A Cloudy Tuesday

Hello again from Monduli!  I just have a few photos to share today; not really a story but more of just a window into my day.  June and July are the coldest months here; on the coldest days, the high is in the upper 60s.  I know for most Americans that just seems slightly cool, but everyone here is freezing.  I wore long sleeves, at least? :)  Despite it being the cool part of the year, a lot of agriculture takes place this time of year because of the rainy season from March-May.  The corn planted at the beginning of the rains is now tasseling, as you can see in the field next to my house.  So, we have corn in July, too, but it's 'winter' corn here. 

Tuesdays are my busiest days teaching since I have three of the four forms (1, 3 and 4), but I spent some time in the library in the afternoon.  Here are a couple of my students goofing around: Salum (above; he wanted to see how that hat looked on him so asked me to take a picture) and Nelson-John (below; just being cheesy).

One of them picked up my phone and got a shot of me arranging things in my backpack.  The library is a bit in transition at this point, as we keep trying out different furniture and shelf arrangements and prepare to hopefully receive a shipping container from the US soon.  When it arrives, it should have almost 3000 new books for the library!  

It's a bit interesting being a librarian here; there is a public library in Arusha, but libraries are not a big part of most people's experience.  Even at home, most people have few books.  There are a few behaviors that seem very weird to someone who's been around books and libraries my whole life, but I suppose if you haven't...the one that drives me crazy is that they tend to put books back on the shelf spine first.  Their reasoning is that you don't risk accidentally bending any pages if you're putting it into a tight space.  I keep pointing out that we put them spine out so that we can see the title of the book without having to take it off the shelf.  Also, when other teachers make them clean the library, they make them arrange the books from tallest to shortest, as they think it looks better.  I've been busy labelling shelves to try to get books shelved by topic instead; as we get more books the tallest-to-shortest thing has become impractical anyhow, so I think I'll win this one.