Official volunteers

We all made it!  As of Wednesday morning, we are all official volunteers here in Tanzania!

More Tanzanian creepy crawlers

A centipede like thing with red legs.  Interesting...

Plattsburgh alum, again!

Last night, we met up again with more Plattsburgh alum!  It was a spectacular evening reminiscing about Plattsburgh.  It was great to see that all the students who I worked with are successfully employed back in their home country.  I am looking forward to seeing them all again the next time we are in town for work/visit!

Our neighbor

This is our closest neighbor to our home!  He's a 79 year old volunteer who is teaching math.  He will be located about one hour away from us.  I think he needs to be highlighted since it is amazing that he has chosen to volunteer in his older age!

So much change

Well, things are slowly wrapping up for us!  We left our host family on Sunday morning.  It was a very sad goodbye for us.  Unfortunately, our host mama's brother passed away unexpected earlier in the week.  So, our last week was spent without her which was very sad for us.  We were able to see her briefly when she got back home, and at about 6:00am the morning we left.  I know that we will definitely miss them so much.

We left our training site and will become official volunteers on Wednesday!  I am proud to say that our training class is the first group to go through in a very long time without having anyone leave early!  We had a nice tour of the Peace Corps office and have been just doing last minute stuff.  This afternoon we met with our the principal of our school.  He seems very kind and understanding.  Our school has about 950 students with 12 professional teachers.  They have around 4 student teachers there and then us.  We learned that our house has no electricity or water and that we are living amongst our colleagues in teacher housing.  We have our own house, but are surrounded by teachers.

There have been two other volunteers at our school before us.  So, the students are accustomed to Peace Corps teachers and are very excited to meet us.  Additionally, the principal was ecstatic to learn that he was getting both of us!  In our school of 950 students, there is one math teacher and Jon.  So, he will definitely have his work cut out for him.  There are two English teachers and me.  So, I also will be quite busy.  However, our principal is very understanding.  As it turns out, we won't even officially start teaching until September 20.  This gives us plenty of time to adjust to our home and make it our own.   I want to get into the school before that, though, and give a self introduction since we will certainly be seeing teachers and students around before we first begin teaching.

That is all for now.  I hope to "write" more than just post pictures when we get to site.  But, the internet is so slow and things are complicated in terms of computer stuff.  So, if this turns into a picture blog, I am sorry!

Wedding photos

One evening when we had no electricity, one of our house girls (a girl who works in our house cleaning or cooking, etc.) asked me if I had any pictures of myself.  I brought out my wedding photo book that Julie gave to me as a gift.  It has several photos of our wedding day.  The girls were fascinated with the photos - from the dresses to seeing our family and photos of Jon and I.  The best cross cultural experience:  "Sara, your dress is so beautiful and you look so fat!".  Being called fat here is a compliment.  It was very entertaining given it's such an insult in the USA!

Broken Down daladala

So, this picture is the back end of our broken down "daladala".  To fix it, the drivers piled up a bunch of rocks, and used some sort of jack to raise up the daladala.  It got fixed eventually, but we were amazed at the creativity of getting the car to rise...and a little nervous the rocks would go crashing down!