Tuesday, June 10, 2008

No Food; No School

Thanks for all the birthday love, and congratulations Khloe(little sister) on Graduating!

My first birthday in Tanzania went well celebrated with some pork, friends and a chocolate cake that has been waiting in my pantry for the last five months for such a special occasion. It was goood!

For my birthday my friends from the University Jueng In, Brenda, and Danny treated me to a trip to Udizungwa Game Park. It was an amazing trip; we went on a hike to some water falls and were able to see a bunch of monkeys. My favorite part of the trip was swimming under the waterfalls and watching monkeys swinging from the trees, a dreamlike experience. Udizungwa is best known for the 14 different species of monkeys, two of which are only found in that region. We only spent one day in the park but I already want to go back. The park contains three major peaks and many large mammals other than the primates. The majority of the park is only accessible by foot and for many of the trips you must be accompanied by an armed guard; I hope to go back for a multi-day trip.

Around school things are a bit quiet now after term exams for ‘O’ level and all off my students have gone home for a six week break, which also means break for me! As far as the ‘A’ level they to have been heading home because our school is being forced to close because our food suppliers have failed to receive payments for the food and has stopped delivering the food. Since all the students at Mzumbe are boarding students the school has been forced to shut down completely. It is very frustrating knowing that we are the number one boy’s school in all of Tanzania and not having simple things like food requires us to shut down the school completely. It is important to note are school did get a new satellite dish and TV last week....Thanks Tanzania Department of Education; the resources are being well managed! I have just finished marking my term exams and am very pleased with the results from my students; they worked very hard for me. I initially had felt bad because they had 2.5 hours to complete the exam and no student had finished working on the exam, they all worked to the very end. They had some challenging questions on graphing, a skill they are unfamiliar with but worked hard none the less.

On the lighter side of things I have been doing a lot of hiking around Mzumbe I did 60 km in three days this last week, and found a short cut over the mountain to Mgeta village where my nearest Peace Corps neighbor lives. By taking the short cut I was able to cut a seven hour hike down to five hours, but the trail was very steep but beautiful. On the thirteenth of June I will be hiking Mount Kilimanjaro with my long time childhood friend Jeff. He has been working in Moshi for the last couple of weeks on a tree project to help the issues of deforestation around the Moshi area, so I will meet up with him this week before our Kilimanjaro Trip. I am really looking forward to the trip and hope we are successful; it is ‘winter’ time here so we hope the weather will cooperate for our summit attempt and so we can get some good pictures. I am very interested to see how cold it actually gets; Kilimanjaro is the only place in Tanzania that has snow. I am preparing for cold nights but I anticipate the days should not be bad.

After my Kilimanjaro trip I will return home and enjoy some down time around the school by reading some, attending weddings and preparing for the up coming semester that is if we ever get food back to our school.