Soko la Mbuzi

I went with Michel to the goat market on Saturday in order to by a goat for our Easter dinner. What an experience. The video below follows the progress of nyama ya mbuzi (goat meat) from slaughtering to our table at the market. Today's meal of nyama choma roast meat was wonderful -- I'm exhausted, though, after a very late night and up early this morning. I'm happy not to have to work tomorrow.
Heri ya Pasaka!

Palm Sunday at the Airport Parish

Thousands of people processing down a main thoroughfare of Dodoma -- from the Jesuit youth centre to the parish Church. As you can see in the video, folks can't get enough holy water!

Framing Teacher Education

That's the title of an article I wrote during my last year at Loyola Marymount [Connell, Martin T. (2010) 'Framing teacher education: participation frameworks as resources for teacher learning'. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 5: 2, 87 - 106]. I received a pdf of the article from the publisher today. I hope at some point to find the time to write more. I don't know exactly when, but I hope to figure that out.

Here's the abstract: This article examines the role modes of participation play in pre-service teachers’ learning – what it means to teach and to learn, and what it means to be a teacher and a student. In particular, it examines how a teacher educator’s taking up some social positions and refusing to take up others serves to cultivate active engagement and inquiry about teaching, learning, and schooling among the pre-service teachers by providing them with opportunities to reinterpret the figured world of school.

Slow News Week

I've been busy working on a class schedule so that I can figure out hiring needs -- specifically the subject combinations to economize re: the number of teachers to hire for 140 students. I've also been working on the Student Handbook and three-year goals for the school.

The three-year goals are required by the government. I have directions on how to do it -- complete with examples -- before me. One gets the sense of just why government schools struggle: All the goals concern physical infrastructure and not actual learning.

I'll also start working on some forms, etc., so that they are in place (grade reports and the like).

I'm working with Books for Africa, hoping to find space in a container that's being organized to head this way. I'll post details re: how the readers of this blog might help in that regard when I have them.

Among the highlights of recent days has been reconnecting with folks from my past, specifically from my time at the Diocese of Cleveland Tribunal (where I did field ed. as a seminarian in the summer of 1991) and from my time as a scholastic teaching at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland. Very nice to know that time and distance don't sever ties.

Dancing in the Dark

I don't dance, but if I did it would be in the dark.

Why? Because national rationing of electricity has begun -- 6-10 every night indefinitely.

We have solar lighting for our dining room and living room, and I have a really spotty headlamp to read, so it's not so bad. Occasionally.

Here's the story.

Headed out for pizza (the pizzeria has a generator) to celebrate St. Joseph's feast, given that I didn't properly celebrate Patrick's.

Thankful and Angry

Malasi, the scholastic in his second year of regency, was returning home by bus to Dodoma from Dar es Salaam, where he was doing some work for OLQP. The buses here are very unsafe -- drivers racing on a road that is not divided without limited access. (You know where this is going, I'm sure.) He was on a bus that was racing another. The other bus was passing a third on a two-lane highway and the bus he was on was in hot pursuit. Well...the bus ahead of his, trying to overtake the third, managed to do so -- but it was blocking the view of the following bus. And there was oncoming traffic -- a truck.

Instead of a head-on collision, the driver chose to rear-end the vehicle going forward in his direction -- it bisected the bus. One passenger was declared dead on-site; others died at the hospital. Many others lost limbs. Malasi was unscathed. Thank God.

Not only do the reckless drivers make me angry, but also a detail of the story makes me angry. Malasi had things stolen from his bag while he was waiting for help after the accident. And not only that: a man who was pinned in his seat had his phone stolen from his pocket by a thief while pinned! No shame whatsoever.

Not only am I thankful Malasi is safe; I must say that given all my bus travel the last weeks, I'm happy to have arrived home safely. I don't know when I'll be ready to ride a bus again.

Re-entry

We returned to Dodoma on Wednesday. I've been writing some observations regarding what I learned from the visit to other schools and addressing some of these matters as they pertain to our building. (For instance, I was confirmed in my initial judgement that we have too few classrooms).

What else did I learn? Some schools spend their days preparing their students for national exams, others spend them preparing their students for life. Starehe in Nairobi and Loyola High School in Dar es Salaam are examples of the latter. At Starehe, a nationally known boarding school for poor boys that is among the top five schools in the country, play is an important part of their program -- and they don't compromise on academic success in this regard. At Loyola High School, service is an important part of the curriculum. Other schools we visited -- very well known schools in Tanzania and Kenya -- were all about drilling facts into students' heads.

I am beginning to work a bit more on the school's curriculum -- not without some frustration. We have been asked to offer agriculture as a subject. When I was in Dar es Salaam, I went to the Tanzania Institute of Education, the government office where one purchases the syllabi for the government courses. They don't have a syllabus for agriculture. Arghhh!

This morning we had four alumni from Loyola High School stop by to visit us at the parish; given that I was headed out to the site, I invited them along. It was a very nice visit with them -- and they had some great suggestions for us.

While there, I took pictures of a truss being hoisted for placement. No cranes -- but after all, a pulley is a pulley!