Friday morning Simon and I headed off to Holy Family Primary School hoping to meet with Sister Gwyneth and find out what work we would be doing while we are here.
The new classrooms are finished but not yet occupied. Sister has set up her office and the staff room in two of the new classrooms and will fill them with students next term.
Her old office is the new computer room and Griffin's classroom from 2 years ago is the new library. The library has shelves and is being used to store material for the ongoing construction at the school. Workmen are preparing to build the last building of the "quad" which will house the admin offices and staff room and either a music or art room.
The new computer room had just been painted and still smelled of turpentine and paint. It is not yet secure enough to move the computers in permanently but a few will be moved down for us to use for teaching. The room is about 20 x 25 ft with an L-shaped shelf running continously around two walls and a large table, maybe 5 x 16-18 ft long in the middle. There are pairs of wall plugs set up around the room over the shelf and room for about 20 computers.
In addition to the laptops we've brought, 2 last time and 2 this time, Sister was able to get 30 donated desktop computers of which she hopes 20 will work. That will be one of the jobs Simon and I will do next week is try and piece together computers and get them up and running. I have no idea what operating system they have!
The children we taught 2 years ago have moved up two years so the current form 3 and 4 students have not had much exposure to computers yet. The school now has a computer teacher but Sister does not seem to place much faith in her abilities. Simon and I will be teaching the Form 4s and working with the computer teacher as well.
While waiting for Sister G to return from an errand, Simon and I checked out the laptop with Edubuntu installed on it. We started by checking out the games, which mostly seem quite teachable and we played the ones neither of us were familiar with. There is a scrambled word game that is not particularly relevant to the African context. I'm not sure Tanzanian children would have success unscrambling the word curling. Over the weekend, I will check out the other applications so we can become more familiar with them before we work with the computer teacher.
The biggest change here is that you can know buy a "dongle", the UK term for a mobile internet hookup that you plug into your computer so you can access the internet from where you are. No more running to the hospital computer room or over to Ben and Sally's or an internet cafe to access email. So far - yeah!
Simon and I walked up and back to school yesterday and we were just about done in by the time we came back at close to 2pm. Hungry and hot we arrived home to find a few chapatis left from lunch - yeah Juliette!
I started sneezing a couple of nights ago and now have a full on cold - runny nose, aches and pains. Damn. I will lay low for the weekend and rest and drink plenty of fluids and hope for improvement by Monday.
Sally had a completely diiferent day with Leah at Bombo Hospital in Tanga and will blog later.
lub rose ((imagine this said with a stuffy nose)
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