As chance would have it, we were able to try our hand at substitute teaching English. Ah, what an education!

So we had been staying at the Kisanga Farm for eight days. The farm is located about 45 minute dalla-dalla (shared minibus ride) from the center of Moshi.

Kennedy Kisanga's church has established a pre-school, internet cafe and English language classes at a place called Agape Learning Center. As a way to help Kennedy, and ease our minds about taking him and his wife Anna up on their generous hospitality, we ofered to help at the Center by teaching English for three days. The regular volunteer teachers were on holiday for the week in Dar Es Salam. We assisted Susanne, a volunteer from Sweden, who was also roped in to teach English as well. Susanne was happy to have our help, as English is not her first language. Here are the three happy teachers.

After the first 10 minutes, we learned how much respect we have for teachers and more importantly, substitute teachers. There were three classes each day, the first class met from 8 AM to 10 AM. They were a mixed group, both by age and by ability. There were about 20 kids in the first class, ranging in age from about 10 to 17. There were no texts, only photocopied stories from Mickey Mouse's Birthday Book. All three of us just improvised. It was a hard couple of days. The first thing we had to do was look up the English words in Swahili. Then, we wrote them on the chalkboard. The next thing I heard was, "Teacher, I have a problem". The problem was that our Swahili English Dictionary was not very good and did not give us the right words to translate. We muddled through.

The next class of the day was a group of about 8 teenage girls. Both Matt and Susanne thought that Robin should handle this class. They were really tough and super hard to read. I had no idea what they understood or what they didn't. They were not interested in learning about Mickey Mouse and his birthday, and I couldn't blame them. I tried to have them talk about each other, but they didn't want to talk and they looked like they really didn't want to listen either. This went on for almost two hours till I was saved by the clock.

Matt really wowed the next class, three middle-aged local teachers who had grammar texts. Matt taught a great lesson of contractions--is not to isn't etc... They really liked him and asked questions and everything. So that went on for about 45 minutes. Then, they just buried their noses in their books, doing writing/translation exercises and we "teachers" just sat around chatting. This was the late afternoon class from 2PM to 4 PM. We left them at 4 and headed back to the Kisanga Farm.

When we got to the Farm that night, we had dinner with Anna. Anna explained that she met a teacher from another school on the way home who had seen us with her, and she asked Anna what we foreigners were doing. Anna told the teacher we were teaching at Agape. The teacher asked her, "Can I have one?" Anna told the teacher that we were a couple, and that she had us for now!

Each of the three days we went to Agape, we assisted Anna by taking the milk from her cows in to the school where it was used for the youngest students in the Montessori class. (They were the most adorable kids - all decked out in purple uniforms.) We had to take a large milk can on the dalla dallas, which were frequently crowded with 28-30 people in a 16 passenger van! Talk about getting up close and personal! Young guys frequently hung on to the outside, sitting in the windows. People stood crouching over the one's lucky enough to have seats. There was less leg room between the rows of seats than in the cheapest economy jet planes.

Back to teaching: on the second day, Robin and Matt shared a song with the younger early class that we had learned in our childhood: "The Wheels on the bus go round and round..." (now everybody join in!) It seemed to be a big hit; we sang first, then got the kids to join us, and we even did the motions to go along. Then the kids took a turn performing their own songs in Swahili.

The second, older girls' class was as difficult as the first day, we just couldn't think of anything to do with them. But we muddled through with some sorts of lessons to pass the nearly two hours. The third class of the day was not on, so we had the rest of the afternoon off. The three of us teachers went to the YMCA to cool off in the pool for a couple hours.

The third day was ok, Robin and I just did the first two classes. We quizzed the first class kids on the words we taught them from the lyrics of the song we sang. Then we did some other random exercises with them. The second class, only two students showed up! We had a good class with them, nonetheless. Robin found a poem (about travel!) in one of the books the school had, and we all discussed the poem and how it related to the girls' lives, as in how they would share their lives with a visitor, and about the places they dreamed of travelling to.