Letters from Africa

October, 2008

Greetings from very hot Tanzania! It is always warm here - but not as oppressively hot as it has been the last week or so. We are all scrambling to finish up the material in the Syllabus in each subject before our final examinations on November 19-22. However, I wonder when we will ever have a firm grasp of what is going on in the country!

Take today, October 1, for example. I was teaching my second class of the day, when my cell phone rang. My cell phone is the main phone for the school, because we still do not have the landline phones we were promised about a year and a half ago. They have not yet built a telephone tower that was supposed to be done a few years ago. Anyway, while I am teaching I only take calls that are important. If they are parents, or someone else that can wait, I call them back after I finish teaching. Well, I walked out to take the call from Fr. Maruru, our social studies teacher, who should have been arriving just about that time to start teaching the next period. Father asked me if we were having school today. I told him that I was actually in the classroom teaching. He said that today is a Muslim holiday to celebrate the completion of Ramadan. It turns out that the Muslims choose this day based on the lunar configuration and did not announce it until this morning... Most students went off to school today and then found out that it was a holiday and so returned home! Well, we did some scrambling to cover Father's classes until he was able to arrive. I can see now why one of the reasons that staff housing on the campus is most helpful for situations like this. When we went through the calendar for the coming two months, our Tanzanian teachers said nothing about this holiday! Will we ever learn?

The building of the dormitories is progressing very well. Hopefully, if the funds can be found, we will be able to occupy some of them by mid-January. Construction almost stopped Saturday because of a lack of funds... We are heavily counting on getting another grant from that Tanzania/Japan Food Aid Foundation.

How many girls we can take into the first year of school for next year will be determined by how much space we have for them to sleep. It would be good if all could sleep in the new building and we just have classes in the current building. The hard decision in all that is where we Sisters will live. Right now we are living in the office of the headmistress for the past 13 months. We use the room for the headmistress' secretary as our eating and meeting place. We use the actual office and storeroom for sleeping and have all of our things like food, personal items, and supplies stored in that space as well. We are right in the midst of the girls now and the matrons wake us up at any time of the night for a sick student. It is easy to keep an eye on them all the time. For the time being, we could use some of the cubicles that are to sleep 4 girls as single sleeping rooms for teachers and for ourselves. If we stay where we are, we will be far removed from the girls. Many, many things need to be talked about yet - but we are grateful that the girls will already have actual dormitory space.