Here are some interesting facts about me and my life here:
My class is the joint-largest in the school - I have 20 children, of which 17 speak English as an additional language (all of them have amazing English -luckily as all of my lessons are in English!)
Food in Tanzania is fairly cheap -unless it has been imported, like apples, which cost £4 for a bag!
Locally grown oranges are green in colour!
Paracetemol can be purchased in packets of 96… unlike in the UK where 16 is the limit. Clearly they are not worried about the suicide rate here.
Arusha is full of storm drains that I keep falling in.
I live in the countryside, 14km away from Arusha. Its pretty here, unlike in town…
Apparently someone stole the bins in some places in town, so the people that live there just pile their rubbish up on street corners -yuck!
Tanzanians refer to passion fruit as “passion”. This is particularly amuzing when walking through the market with stall-holders asking “do you want passion?”
Power cuts are frequent. Tanzania uses hydro-electric power, bizarrely, as it is so hot and dry here!
My school has offset it’s carbon emissions by planting lots of trees -thus making us the only official “carbon neutral” school in Tanzania!
Vodka can be purchased by the box, or in shot-sized sachets – these sachets look rather like medicine that is administered via a drip!
You can buy coca cola, sprite and fanta here, but not diet coke -how would Ruth Perrin survive?!
All photocopying at school needs to be done by a photocopying man, who often gets page numbers mixed up… He is also responsible for getting things out of the store for you, which he also muddles up. This man is needed though to guard the resources, because naughty people were stealing them before!
The average temperature at the moment seems to be 28 degrees C!
Hehe – so that’s what you meant by getting proposals, eh?