Day 4: Saturday Seminar (it feels more like Day 14, having experienced so much that is new and different this week!) I woke up late, at 8:40, a little worried because our Seminar was scheduled to begin at 9. But we'd been told, and our experience had confirmed, that things happen a lot later here, so we expected that teachers would show up closer to 10, and we headed up to the Big House for breakfast. Things accelerated quickly when someone thought to ask if it...

Day 3 7:30 woke up for 8am meeting 9:15 - meeting with founder to learn more about JBFC. The times on our schedule are verrrrrrrry loose....TZ Time is relaxed, to say the least! We were all pretty hungry/thirsty for caffeine when breakfast came an hour after we'd expected. (Breakfast today was very simple: chapati--flour and water dough baked on a skillet, sweet, a little bit like crepes or tortillas--and coffee. The irony, of course, is that a major export of...

Day 2: A lot of our free time in the last 24 hours has been spent talking amongst ourselves about what we can do here as teachers: given the resources available, the national exam, the cultural expectations...what can we provide as suggestions/ideas that will be sensitive and useful? It seems that the biggest interest among teachers--and expressed by the headmaster-- is learning different teaching methodologies. We're supposed to give a Teacher Development Semi...

tech disclaimer: due to limited electricity, very low bandwidth, and no access to icloud pics, i'll have to save my great photos and videos to upload later, enjoy the text! First day: Most of us woke up around 9am (after 10 and a half hours of pretty good sleep--I managed to sleep through the fast "click-click-click" of the generator and the strange insect and bird sounds), and had breakfast at the founders' house, a little ways up the hill from the guest house...

First impressions - the drive from Mwanza airport to Kitongo. It was dark as we set out in two cars from the airport, and the thing that struck me the most was that, on this unlit road, with a few cars driving at 20 or 30 miles an hour, were lots and lots of people: walking/running/standing on the side of the road talking - I couldn't figure out where they were coming from or going to. After a few kilometers, I began noticing that there were night-time market...