Graduation, And Regional Conference

Graduation

My school recently had its graduation for the Form Four students*. One of the Peace Corps staff came as a guest of honor, and my sitemates came as guests of not-honor. It was good. Tanzanian graduation ceremonies are a bit different than American graduation ceremonies. Quick synopsis:

1. Guest of honor shows up and is taken by school administration to a nicely set up room to have sodas and snacks and chat a bit.
2. Guest of honor is taken on a tour of the school.
3. Everyone goes to to dining hall/assembly room.
4. The head of the school, the head of the village, the head of the ward, and the guest of honor all give speeches interspersed with song and dance routines put on by the students. The head of school’s speech includes a listing of the school’s current major issues, and a request that the guest of honor do something to help with them. Due to Peace Corps policy etc, the guest of honor can’t do anything to help with them aside from helping me with my secondary projects, so he has to politely decline to help.
5. Gifts are given out to students who did particularly well and teachers who did particularly well. I’m not amongst the aforementioned teachers. :(
6. Graduation certificates are given out to the Form Fours, who each have a picture taken with the guest of honor.
7. We return to the room with tables to eat celebration-type food and drink sodas and hang out, with people trickling out as they each decide to leave.

The guest of honor took a bunch of pictures and some videos, so hopefully I’ll be able to upload those soon.

*”Forms” are grades, and in O-level secondary schools like mine, they range from Form One to Form Four, so the graduation Form Fours are done with the school and moving on to either the next level of schooling (A-level secondary) or work.

Regional Conference

We recently had a “regional conference”, which is where all the PCVs from a given region of the country gather together for two days for training stuff and discussion of teaching/project strats etc. Ours was in Dodoma, the capital of the country, which is two days’ journey by bus from Karatu.

There’s basically two main routes to go down there – either directly south via Babati, or first going east to Moshi and then south-and-west to Dodoma. The Babati way is less developed and has a lack of paved roads etc, and although the Moshi way is longer, the paved roads and better transportation services makes it competetive.

We went down via the Babati way, wanting some adventure/excitement. It wasn’t really that exciting, except when we arrived in Kondoa by bus and had to get one last bus to Dodoma, found that the busses going through had already had all of their sitting tickets (tickets which entitle you to sit in a seat on the bus) sold, so we bought standing tickets (tickets which entitle you to stand in the aisle of the bus), having heard that it was a three-hour trip and figuring that standing for three hours wouldn’t be so bad. The trip ended up taking five hours, and wasn’t really all that bad in the grand scheme of things, just a lot worse than we’d expected.

After arriving in Dodoma, we had a good time seeing people we haven’t seen in a long time, meeting health and environment volunteers for the first time, and meeting the freshly-arrived new education volunteers for the first time. The training itself was a bit dull I suppose. The training center we stayed at was quite luxurious by Tanzanian standards.

When we finished our training, we went back up, this time by the Moshi route. Our bus left Dodoma at 6:30 am, and due to a series of breakdowns and engine issues only arrived in Moshi at 9:00 pm. Then we had to go find the house of another PCV who very kindly let us stay there, in the dark, after having never been to it before, and having hardly been to Moshi before. Eventually we found the house, though, and crashed.

Yesterday morning, we woke up, went out to get breakfast, and found an amazing restaurant in Moshi called Deli Chez, whose menu largely consists of burgers, pizza, Chinese food, Indian food, and Japanese food, and they serve milkshakes. All of this for very good prices by foreign-food-restaurant standards. I was incredibly happy, especially with the milkshake, which was a top-notch milkshake and the first milkshake of any notch that I’d had since late March.

After breakfast we went to the bus stand and travelled to Arusha, went for a restaurant lunch of pizza followed by sushi, and then went to the bus stand in Arusha and travelled to Karatu, where we arrived after dark and then stayed the night.

Note that Karatu’s foreign-food options are quite limited and generally unaffordably expensive, so all this restaurant-going was a nice treat.

So now I’m in Karatu, using the internet for various secondary-project-related purposes, and I’ll attempt to give one of my cats away and then head back to my village either today or tomorrow.