Today, we had a surprise visitor to informally evaluate the English teachers in my group. So, that just meant me and one other woman in our small 5 person group. The evaluator works for “VSO” which is essentially the British version of Peace Corps. Since this is the first year of Peace Corps having English teachers in Tanzania, they have brought in a few VSO English teachers to assist us with training and critiquing. For once, I have had positive feedback since being here. Although I’m not struggling terribly with cultural adaptation, my language learning has been far from what I hoped it to be and I have been finding it hard to make friends with some of the Peace Corps trainees. A part of me thinks it’s because Jon and I are married, but who knows. In any event, I finally got some great news. The VSO woman told me that my lesson was “absolutely brilliant, you’re a great teacher and I have nothing to tell you to make you a better teacher” and that I should be teaching the fellow English teacher trainees. Although I am not going to volunteer myself for that position, since I’m so overwhelmed with learning Swahili, I am pleased to know that I am being successful in one aspect of my training. I did feel that today was a great success for me. One of my students even came up to kiss me on my cheeks she was so happy I was there. Later in the evening, Jon and I went and threw a Frisbee around. We attracted about 8 children who were fascinated and joined us. I soon became a little “mama” and was surrounded by three girls aged probably 3 – 8. They were all taking turns trying on my sunglasses and holding my hands. The boys were all chasing after the Frisbee. There was one kid that was super good. He could jump extra high to catch it and threw quite far. We played for an hour with them. Then, Jon and I made dinner for our host family. We made pasta and sauce and made guacamole. It was the first time my host brother had tried it and he really enjoyed it. He was laughing at himself because when I was making the guacamole, he kept thinking we would be boiling it and was so confused what we were doing with the avocado. Oh, and today was definitely a reminder that I’m in Tanzania. A cockroach laid about 100 eggs in my shirt. I literally want to throw up thinking about it. Jon had the same problem, too. Imagine if those eggs actually hatched? Barf. The bug situation is getting a little bit out of control. We have two spiders in our room that we are letting live to catch mosquitoes. At first, it seemed like a great idea, but now there are like 20 dead mosquitoes in each web. While this is good for us, it’s a little distasteful to stare at every day. Between 200 cockroach eggs in our shirts and 40 dead mosquitoes hanging over my head, I’m ready to barf!
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