Hello England

This week has been CRAZY!
I have been teaching all on my own (my teacher has pretty much vanished lol) and with 50 children in my class whose English is VERY limited it has been quite tough. I'll spend ages explaining something and they'll smile sweetly and say "yes teacher" but then have not understood a word I've said! It's very frustrating at times but I keep reminding myself that their first language is swahili and all of their lessons apart from English are taught in swahili (most of the teachers even teach English in swahili which makes it even harder). Therefore I feel that as little as we think we're doing, we're probably making a bigger impact by just talking and interacting with them? Sometimes they will surprise you and get something right and they are SO creative! I gave out coloured pencils one lesson when we were doing punctuation and they were so happy! They take great pride in presentation and all love answering questions on the board. I'm trying to be as creative as possible in my lessons using posters and games (thank you for the jelly smelly pens Mark they're fascinated by them!) they really love interactive lessons because usually they are told to copy down notes off the board or to read quietly, so hopefully even if they don't understand everything that we are saying, they will be seeing new ways of learning!

Another difference between us and their normal teachers is that in Tanzania the cane is still used as a form of discipline, this is shocking to see and very hard to understand but hopefully we'll help the teachers too by showing them that you can control a class without violence.

Now we're getting into the school more we've started a volleyball club and a creative club, both are hugely popular and successful, the kids love volleyball and some of them are really good! They're also very imaginative in creative club, drawing pictures and making figures out of salt dough (photos soon of all this hopefully!) It's just lovely to see how joyful they are when they get to do something other than writing, plus it's fun for us too!

This week we also visited an orphanage that we're going to help out at some afternoons and we have been getting to know our neighbours through random volleyball games and asking where to buy bread etc, everyone is really friendly and helpful which is good :)

Bad points of the week however include an invasion of cockroaches in our living room (very traumatic) about a million powercuts and we've had no running water since Saturday! I've been having "bucket showers" which aren't great but i suppose it's all part of the experience!

I'll try get photos up asap, I hope the snow's melted back home, I'm devastated I'm missing it!

Lots of love,

Claire xxx