Kwa Heri, Tanzania

"Kwa heri" is a goodbye in Kiswahili that literally means "for happiness." The more informal way of saying goodbye is to say the translation of "see you later," "see you tomorrow," or something like that. But I like the way that kwa heri sounds.

I left Tanzania 3 weeks ago, so to do a bit of a wrapup here are some of the last pictures I took in Iringa, organized by topic rather than strictly chronologically:

Class Pets: In May, a couple of students found a very young mouse, or a "pinky" as it's apparently called. The majority of the class decided that they wanted to keep it as a class pet. They named it Dudu, which means "insect" in Kiswahili.

A couple kids even made a playhouse for him.

Unfortunately, the mouse was simply too young to survive without its mother and died about 5 days into our care for it. We made a shallow grave and a couple of students mourned Dudu's passing.

The next week, a student informed the class that if we still wanted a pet, her father could get us hamsters. After much debate and an attempt by me to explain why some mammalian species have lots of babies and others don't, the students again agreed to give it a shot. So one day the student comes in with these:

These, obviously, are not hamsters. They are full grown guinea pigs, which are about 8 times the size of hamsters. Yeesh. And one was pregnant. The girls wanted to name the adults Romeo and Juliet, but the boys nixed Romeo and went with Flicko instead.

Then the female had 2 kids, and the students simply could not agree on names. Some of the boys wanted to call them Manfred and Gustav, after a pair of twins at the school, but it was left up to Chloe, the student who would take them home.

I was really surprised at how these babies looked. Having seen rat and mouse babies, I expected them to resemble their order of mammals: hairless, pink, closed-eyed. But no! The babies, as soon as they came out, were fully furred, had wide open eyes, and even started eating a little bit of tomato.

Seriously, what kinds of rodents are these?!? They're sort of picky eaters as well.

All of the guinea pigs have survived to date, and are being cared for in the indefinite future by one of the students.

Key Stage 2 Exams: I have no pictures of these, but my students finally took these exams in English and Math at the end of May. We prepared for them big time, and so I finally understand why teachers are so annoyed with having to prep students for standardized tests...especially when the tests aren't entirely relevant to the student group (in this case, the exams are British). But they're done, and all but a few students passed - including a couple who I worked with a lot this year. I'm pretty happy with the results.

Service Day: Right after the Key Stage exams, the Community Service Club organized a Service Day in which every student from P1 up participated in a service activity. Sara, the club teacher, found 8 or 9 projects for students and it was a pretty great event, especially for the first go. I was in charge of Trash Pickup, having done it with Senior PE a few times this year. This time it was just for primary students. Most of them did a really good job! We made spears from stakes and nails, to make it more interesting, and those worked to a certain degree.

First we walked and collected trash.

The little P1s really went for it!

Then we sorted out the plastic bottles to be recycled.

Presentation of Learning: yes, I ripped this name off from Summerbridge (I mean Breakthrough). Most of my students have no fear of performance, and in fact crave attention, so when I proposed to them that we hold a day of various activities so they could show what they've learned, they jumped at the chance. So we invited the parents, I made as much Egyptian food as I possibly could to celebrate the end of our unit on Ancient Egypt, and we had a morning of multi-disciplinary activities. The students delivered their well-researched presentations on an aspect of Ancient Egyptian culture, we played Math Jeopardy!, did a running dictation, and I had them try the egg-drop project as a science activity. Here are some pictures from the egg drop case assembly:

And here I am on the roof of the preschool dropping the final products:

The kids did pretty well! 3 out of 4 eggs made it.

So that's all for Tanzania! I flew out on June 28th, and had a weeklong stopover in New York and New Jersey. More on that in the next post...and then on to Peru!