12/03/04
The inspectors are due next week and this seems to have caused all manner of panic at Amani. At IBC (where I am teaching) they just seem to be taking it all in their stride - and teasing me that the inspectors are going to want to interview me! That’s just fine as long as it’s in English! The kids are still fantastic and I’m having such fun with them, The charity that visited left some footballs and I presented two to the school (which clearly meant that never having played football in my life I had to spend the afternoon teaching it!) the teachers were over the moon. Through various donations I was also able to present a pen to every child in standard 7 and standard 4 (140 in total) they were very excited and didn’t let go of them all day long!

There was a first aid incident on Thursday where a standard 3 student sliced his foot open - I attended as first-aider and we took him to the nearby health post - each of the kids taking it in turns to piggy back him! As I rushed over and saw all the blood pouring out my first instinct was to put pressure on it but Aids and HIV are so prevalent here that you have to stand and wait while the other children bring water for you to pour over at a distance, it's rather sad. Luckily the kids here are all so brave that they very rarely cry otherwise you'd just want to pick them up and cuddle them as well in spite of all the blood.

The teachers and I had a good chat about teaching English on Thursday and the difficulties that they understandably have with it. Many of them are only educated to standard 7 themselves and leave school at 16 to become teachers, they receive very little if any updated knowledge and yet they are expected to keep up with a changing curriculum. They expressed their disappointment that I am leaving and made the very brave step to ask for help with their own pronunciation before I leave. I have donated a dictionary to them and they use it now like a bible, it’s impossible to imagine how they managed to teach a foreign language without the use of a dictionary!

19/03/04
This was the week of the dreaded inspectors and what a long drawn out affair that was. Amani school closed on Monday to enable the standard 7 students to fill in their exam forms so Alex and Peter didn't go to school, along with Caroline, who is still feeling too exhausted to teach, so I trundled off on my own with John, first to Kindergarten, where three new students enrolled this week and then off to IBC, where they started to brief me on the inspectors. I teased and joked with them that they were nervous and explained the meaning of the English phrase 'to have butterflies', this caused much amusement - I mean who ever has anything flying in their stomach!?! They were expecting the inspectors the very next day - however when I turned up on Tuesday they were nowhere to be seen, the same on Wednesday - at this point I started to joke that they weren't going to come and that it was just a scare tactic! However on Thursday morning when I arrived the school was in strange silence and the inspectors were present, including Mama Mchagga, the Chief Inspector who sat in on both of my lessons - rather unfair I thought - and she corrected me on my English pronunciation of the word dancing! After all what do I know, it's only my native language!

The other inspector was very impressed by the English songs that the students knew and he invited me to the Inspectorate in Muheza in order to sing them for the other inspectors - I managed to very politely decline but he did ask for me to write them down so that he could type them up and distribute them to other schools - that's a scary thought - I hope I've remembered all the words okay! Throughout lunch he grilled me on the English Education system and I dragged my mind back to things that we studied at Primary School while he took copious notes then returned the information exchange with details of exactly how things are done in Tanzania - it was very interesting to hear about their scheme to fast track 10,000 teachers per year for Primary Education until the year 2006 when they will start to do the same for secondary school teachers.

Talking of food, lunch on Thursday at school was a very interesting affair. Laid on for the inspectors we were served cabbage with a sauce - lots of sauce, chicken - this time complete with neck, feet and on some pieces of feathers and ugali! We then all had to it eat with our fingers - this is of course considered perfectly normal for them and they do in fact find it difficult to use a knife and fork - however for me trying to mop up cabbage in a runny sauce with lumps of ugali was a rather messy affair much to their amusement!

The dolls are coming on okay - although the girls still never cease to amaze me - sewing a black doll with white cotton, trying to make a skirt without measuring the wearer and embroidering upside down! Still it's all an interesting challenge!