Our workshop ended on Tuesday. It actually ended really well - it was amazing to see those guys working together, getting all excited about their literacy programs! It got me all excited again, too, which is quite a feat, since I've been so ready for my little trip out of Jb for quite a few weeks already!
The closing ceremony rocked, because we had people share songs and dances from their language communities. There was some spectacular dancing and singing from those teams! The best was one of the teams which was made up of 4 young-ish guys, and one old man. They gave the old man an old purple plastic bucket, a chair and a stick. And he started beating that old bucket like there was no tomorrow, and the other four danced in circles around him! These folks come from a cattle keeping tribe, so it all comes back to... yup, you guessed it, the cows! So the dances mainly consist of raising your arms in a stately cow-horn-like fashion, and prancing around with your friends, who also have their arms raised in stately cow-horn-like fashion.
Another team sang a song in their language about how everyone should wake up and go to school in the morning when they hear the doves singing (all I could think about was the Prince song, "When doves cry..."). It was a great song about not being lazy and actually going out to get an education! It was really a good time to laugh and sing and dance together (not that I did much dancing, but I really enjoyed watching everyone else do their dances :) ).
It was a good group of participants, and I'm already looking forward to the second round of "Literacy Specialist" workshops! We really did have some fun with them - learned how to teach, using the mother tongue, with few printed resources. We looked at how to do "learner generated material" (i.e., writing stories together with the class), how to write simple sentence stories, how to do shared reading, and how to plan a literacy program. It was a lot of material to cover in 10 days, but we managed it, even with a surprise holiday thrown in the middle of it all!
Here's the whole group of us (though the photo isn't the best quality :( ). At least you can see my lovely dress - it's my "peacock dress", since it reminds me of peacock feathers. I love it, and I've been wearing it to quite a few closing ceremonies these days! For the closings, it's all about the outfit - sorta the local version of the Oscars or something.
Anyways, now that the workshop is over, I've been working to do a bunch of other bits and pieces that got shoved to the side during the workshop. I'm so thankful that the normal guesthouse and site managers are back tomorrow from the US. I'm so ready to give over all the administrative bits I've been dealing with. Plus, stuff (like toilets) keeps breaking, and it will be nice to have someone around again who knows a little bit about how to fix it all!
And then I can fully concentrate on getting ready for my trip! I'm off on Sunday to Dar es Salaam for a literacy conference for 5 days, then it's off to Zanzibar for a few more days. Then Annamarie and I are going up to Arusha by bus, then on to Nairobi, and then back here by 29 August. At least, I think that's how it might all end up working out! I booked my return ticket a few weeks ago, and just got news yesterday that the flight was cancelled... see what happens when you plan too far in advance?
Anyways, I have already given my suitcases the all important pre-travel baths. They are clean and relatively shiny again. I'm still a bit up in the air as to how much to pack, and what to take... don't want to take too much stuff and end up carting it all over Tanzania, plus, I need some space to bring some stuff back from Nairobi (like apples and coffee!), but at the same time, I want to make sure to bring enough stuff so I'll be comfortable in a few different climates on holidays. Sigh, decisions, decisions. Oh, and I still need to make sure I look relatively "smart" at the conference. Don't want to look like a missionary who just walked out of the bush, after-all. Though my clothes are all looking rather worn - doesn't take long around here for stuff to get old, and things that I thought looked pretty decent in Jb, certainly don't look the same when I get back to "civilization"!
But it's only Thursday night (though quickly coming up on Friday morning!) so I have a few days to think about it all still.
In the meantime, we've set the rat traps again to see if we can catch the pesky little guy who's been eating our potatoes at night. I'm afraid that if we leave the house without catching this one first, we're not going to have much left in the house to come back to! He's a tenacious little guy. Well, he might not be all that little, considering how many potatoes and bananas he's eaten in the past few days...
Zane, on the other hand, has caught two big rats in the past few days! I'm so proud of the little guy! Our rat, however, lives in our ceiling, and only comes down when it's safe. He's a smart one, and Zane, of course, can't climb the walls to get to him. Tonight, though, Zane is outside, and the trap is set. No action yet, though :(
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