off to the office in no time. I technically arrive a little late (around 8:04am) and find that a teacher assessment is happening in the main office! I sit and set up my stuff. 

It’s a physics teacher and he seemed to do okay. I would say that he’s better than the last guy I saw as he had better energy and what seemed like more knowledge about his subject. I’m not sure what percentage of teachers they take, but I know that Tanzania has a teacher shortage and that VST keeps opening several schools each year. I could be wrong, but it would make sense that most teachers make it. During the entire assessment I blogged!

When the assessment was over, Rambo made sure to note that I was late today! I wouldn’t think anyone would notice. I know that he was simply giving me a hard time, but I find it funny to comment on me being a couple minutes late when it seems like almost everyone here hardly does any work! To be honest, I didn’t feel like getting to work so I continued to blog until it was time for tea. 

I went with Eli and Miraclin to Roza’s around 11:00am for breakfast. Today we ate something entirely new to me called kande. It’s a mix of beans and maize boiled together to make a very hearty breakfast.

It was great and Alvin was there to eat with us. Since the kande sat in a broth and was boiling hot, it was very hard for little Alvin to eat. Every time he’d bring a spoonful of kande to his mouth, he’d angle the spoon away from himself and blow on it to cool it off. This caused most of the spoon’s contents to drop onto his pants and the floor! 

Eli, Miraclin, and laughed so much to see spoonful after spoonful get everywhere. I can see why little kids sit on the floor to eat and not with the adults at the table! No matter how much he spilled on himself he never seemed to notice or care! 

During the meal, I could tell that Roza was very stressed. She has a ton of work to do at the department from printing exams to learning Canva and Kolibri on top of taking care of us three. Joseph and Jordan could cook for us, but it’s seen as Roza’s responsibility because she’s a woman (I prefer Roza’s cooking any day). For some reason it seems like she’s the only one that works 24/7 at the department. I have so much respect for how much work she puts in and want to make sure that I can help in any way I can!

We finished our meal and returned to the office! I blogged a little longer until Eli made me realize how little time we have left to finish our projects. For the next two hours I began to set up my master guide Google Doc that has everything anyone would need to help them set up Kolibri. When it comes to Miraclin’s project progress, she has Form 1’s poster done and has three more forms to go. Eli’s projects are getting very close to being completely finished! All he has to do is make things look better and edit videos.

I work on my guide until it’s time to go to lunch. Alvin joined us once again where we had ugali, greens, and big fish. The sauce the fish was in was quite spicy so Alvin left almost immediately from the meal. I thought it was funny that Alivin could just up and leave! I feel like in America you don’t leave the dinner table unless you’ve been excused or everyone is finished eating. The ugali and greens were eaten quickly while I avoided the fish. The sauce was very good, but I was frankly worried about eating the fish. Eventually Roza called us out and asked why no one was eating the fish! I decided to just man up and eat it to please Roza. To my surprise, it was actually pretty great! Of course the fish is going to taste like fish, but the sauce that it was in paired very well with it. I’m not sure what I was so afraid of and would love to have fish again! Miraclin ate the fish with me, but Eli didn’t have any as he thinks it makes him sick (we’ll see if it makes me sick too).

When the meal was finished, Alvin and another kid around the same age named Lightness played the monster snatch game from last week, but with Eli this time around (less work for me, all I have to do is sit and watch). As always there is a ton of screaming and laughing! Soon it was time to go back to the office for me to teach. Since I was focused on working on my guide all day, I didn’t think of what I'd teach and decided to just wing it. I decided to teach them how to set up a Raspberry Pi Computer from scratch. Before coming here, I thought that the Raspberry Pi Computers that we would use would come fully set up. Turns out I was thrown a curveball when I got those new Raspberry Pi Computers from Jonathan last week as every one of them was not set up! This meant I needed to learn how to set up a Raspberry Pi in the first place and then teach everyone the process. I also wanted to teach everyone how to set up a router for the use of Kolibri by resetting it and changing the name and password of the router.

The entire process went well and I ran into hardly any problems! To be honest, I was learning right beside them as I hadn’t gone through this set up process before. The only thing that worried me for a bit was when it came to connecting a keyboard to the Raspberry Pi during the set up process. I only brought a battery operated bluetooth keyboard with me and it seemed to have died on me! I asked around if there were any USB keyboards in the entire department to continue my teaching. To my surprise, there was not a single one as everyone uses laptops and there’s no reason to own a USB keyboard. Thankfully, I was able to smack the keyboard to life and connect it to the computer!

In total they all seemed to learn well and I finished up around 4:00pm. Tomorrow we’re going to actually set up the Kolibri server on the Raspberry Pi Computer. It starts to get pretty complicated from this point forward so I’m praying it goes well! As I packed the materials, Rapheli wanted to talk with me. To summarize the conversation, I had to first go over and reexplain everything I had just taught (it’s hard to understand anything when today was the first day he joined us). Then I had to reassure him that standing in the projector light does not kill/harm you. He was told by a friend that the lens of a projector shoots out x-rays and it is extremely harmful (he’s quite the impressionable guy and just believes everything that anyone says). I’m pretty sure that if projectors were that bad, every teacher I know would be dead! Eventually the conversation finally ended and he wanted a picture with Eli and I.

I packed up all of my stuff and left with Eli to the shop around 4:30pm. After work we’re always hungry so we wanted to get a small snack.

Eli paid and we got glucose crackers while he got a jar of peanut butter. It was only 3000 shillings for everything and I’m curious what the peanut butter will be like. 

During this whole little adventure, we talked about so many different things. Our conversations always run all over the place as we’ll be talking about one topic before getting derailed onto another and then another! We got back to my house so I could change quickly. When I was ready we went to Eli’s house for him to change and we were on our way to the field.

Volleyball is an active sport but in no way gets you as tired as soccer does, so some laps were in order to get us warmed up. We ran four laps around the soccer field and Andrew and Joseph joined us. As I finished the last lap, Joseph wanted me to sprint a lap with him, but I had to decline (let’s just say I would’ve needed to use the bathroom half way through). The volleyball games went okay today. At the end of the evening the set score was 3-6. What really took the steam out of our team was something called a “Super”. Essentially if a team scores seven points in a row at the beginning, they automatically win (0-7). This happened twice for my team. 

I played decently but our team just wasn’t clicking like Eli’s even though I felt like the skills of the team were very similar. In general spikes were landing in the net, silly mistakes happened, and the other usual reasons why a team loses. I will say that it was fun to watch Mboje play as he’s too tall for his own good. It’s like watching a toddler in a grown man’s body. You’d think that since he’s so tall he’d be unstoppable, but due to his lack of coordination he often loses his team the point.

My team ended up winning the last game which is the only game that matters to me! As the other team took down the net, we had our regular team discussion. Joseph started and ended the meeting with a new little chant I haven’t heard before. He yells, “VOLLEYBALL” and we yell, “FAMILY!”. It’s fun and makes me feel like I’m playing with an actual team.

With the meeting over, Joseph and I jog back to our house to find that there was no electricity! I sat around in the front room and waited for Joseph to finish bathing. I waited a few minutes before going to Roza’s house to pick up my warm water. I must’ve gotten there too early as the water was only lukewarm when poured into my bucket. It’s better than cold water at the end of the day! I brought my water back and was getting ready to take my bucket bath when I heard Joseph do something with my water. When I was ready to go use it, I felt the water and it was a lot colder! I think Joseph poured the rest of his bathing water into mine to give me more to use. Regardless, I took my bucket bath and all was good.

After I got dressed, I went to the bathroom, and since the light switch for the bathroom is in another room, I usually don’t bother to turn it on and simply use my flashlight. As I was about to use the bucket to pour water down the toilet, I saw a pretty large spider crawling on the side of the bucket! When I tried to take a picture of it, my flashlight turned off. When I turned the flashlight back on, the spider had inched closer to me! I didn’t want to kill it, but when I placed the bucket on top of it, I smooshed it pretty good. I thought there would be a big enough lip underneath the bucket to catch the spider and drag it outside. Oh well!

Back in my room, I sat down, opened a package of glucose crackers, and started to blog. The moment I opened my blog, Joseph told me it was time to go to Eli’s house! I packed everything up and went with him right away. When we arrived I stopped by Eli’s room to see what he was up to. We figured we should go hang out with everyone else, but found that the door was locked! So we went back to his room and just hung out. Since Eli was in Spain all last semester, he went through his camera roll and told me about all the fun he had out there. It looked like quite the adventure and makes me excited for my study abroad experience in the future (God willing!). 

Before we knew it, Jordan came by to tell us it was time to go to Roza’s house for dinner. When we arrived, we walked in on a mandazi feast being prepared (lots and lots of mandazi being made). Miraclin was rolling out and cutting out pieces of the dough into circles while Roza was frying them over a charcoal stove. The power was still out at this point and we watched the cooking process until it came back on. For some reason the WiFi router was there so Eli and I used it for a bit before Andrew came by to pick it up. Even though it’s not that cold for us foreigners, this time of year is very cold for everyone else. When Andrew came in his neck and body were wrapped in a blanket to stay warm! It looked kind of ridiculous and we all laughed. 

After a while, the mandazi feast was ready to eat. Roza prepared us an avocado, prayed, and it was time to chow down. Besides the mandazi, there were also small pieces of bread called half-cakes. Apparently Roza didn’t put enough sugar in them, but they tasted good! The name is fitting as it tasted exactly half bread and half cake! I was super hungry and I told Roza I could eat 15 mandazi. I didn't realize how filling the small mandazi pieces were and only ended up eating five. Roza made fun of me for being so naïve! We washed down the meal with tea and were quite satisfied.

We sat around and talked for a while until the carb coma hit us. Dorris came from school to eat and Andrew came by for the last time to pick up another piece of mandazi. While I had bathed hours ago, Eli hadn’t as I unknowingly took all of the warm water. Thankfully Roza prepared him some water on the propane stove and we were off on our way to our own house’s. I got home, got ready for bed, and blogged for a bit before falling asleep. What a great Monday!