The team has safely made it to Lushoto Town where we will be
for the next 10 days working and training SEKOMU students/teachers, parents,
and volunteers to further our literacy efforts focused on students with
disabilities in Tanzania. What a mouth full!!! We sometimes feel like we have
gotten in over our heads, but things are really starting to fall into place.
Yesterday we met with the Irente Rainbow School Outreach
Team (consisting of 3 teachers, which we thoughts seemed awfully small). We
discussed our “Books in a Book” ideas as far as combing them with their
outreach visits and they received our suggestions well and seemed interested in
implementing the use of the 7 books over the course of a year. The plan is for
the outreach team to visit our initial implementation site once every 8 weeks
to get an idea of how much the parents and volunteers have utilized the books
and to hand out the next book to go in their “bags”.
Today, we are doing a dual training with both the SEKOMU students
and the Rainbow Outreach Team to simulate each of the literacy activities we
have created for each of the 7 storybooks. We will have stations that each of
us will move around to and help model how to use the materials with parents and
volunteers.
Now about our giggles….. Marilyn and I, upon our arrival to
Lushoto, made sure that our key was secure and easily accessed for entrance
into our house on campus after dinner. We had left the key over the weekend to
have things cleaned and tidied up. We pulled up to the gate we were told it
would be out and the guard immediately looked at us quizzically and stated that
there was no such key left out the gate :/ We got on the phone with Eberhardt,
who for one reason or another seems to be the SEKOMU staff member “in charge”
of us during out time at SEKOMU. He assured us he would get on the phone with
the warden, who is also one of our students, to try and figure the matter out.
This is where things start to get funny. People are making phone calls right
and left trying to figure out where the key is located. In the mean time,
Efraem drives us to our house where we are to wait for the warden to come.
Eventually he shows up and informs us that the Provost’s secretary had
forgotten to hand the key off to him and it is now locked up in the
administrative building of the college. We were out of luck for the evening, so
we took up the warden’s offer to stay in one of the dorm rooms on campus and
wait for the arrival of the key in the morning. Marilyn and I both took up
residence on the bottom bunk of two sets of “double-decker” beds. Marilyn and I
were exhausted so hit the hay after all the confusion. Waking up early for the
arrival of the key, Marilyn and I decided to take a shower, but soon realized
that there were no towels to use. I was in desperate need of a shower after our
traveling day back from Zanzibar so decided I would dry off with a bed sheet J
What an experience! I’m working on making sheet showers the new fad! We had
warm water so that was all that really mattered. The key showed up at our
doorstep a little after 7 and we had a driver take us to our home to pack up a
few things are change into our “teaching apparel”.
The rest of the day was busy busy busy. Filled with a
morning of teaching at SEKOMU, an afternoon meeting with both the Rainbow
Outreach Team, and Mama Munga to secure her permission to continue with our
research project on literacy.
We look forward to sharing the rest of our teaching
adventures with our readers! Now we are headed into a meeting with our KSU Team
to firm up our plans for teaching this afternoon.
Tomorrow it is teaching teaching teaching and then a visit
to play with babies at the children’s home! We can’t wait!
Stay tuned for more excitement!
Kwaheri (bye)
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