9-25-11
As of right now at the preschool we have 2 teachers who are working the preschool everyday but one is about to go to school starting in January. The teacher that is going to start school is one of my closest friends and I am the one saving up to send her to school (by the way her name is Jen). Jen has been helping me with things around my house for many months now, like laundry and such and she also stays at my house when I am gone to watch/feed Amadeus. She is really trusted by a lot of villagers and so I am really lucky that I became friends with her. She went to high school all the way to senior year before becoming pregnant and getting kicked out. She has always told me that she wanted to go back to school and I told her that I would help. As of now I am paying her to clean at my house and also to teach and I thought that she would be able to use that money to send herself to school but turns out she is paying her sisters school fees as well as trying to put a real roof over her family’s head. I went to see her house for the first time not too long ago and I was shocked. They have no glass in their windows, no steel roof, no true cooking area, and that was just from the outside. As you may know it gets VERY cold here especially at night and since her windows are open (there is some old corn husks put in for insulation) it probably gets very cold. So her spending the money to try and make the family house better is a-ok with me.
School fees are actually really cheap but it will take some payments for me to be able to cover everything. She is going to check out some schools this coming month and we will see what the bill comes up to. Since she was kicked out of the nearby school she will have to board plus normal fees and uniform and such. I am thinking that it shouldn’t be more than 60,000tsh which is like 40ish dollars. I hope all goes to plan because as you should know, education is a gateway that leads to only positive things.
I have been here now, in my vil for over a year and it is starting to seem as though I am leaving tomorrow and I need to get moving! So I have made a list of things that I still want to do in the vil and assigned a month for those activites. In October I am pushing SODIS which is an amazing way to disinfect water without boiling, you simply use the sun (www.SODIS.ch). There is a HUGE problem with people here and not boiling their water and being super sick. Even things like typhoid can be found at our hospital. As for November I plan on doing better chicken keeping practices along with better book keeping. My fellow peace corps volunteer is coming to run a seminar along with my village “vet”. I hope it goes well!! Also in October and November I plan on finishing up my 2 grants, one for the water tank and the other for a World AIDS Day party/ testing day. In December, Tim (sitemate/ closest neighbor) and I are planning a big party for World AIDS Day which will be held in his village and we are going to invite the whole ward (surrounding villages). The day will have entertainment (music, drummers, dancers), a film on HIV, a baba cook-off (showing the men can cook too!), and most importantly FREE HIV TESTING!!! The testing will be done by an outside organization, so no one should be worried that their status will be the talk of the town, which seems to be a universal concern. The party will also have speakers on HIV and condom stations and other information available! I hope this goes as well as I think it will go!! That brings us to January where I plan on doing either jamming (we have a lot of seasonal fruit) or more information on SODIS. If anyone has any other ideas let me know because I am pretty blank after those months lol
Well that is about it I will end this with some random stories.
1) A 3rd grader from the nearby school came up to me the other day telling me all about how mad he is because his little brother (in my preschool) knows English better than he does. He claims that Octovian (preschooler) is purposely not helping him with his homework lol. But after talking to him for a while I found out that the real problem is that he doesn’t have an English book for class, I asked how much the book was and the answer was 3,000tsh (less than 2 dollars). I told him I would talk to the head teacher to see if we can get him a book so he didn’t have to ask his little brother anymore. Octovian is very bright and I hope he is able to do well in school because he comes from a VERY poor family, well that’s not entirely true. His family has a lot of cows and a small shop where they sell produce BUT for some reason they children don’t reap any of the benefits (priorities?).
2) The other day I was sitting at the secondary school Catholic club graduation. To my right was a very smelly man and on my left was a great smelling man and the mixture was interesting. I was sitting there and thinking about how funny the party was when I realized that the DJ was talking about me and I was expected to get up and say something. Well needless to say I wow’ed them with my “My name is Amy, I’m from Milo, I am a Peace Corps Volunteer dealing with many activities”, yep SUPER high expectations lol. But the reason why I thought this party was so funny was because the DJ would play music, at a deafening volume, after each little speech and all the students would get up at do a few dance moves, the leader would pick a certain step and all the students did the same thing and then they would sit down. For hours and hours this goes on while me and the others at the high table watch, funny? I think so!
3) The last 2 times that I went to Tim’s village I have cut through the woods because its faster and each time I have ran into men asking for my number. Both times I started with saying no that I don’t know them and that I was late but in the end both times I ended up giving them my number. Days after the encounter I have gotten texts asking for marriage! Needless to say those numbers have been put on my ignore list!!
4) I went to a neighboring village that doesn’t get to see a lot of foreigners and man oh man was I the talk of the town. But the thing was, no one would actually come up to me, they all just stared a safe distance away. After most of the day was over I was sitting having a soda with the head of the village when a little old lady came in to greet me and to tell me “I am not scared of you” which I responded “that’s good”, she then said “everyone is scared and just waiting outside, but im not scared and I came in”. She then got up without another word and left lol, yep that’s my life!!