Various
So, I’ve been pretty busy lately. What with IST, travelling back to my village, getting back into the swing of things, teaching temporary extra classes that for some reason my school decided to have, and helping to type up a bunch of exams that are going to be given next week.
First: a picture of that alien freak that visited my bathroom is up, at http://www.paffl.net/ChrisTanzania2010-2012/Dec2010/pages/IMG_0103.htm. I’m very curious to know what that is – anyone have any ideas? I’m pretty sure it’s not a terran organism. It might be from Half-Life. (Also, the body was about one and a half inches long.)
Other stuff:
I went home from IST via Dar Es Salaam, and while there went to a (fairly small ) American-style shopping mall, complete with a couple of department stores. The department stores were weird, for a few reasons:
1. It was the first time I was in one and unable to afford most of the stuff there.
2. The vast majority of the stuff they have isn’t that useful/necessary, or is very specialized, which is basically the exact opposite of how the stuff works in all of the other stores in Tanzania.
3. The stuff they had there that was the same as you can find in regular stores here was way more expensive than usual – several times as expensive.
I talked before about a list of what sessions we had at IST. It’s been a while and I’ve been quite busy, as I said, so I don’t remember them that thoroughly anymore. But off the top of my head, we had stuff like:
- HIV and “life skills” (health topics) teaching, if we choose to run a club or class at our schools.
- FEMA clubs, which are basically life skills clubs run by an organization called Femina Hip, which seems to be doing a lot of good here.
- Grassroots Soccer, known in Tanzania as “Zinduka”, a youth soccer/life skills club organization – they seem to be pretty good as well.
- “Permagardening”, which is a way to do food gardens that apparently have really high yield
- Secondary project ideas and planning.
- Grant-writing.
- A bit more Swahili class, this time mostly dirty words, which was fun.
- Each PCV brought a teacher from their school to IST, and the teachers had a big session about HIV. My teacher is now really keen on doing some sort of teacher-training about HIV at my school, and I’ll have to talk to him sometime to see what they talked about in their session, slash what we should do.
- We also heard about another NGO, whose name I didn’t catch (I was tired/bored at that time and had trouble paying attention), but who seem to be doing really good work in terms of public outreach and education with regards to malaria prevention and other issues here.
- A couple of teaching-method sessions.
- Alternatives to corporal punishment, which is widely used in schools here.
April 9, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Hi Paff,
Do you know how many legs the weird alien freak had? From the picture, it looks like the really long appendages sticking out to its sides are some sort of antennae, and it could have either one or two pairs of legs in front. If it has 6 legs, it’s an insect, and if it has 8, it’s a chelicerate (group that includes spiders and scorpions), and that will narrow the identification down a little. From your picture, I’m leaning towards chelicerate (it also looks like it has 2 body segments instead of 3).
April 10, 2011 at 11:34 am
In back it had two pairs of actual legs. In the middle it had one pair of giant antennae-like things, but I’ve never heard of anything having antennae anywhere but on its head, so I was assuming that they were some sort of specialized leg-like appendages. In front it had one pair of actual legs, and one pair of arms with pincers (the things sticking to the sides in front are the arms, and they had elbows at the outside edges, and then the pincers were in the front center, though they don’t show up well in that picture). I guess if the antennae-like things were actually antennae, and it had eight legs/arms, and the arms had pincers, that’d make a strong case for it being related to scorpions and probably a chelicerate.
April 9, 2011 at 10:27 pm
Ooh! I totally found it! It’s a giant scorpion spider, scientific name Damon diadema. Here are a couple pictures:
http://ag-edit.lightlink.com/view_caption.php?image_id=206010
http://kryp.smugmug.com/Other-arachnids-Arachnidada/Arachnida/9533827_MT72m/1/649620402_BovBw#649620402_BovBw
April 10, 2011 at 11:39 am
In back, it had two pairs of actual legs. In the middle, it had one pair of giant antennae-like things. In the front, it had one pair of actual legs, and one pair of pincer arms.
The giant antennae-like things I assumed to be some form of modified leg, because I’ve never heard of anything having antennae connected anywhere but the head, and also because they were built a bit like legs.
The pincer arms don’t show up well in the picture. They’re the two things in front sticking straight out to the sides. They had elbows and in the picture are folded up completely, with the pincers sitting just in front of the mouth.
If the antennae-like things were truly antennae, then I guess that means eight legs/arms, with pincers, which would make a strong case for it being related to scorpions/a chelicerate.