Under 100!!

Because my brother Preston thinks I don’t update my bog enough this post is dedicated to him.

I am officially on the downward slide of my time here in Africa and in Tanzania. I can’t believe how fast time has flown by in retrospect. In only 72 days I will leave my home in the village of Kafule and head up to Dar to meet my parents and in 98 days I will be back in America!!!! In between now and then I have some fun things planned, which I look forward to everyday. One of those is my spring break trip down to Zambia and Victoria Falls for 8 days, the other is of course my parents coming to Tanzania for three weeks of crazy traveling. It’s these things that get me through the long days when my students are behaving badly (which has been an unwelcome new trend).

I really cant believe that it is already March. Furthermore I can’t believe that people are still baffled by our presence here. We have been a constant in this area for a good 7 month and still on the reg, I meet people who cant believe that I live here. Where have they been for the past year, living under a rock. I feel like the majority of people know that there are 4 mzungus living in Ileje District, but somehow I still manage to encounter the people who are taken aback by the sight of me.

Lets see so far this week things in the village have been fairly calm. Today the students for the 7^th week in a row did not go to class and instead spent their time planting/cutting down trees. Apparently the massive amount of 2X4 sitting outside the classrooms is not enough and they need more wood. It turns into a colossal waste of time after about an hour because when you delegate 600 kids to do a job that only needs 50 people you end up having all the guys sitting around while the girls are doing all the work, which is typical in Tanzania. The girls/woman do all the cooking and cleaning while the guys sit around and watch TV or talk. The same happens at school when it is cleanliness on Thursdays the girls are always the ones doing all the work while the guys just kind of idle around.

Yesterday things did get kind of interesting; lately there have been a lot of soccer matches at the field by our house because they are working on the one near Isoko. Well yesterday was a rather heated match between Isoko men’s team and a neighboring village. We can hear all the cheering and vuvuzela horns from our house, but it looked like rain so yesterday we did not go to the match. We heard a loud commotion out of the norm, and found out later that there had been an all out brawl between not only the two teams but also the fans who were there. This is out of the ordinary for Tanzanians because they are normally really peaceful people and rarely fight. Yesterday things got real though, we found out later that the “ambulance” came and two players had to be taken to the hospital apparently I picked a bad match to skip.