Semi-Annual Report Card

Chicken drama at Ruth's house. Fighting over a girl chicken, 

of course.

I arrived in January with lots of plans, always lots of plans, rolling around in my head day and night, making it hard to sleep. Berega needs everything, so it doesn't take a mental giant to develop a list of projects, what's difficult is to focus on just one or two at a time. Then there's the time factor.

Chased him all the way across the yard and down the road.

As an American raised in Hawaii, my sense of time and urgency, or lack thereof, rests comfortably between wazungu and African. The pace here doesn't drive me crazy, but then, maybe I've just adapted. In America, time is money. In Africa, time is time, and hamna shida, there's plenty of it.

Just painting a classroom involves a multitude of delays. If I run out of blue paint I go into town and back, which takes all day, or I can ask Abdallah (handsome daladala driver and one of my adult students) to pick it up for me, again all day . Lots of things here take all day, or longer.  But I usually work multiple projects, so I can flit from one to another depending upon the availability of supplies.

The winner. Hard to imagine a 

chicken looking proud of 

himself, but this one does. 

Yes, this is what I do with my time.

But sooner or later (mostly later), things get done and ninafurahi kabisa to announce that the checkechea is finished. It's been likizo so I was able to proceed unimpeded by classes and kids. On Monday, Martha , Mary and I will prepare the room for school on Tuesday. The screens are about as dusty as they can get while still letting in light and air. The floors are a horror.

Berega Community Library. 

Told you it was small. I'm going to

Dar this weekend to beef up 

the English grammar, math, and

 the health and medicine section.

The kids have done very well, everyone knows their letters and numbers, in and out of order. Some can count up to 150. In varying degrees, they can write numbers from 1-150 as we call them out, read a few words, do simple addition, speak some English, lots of stuff. I'm really impressed, and the parents are more than happy.

Animals labeled in English and Kiswahili. 

Used the same as 

everything else on the walls. 

Nothing is just one thing. Everything 

a color, a sound...

AND the Berega Community Library is done as well. It's smaller than small, we just painted the walls white, borrowed some bricks from the pastor next door, and laid planks over them, old hippie style. As we get more books, we can add more bricks and planks, but it's operational. People are filtering in, getting books, and telling their friends.
We offer the usual library menu, adventure, mystery, and a few bodice rippers, lakini as it's located inside the Anglican Church school building I've avoided titles featuring words like heaving, throbbing or burgeoning. We also have a Kiswahili section for adults and kids, lots of English story books, and grammar books for all levels. There's a bilingual health and medicine section, and some of the hospital staff and nursing students are coming to get books to improve their English and prepare for exams.

Aissa and Jeska, two of my adult students, pluralizing. 

Kiswahili pluralizes from the front, and doesn't use a or an.

It's a process.

Last week I sent out a gangmail asking for money for a laminator, and accessories. Thanks to Evelyn, Patti, Chris, and whoever put money directly in my bank account, I have enough. There's some surplus which I will use to buy yet more books, if that's ok with the donors.
One of the things I plan to do is rip out the pages from all the workbooks I've collected, erase the answers, and laminate them so we can use them milele na milele. Schools here are generally resource free, so hopefully after I've plasticized everything in sight we can have a teachers resource section.

This is how we teach numbers, 

and fruit, and sentences. Also

a and an. I want an apple and a banana.

Last week I was talking with Sylvia and Isabelle, the owners of Ricky's Cafe (home of Black Forest Cake and ice cream). I mentioned needing books for the library, so they took me to a tiny hole in the wall shop way in the back of the market and I bought over 100 books, 20 plastic animals and about 30 little matchbox cars for 60,000 tsh, a good deal.This is why I talk to everyone. S and I are also boxing up some old books for me.
The kids are nuts over the cars and plastic animals, and spent about an hour lining them up till I showed them how to push the cars up and down every available surface. Now they're crawling all over the place. African kids are creative, and make their own toys out of sticks and mud and anything else lying around. I save my plastic bags and broken flip flops for them and they use them to make soccer balls, lorry tires, lots of stuff, but these are new and different and the word is out. I can hardly walk down the street without a troop of dusty little watoto trailing behind. Wait till I've finished the blocks.

Days of the week and below greetings using position of the sun.

There's a group of fundi wa mbao (carpenters) that work near my house, and they saved all the end pieces and made about 200 blocks, all different sizes and shapes. I'm painting them now, planning to draw numbers and letters and words on them as well, because Mungu forbid something should just be fun. The thing is, preschool is just games, so the kids are learning painlessly and playfully, and it's fun to watch.

Where the kids practice writing letters. Also note the letters 

out of order. Below is the transport section we use for sentences,

letter sounds...

Wall mural. Hard to see but we 

use this to teach nouns, verbs 

and pronouns. The boy is sitting on the rock. 

He is swimming in the river...

We do math with little blocks, and if I say to make 5 + 5 they make 2 groups of five, then count 'em up. The usual. One day after 5+5  I said "Now make 6 + 4" and two of the kids just moved a block from one pile to another. Ninashangaa sana. That's pretty sophisticated for a five year old who hasn't had a TV or computer or books. Smart kids.
The adult students are doing fine. They aren't as fast as the kids, but they work, farm, cook... Still they've made a lot of progress but I've decided that English is a dopey language. It's totally unexplainable, there's exceptions to every rule, and homonyms are just unfair.
Kiswahili has its wierdness as well, but on the plus side, there's fewer words to learn. Big is kubwa, very big is kubwa sana and really really big is kubwa kabisa and that's pretty much it for big. So I showed them the probably 200 English words for big in my laptop thesaurus. They looked appropriately intimidated.

At first we taught up to 20, then 40, 

and it was so easy we upped 

to 150 and they're learning it. 

So that's how the first six months have gone, and I'm satisfied. I hope all the Sisters at St. Theresa's and Sacred Hearts are happy to see that I'm finally "using my free time wisely." The plan now is to paint the Kiswahili chekechea across the courtyard. But I think I might take a few weeks off from painting to get the smell of paint thinner out of my skin and scrub off the remaining paint splatters on my person. It's a handy way to teach colors though, half the village knows all their primary colors from watching me walk home from work.
Brad Logan is coming next week, he's the doc who runs Hands4Africa, the org that sent me here. I gave him a yard long Santa list and he's got it all. Some exciting things coming, equipment, computer stuff, but most important, a box of Oreos. By and large the cookies hare are stale, or taste like pesticide, or both. I still eat them, it's what we have, but I'm looking forward to eating the middle out of my favorite store bought cookie.

Shapes and colors.

And THEN, Patti is sending me some home made chocolate chip walnut cookies in the mail. Yes, you can do that, if anyone else feels the urge. Not sure how well peanut butter cookies would travel but hamna shida, I would suck up the crumbs without complaint.
Just ate an eye, a little one, but an eye nonetheless. I've been avoiding eating eyes, picking around them while politely refusing the actual orb. In Ghana, one of the kids rolled a couple across my desk just to see what I'd do. I looked at the eyes, they looked at me, and I rolled them back to Alice, who ate them. Guess I've gotten over the trauma, because today I caved under the pressure and had a little fried fish, guppy sized, with the eyes still attached. From Moshi, where apparently the fish is good. Maybe by the next six month report I'll have eaten a big eyed fish, you never know.


Nakupenda.