Rainy Season Goes On

Rainy season goes on...but it does make it super green!  Work continues, here and there, on the new bell tower on campus.  Here's a photo of the progress, above. 

The worst part about rainy season, as I've complained many many times, is the muddy roads.  My road is predictably in full rainy-season mess now.  

The corn field next to my house has been planted again and is coming up nicely.  With the weather here, farmers can get two or three crops a year; the last batch of corn was harvested in January.  At the coldest, it rarely gets below fifty degrees, and that only at night, so growing seasons depend upon getting enough rain, not on frost.  

Above, here's another view from just around the corner from my gate.  Definitely green and growing! 

The students have been out of school for two weeks now (well, as of tomorrow morning), and most of them are thoroughly bored already.  I had a couple of visitors today who have already gotten bored enough to want to hang out with their teachers again.  Paulo and Mathayo are from up in Monduli Juu, the collection of Maasai villages up on the summit of the mountain, but they're staying with Koimere (the preacher of the Monduli Juu church and also a school board member), who lives here in Monduli town.  We often call the main town here Monduli Chini (lower Monduli) to differentiate.  They came by to greet me and to pick up some school work I had printed for them. Since they have about a mile to walk back into town, I invited them in to hang out for a while to wait out a downpour.  

 

The Work Goes On

Although schools have been closed, we teachers still have work to do.  We would have had our two-week Easter break in two more weeks anyhow, but the students are missing two weeks of school now and then probably more after they would have come back from that break in mid-April.  Either way, it's going to be longer than they really should go without studying.  So, we're trying to put together packets of work to send out to the students for them to work on at home.  Before they left school, the headmaster told them to stay in touch so we could let them know about work.  I know there will be some we can't reach, but we're trying to get work to everyone we can.  

I put together packets for my form 1 and form 3 English grammar students.  Mine have three parts: a study guide (notes on the topics), exercises to do, and a key to the exercises so that they (or their parents, ideally) can check their work after if they aren't able to return it to me to check.  Just for fun, I tried to use all of their names somewhere in the notes or exercises.  Form three was especially fun; I wrote a silly story about a whole group of them going to the market for one exercise.  

Schools are Closed

Well, the coronavirus has reached Tanzania.  Yesterday, the news reported the first case.  The students somehow found out before I even did, and rumours and worry were going around, so I scrapped my lesson plans for the days and chatted with my students about what facts we know so far.  I think it's better for them to know the truth, so far as we know at this point, rather than just keep passing more and more far-fetched rumours around.  The first case turned out to be not far from us; the woman lives in a town only about a half-hour drive away from us and had just returned from a trip to Belgium.  

We knew that it was likely that changes were coming; Kenya announced on Monday that they were closing schools and setting certain restriction to try to keep the virus from taking hold there (they have five or so cases right now).  Our government moved even faster than expected, though--the first case was reported earlier in the day and by that (Tuesday) night, it was announced that schools were closing.  Immediately.  I was already home for the night when the news came out, and by the time I got back up to the school Wednesday morning at ten half the students were already gone. 

I was expected the library to be a complete wreck as all the students would be returning books before leaving, and as we had no time to prepare or to check them in in an orderly fashion, I figured there would just be a massive pile on my desk, and my plan for the day was to sort them all out. 

However, I was in for a surprise!  The library workers, led by our head student librarian Baraka, had started right after breakfast and sorted out and shelved all the returned books before I could even get there!  It's times like this that I know I made the right choice in choosing Baraka as head librarian.  He's proven to be a hard worker over and over, and he's not afraid to motivate the others.  

Above: it's a bit sad for the library to be suddenly empty of students on what should be a school day.  And with everything just getting started here, who knows how long we will be out?  

Below: After leaving the school once most of the students were gone (some have to wait for morning as they take long-distance buses and the tickets need to be bought the day before), I went into Monduli to run a few errands.  The coronavirus is definitely the topic of conversation today.  Several businesses are putting out hand-washing stations outside, and NMB bank was the first.