[note] Dec. 26, 2008

Happy holidays!

I’m back in Zanzibar from the 10 day trip to Dar es Salaam. Although I briefly suffered from a bacterial infection in my intestine, the two volunteer meetings I attended went quite well and I certainly enjoyed them all. It was also nice to see my fellow volunteers in the 20-2nd dispatch (the 2nd group to be dispatched this year (the year Heisei 20 in Japanese way of counting)) again after spending some time in each of our sites. Some of them are already swamped with work, and others including me are starting out slowly.
I especially enjoyed the conference for education volunteers. It gave me a chance to get to know all the education volunteers currently in service in the country, and was motivating for me to listen to their experiences in class rooms.
I’ve also learned that JOCV education volunteers are really active in Tanzania notably the Southeast where the infrastructure is minimal and shortage of teachers is severest in the country. Our field coordinator in the city of Mtwara (please google and refer to a map of Tanzania. In the future posts also, I’ll be throwing in the names of random places in Tanzania) has been organizing teaching skills workshops in the city every four months for both JOCV education volunteers and Tanzanian teachers which have had very positive feedbacks from the schools where JOCVs are assigned.
Unfortunately the coordinator is leaving soon after working here for 4 years, but at the meeting we have decided to continue with this tradition and the date for the next workshop is set to be sometime in the next February. What’s great about this workshop is that you are encouraged bring some of the teachers from your school with you to learn from each other, to help develop teaching skills for both JOCVs and the Tanzanian counterparts and to stimulate communications between Tanzanian teachers in different regions of the country.
I’ll be attending the next workshop of course and I’m already thinking about bringing along a teacher from my school even if I might have to pay for his transportation, food and accommodation from my own pocket. From the short time I’ve known him, he is very serious and enthusiastic about teaching and is deeply concerned about the deficiency of science education in this country. So I figured it would be a positive experience for him and the school to attend the event.
Hopefully I could get an approval from my headmaster and get through some administrative businesses.

Hope everyone’s having a great holiday season!

[Notes and Photos] Nov. 30-Dec.4, 2008

Part 1. Dec 4, 2008
The school for this year is done today and I’ve got a month of break till the it re-opens on January 5, 2009. I feel this isn’t really a well-deserved break for me because I still haven’t done much at school, but I guess I was just dispatched at a bad timing.
According to JOCV regulation, I’m supposed to keep my traveling to minimal for the first three months to establish myself at the site, so I’ll have to save my traveling for the next long break. I am however obliged to attend the annual volunteer meeting and a conference for education volunteers in Dar es Salaam which are coming up in two weeks.
Aside from lesson planning and studying Kiswahili, I’m planning to spend some time exploring some of the beaches around the island.

Part 2. Photos


I had to put up this picture of khanga I found and instantly bought at the local market. It reads "Congratulations Barack Obama" on top and "Love and Peace he has granted us in favor of God" on the bottom. Though I'm very optimistic about his up-coming administration, I think it is a little presumptuous to make that statement at this point.


I was invited to the commencement at the state university in town by my colleague/friend. He finished his B.Sc. with Education program couple of months back and he was officially receiving his degree that day.



Line up of Tanzanian beers. (Tusker on the right might have been from Kenya)
There's also a hard liquor option called Konyagi.



Part 3. Food

Here’s my daily food consumption;

Breakfast: usually 4 to 5 bananas.

Chai at school around 10am. Usually accompanied by chapatti.

Lunch: pilau, byriani or other dishes (usually around Tsh. 1500-2000 which translates into about $1.50 to $2) at this local diner of which I’ve become a regular. Guys who work there already know my face and address me as “rafiki” (a friend) whenever I go there.

Dinner: I cook vegetable stir fries and rice at home using an electric stove I bought at the market, but I’m thinking about switching to kerosene or charcoal stoves as blackouts seem to occur frequently.

Since I don’t have a fridge at home, I cook just for a meal. I’d like to try using meat or fish some time but it’s difficult without a fridge. Vegetables and tropical fruits like pineapples, bananas and mangoes here are fresh and delicious.

Here’s some of my favorite food on the island.

Sugarcane juice: freshly squeezed sugarcane juice with lime, Tsh.200 (about 20 cents). A really good alternative for a bottle of soda. Great on a hot, sunny day, which I guess, is pretty much everyday here.

Mshikaki: reminds me of yakitori back in Japan, it’s a skewed meat on grill, common in all over Tanzania and probably East Africa in general, but the ones over here have wide selections of skewed fish and seafood as well as beef, chicken and goat. Tsh. 200-300.

Pilau and Byriani: Zanzibar is well-known for its spices and in my opinion, they are used best in pilau and byriani, two of my favorite rice dishes here. Did I mention people here eat so much rice?

Seafood: as in mshikaki, fish and seafood like clams broaden the selection of mchuzi (stew) and deep-fried items here from the usual beef and chicken.

Zanzibar Pizza: it’s not really a pizza and perhaps started out as a tourist attraction, but it’s greasy and good. I can’t find any ways of describing it other than to say it’s like a Spanish omlette rolled up in thin chapatti dough and fried on a pan.

Orojo: spicy and sour soup. The color is yellow but I can’t quite figure out what it’s made of. My guess is unripe mangoes. Served with deep-fried noodles, mshikaki and potato-made snack called kachori. Tsh. 500.

[2008] Nov. 17th - 28th

It is a kind of let-down for me that, not having done much, the school is going to be closed soon for a month until early January next year, after another week of classes. I do however, appreciate the seemingly idling period of time spent at school for the past week for giving me some time to talk to the teachers, adjust to the environment and figure out what I could do.

I’m not sure if this is limited to JOCV or the other international volunteer organizations take similar approach, but I’ve noticed that my program tends to throw you out there to the site with a little information on it, let you find out everything else and work on your own. Inefficient this approach may be, I like the idea since this is a good way to force myself to be involved at the work place in the process of information gathering and establishing solid relationships with the colleagues.

So here’re things that I’ve done at work and the things I’ve learned. Some of them are as trivial as the annual timetable and daily schedule, but others turned out to be quite useful information. Instead of writing down long paragraphs, I’ve put down a list in chronological order.

1. After all, I confirmed that there were more advanced level teachers for biology and chemistry at the school than was necessary and that I was only assigned to have one lesson a week of the physical chemistry section of Form 5.

2. I found out about annual timetable of the school. Major breaks in December and about a month during the period of Ramadan (around September) with few week-long breaks in between.

3. School year form O-level begins in January and goes until December. A-level year begins in March and goes until February of the following year.

4. Morning sessions starts from 7am and goes until 1pm. The afternoon session follows from 1pm to 6pm.

5. Like the school system I’m used to, there’re home class teachers whom I can talk to if the students are in trouble.

6. Organizational hierarchy of the teachers. We have what they call section leaders at school. Above them are the assistant headmasters and then the headmaster.

7. If you’ve got a suggestion, chances of your suggestions getting through would be much higher to first consult with one of the section leaders.

8. Headmaster has changed while I was back in Dar for two weeks.

9. Some teachers do take going to class and giving lessons seriously, and others do not.

10. Laboratory equipments are scarce, especially for biology. I haven’t spotted a light microscope yet.

11. After randomly meeting with an O-level teacher, who is currently teaching all the chemistry lessons from Form 1 to 4 (Grade 7 to 10), I found out that there was in fact a shortage of science teachers not in the A-level but in the O-level classes.

12. Starting from January when the school year for O-level begins, I’ll be taking over his Form 1 and 2 lessons which means I’ll be teaching total of nine 80-minute lessons (1 lesson for Form 5 and 4 lessons each for Form 1 and 2) per week which is standard for the education volunteers.

13. This week is the nation-wide examination period for Form 2 students. The exams are taking place in all the secondary schools including mine. All the teachers and Form 5/6 students are supposed to be at school for regular classes, but on Monday, an invigilator from the ministry of education requested to completely close the school for the examination. Apparently, this kind of abrupt change in plans happens occasionally. Makes me wonder how I could plan out my lessons to cover everything on the syllabus till the end of the school year.

So here I am with this so much extra time in my hand, writing this post.
All together with the month of break ahead, I’ll take this as an opportunity to plan my lessons ahead and studying Kiswahili, since the students in lower grades generally have lower English proficiency compared to those in the A-level. There’s also an annual volunteer conference and a conference for education volunteers in Dar for me to attend in mid- December.

After all, when the new school year starts in next January, there won’t be any major breaks until next September. (According to the official schedule and that if there was no long-term blackouts or major shortages of water)

[Photos] Memories of Dar es Salaam

It's Friday and my first week of work is over!

I'm slowly settling in my place and becoming used to much slow-paced life on the island. Although it's only been a week, I've learned a great deal about my school. I'll be sure to have a detailed blog update on it, but I'd like to put up some pictures from the 6 weeks of my stay in Dar. (With the slow internet connection, I don't know how much of them I could upload. I7ll try nonetheless.)


View from our bus on the way from the Salvation Army back to our dorm. A mini-van with yellow stripes is daladala, a public transportation. It gets over packed during rush hours. Worse than the rush hour trains in Tokyo in my opinion. I'm glad I don't have to deal with it any more because the daladalas in Zanzibar don't let any more passengers get on when the seats are filled.

Nicholas, our Kiswahili teacher.

Beatrice, another Kiswahili teacher.

Okay, this is as much as I can do for now.

I'm going to dedicate myself in cleaning and preparing my place because the place had nothing except some basic furnitures like a bed, a table, chairs and a couch when I came in. It's in a rediculously good shape though. Hopefully I can get stoves and all the cooking utencils this weekend so that I can start cooking.

Out of the Bubble (a short announcement)

I'm finally off to my site today.

I'm exected to be at school tomorrow (Monday) at 7 o'clock in the morning to observe the lessons and take care of some formalities.

Quite excited to be on my own again!

The Work

What I thought I was expected to do from the school was to simply be a human resource to cope with the shortage of science teachers by giving lessons. Thus what most of the education volunteers do is to teach 18-24 40-minute periods per week.

But it seems that is not going to be my case, at least for a while, because the issues at my school appear to be somewhat different from that of other Tanzanian schools the volunteers work at.
Here’re several things I have found out during my visit about the current situation at the school:

1. There are more than 1000 students at the school.
Because there’re not enough rooms to accommodate the gigantic number of students, the school is dividing it’s sessions into morning and evening sessions. All the Advanced level classes (equivalent of grades 11 and 12) which I’m supposed to teach, are fit into the morning session which starts from 7am and ends at 1pm.
(Grades 7-10 are called Ordinary or O-level. Though the medium of instruction for entire secondary education is supposed to be in English, in reality much of the O-level classes, especially at the lower grades, are done mostly in Swahili which I’m not yet fluent enough to give lessons with.)

2. No shortage of teachers.
It appears that the school currently has sufficient number of teachers to deal with its number of students. The usual case of Tanzanian secondary schools is that the teachers are scarce especially in the Advanced level sciences and math subjects, but there are four teachers including me who are responsible for teaching A-level biology and chemistry.

3. No Lessons(?)
During the three days of my visit at the school, I saw students in every class room, talking or waiting, but I did not see any teachers in any of the classrooms giving lessons. The teachers appeared to be either having an extremely long break or not leaving the staff room at all until the session was over for the day.

4. Only 4-6 periods per week for my lesson
Because we have so many teachers for the subjects I was supposed to teach and there are only one A-level science class, I have discussed with the teachers and they decided to distribute the periods among three of us, each of us teaching different sections on the syllabus. One lesson usually consists of two 40-minute periods which means I’m going to be teaching only two to three lessons a week.

With a possible exception of the third point, the current situation of the school I have observed is not what I’ve heard as typical of Tanzanian schools. Based on the observations so far, here’re some of my tentative plans on what I’ll be doing for the next three months.

1-Observe the lessons of other teachers and see how it’s done. (for the first two weeks of November before the school is closed for break in December)

2-Lessons: the way we distributed the periods may be inefficient, but without any extra information on the school, I figured I’d better stick with the idea. (I also do not want to offend the teachers by expressing too much of my opinion at this point. Tanzanian culture values politeness and the respect for elders and I’m by far the youngest one among the teachers.)

3 Communication: come to school everyday and stay there for all day to talk with the teachers and the students to find out how often the teachers are giving lessons during the week, and how they are giving assignments and tests.

4 Earn Their Trust: Since I’m the first foreign volunteer at the school and the teachers and the students are definitely not used to work with a person like me, either consciously or sub-consciously, it is natural for them to be on alert of my presence (despite of the seemingly warm welcome I received from everyone) or consider myself merely as a foreign guest. What I have to do besides grasping the situation at the school is to show that I’m capable of adapting to the life in Tanzanian school system by conducting solid lessons and improving my Kiswahili.

To be honest, I am slightly confused by the twisted situation of the school, but I’ll see what I can do with the plans above. After the three months, when I feel ready and fully accepted by everyone not as a foreign guest but as a teacher, I’ll make some proposals to the school based on what I’ve learnt until then. The proposals can be; setting up tutorial sessions during my spare time, taking over the other teachers’ lessons, teaching additional subjects i.e. math and physics or teaching O-level if I have sufficient tact of Kiswahili by then.

When everything fails after my research and work for the three months and I truly believe that my presence at the school is not needed, I will submit a request to the volunteer coordinator, the headmaster of the school and the ministry of education to transfer myself into a school that is suffering from the shortage of the teaching staff.

Overall though, I’m really excited for the challenge. The kind of challenge I have never faced before.

If you got any suggestions on my work, let me know!

The Site

A typical volunteer life in Africa that people would imagine goes something like this:

Living in a thatched roof house, without running water or electricity, located in the village surrounded only by vast grassland.

Considering the idea, Zanzibar is not a typical place for a volunteer to be in, especially the world famous Stonetown. But that’s where I’m posted; a school located right in the middle of Stonetown.
Most of the education volunteers are posted on the mainland, mostly the schools in rural areas of Southern highlands or Southeast where they desperately need teachers. So it came with a surprise and a little disappointment that I’m actually going to be working at a school in the urban setting (though it’s Stonetown). Through what I’ve experienced during my trip however, I realized that despite of the location of the school and the fact that the place was well-known as a tourist destination, there is a great deal of things to do as a volunteer even at a school located in Stonetown. (Story about my work place is continued on to the next entry)

Having said that, here’re some photos from my trip.









Sunset and a dhow boat.

My school. Besides the location and the 3 floors, it is a typical school you find over here.

He's quite a popular figure in Tanzania. (only a day left before the election!)

A roof top view, from the guest house I stayed, of Stonetown.

The First Visit

After 3 weeks in Dar es Salaam, just for the next 5 days though, I am finally leaving here to my assignment site.
As I have mentioned, I'll be visiting my work place for the first time to talk to the principal and the fellow teachers and students and to discuss about some logistical and administrave issues such as my housing, and the grades and subjects I will teach.
I'll be back to Dar on Saturday, continue withe my Kiswahili lessons for another week and I'm then off to the site again to start teaching.
I found out that there are several internet cafes at my site so no problem on internet accessibility.
I'm happy to finally be out of Dar and to see the other parts of Tanzania!

Culture Session

On top of the Kiswahili lessons, everyday we have an hour of culture session where the Kiswahili teachers teach us about various aspect of Tanzanian culture such as mannerisms at work place, among friends tothe elders etc.

Two days ago we had a session on the Tanzanian perception of Japan andits people. The teachers listed what Tanzanians in general think about Japanese and it goes something like this;

1. Japanese people are so rich that their main concern is how to spend the enormous amount of money they have. (this probably applies to any foreigners coming here, because the fact that we use airplanes to comehere makes us be percieved as rich according to my Kiswahili teacher)

2. They love taking pictures. (Classic!)

3. All the Japanese are fond of computers, car maintenace and electronics. They can fix those items if they stop working. (This onecomes from the fact that pretty much every car we see here areJapanese and same goes for electronics)

4. Because Japan is rich, everyone has a car. Tanzanians may besurprised if we take Daladala (a microbus form of common publictransport), and if they see us walking they'll think we're justexercising.

5. Japan has the highly advanced technology. (This one also is aclassic, I guess)

6. They only wear Kimono, and likes to conserve their culture a lot.(no surprises here as well)

Among some typically formulated stereotypes around the globe, I found the following to be quite interesting.

7. Japanese people work so hard (well, so far so good), and they NEVER take a break or get tired. (My teacher exaggeratingly added, if they see you taking a break or getting tired, they won't think you're from Japan.)

8. Every Japanese knows Kung-fu, Karate, Judo, Kendo or some other martial arts and they are extremely good at it. Tanzanians will bereally scared of you when you take the Karate fighting stance. On top of this, Tanzanians consider Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan as Japanese!(not sure how they got this one)

Now, I haven't been engaged in long enough conversations with manyTanzanians yet to find out how much of this people seriously beleive in. Like any stereotypes about anyone, there're some truth and mis-concieved ideas to it.One thing the teachers emhpasized was that whether you fall into any of these stereotypes or not, people around you in your town/village and at work, to some extent will look at you through these ideas. I'm not sure whether the people whom I'll meet will be disappointed with me without Kimono, knowledge of cars and electronics and expertise in matrial arts, but regardless of where you are, I know for the fact, that there're always some people accepting you the way you are and I hope to meet them again in where I'll be.

Photos: Food, Classroom and Accomodation

Pilau and Mchuzi wa Kuku (Rice and Chicken Stew)
My Kiswahili Classroom
Looking over the main entrance of Salvation Army. Each of us llives in small cottages to the left.
My cottage
Inside

Intensive Kiswahili Session 1

I'm writing this at an internet cafe close to the facility we stay and take Kiswahili lessons, hence I've got limited amount of time.

Briefly, here're the updates;

1. we moved out of our somewhat luxurious volunteer dormitory and checked into the Salvation Army Territorial headquater two days ago where we stay for four weeks and take intensive Kiswahili lessons and leanrn more about the Tanzanian culture. In my class (which is internediate because I've done the two months of fundamental Kiswahili at the training in Japan), we started right into the free-way conversations on various specific topics, and slowly though, I'm getting to be in a good shape.

2. For the third week of our program, each of us will make a trip to our respective volunteer sites and talk to the colleagues or supervisors(we call them counterparts) to decide specifically what each of us will be doing.

3. This part of the city has relatively calm and relaxed atomosphere compared to where the dormitory was. People seem more friendly and relaxed. Even though we're still in Dar es Salaam, we are starting to witness the Tanzanian culture of emhpasis on greeting and talking with the strangers inside the facility/on the road which apparently is more prominent in other parts of the country.

Please be patient about the photos. I've taken a few and will upload them when I have a chance to, but in general it takes ages to upload photos with the current internet situation here.

Chakula cha Tanzania (Tanzanian Food)

First of all, I’ve been doing pretty well for the past couple of days here in Dar. We have a rough internet connection (and this is supposed to be pretty good for Tanzanian standard) here at the volunteer dormitory but things are good so far.

So, here’s the story of my first encounter with the Tanzanian food.

Muslims make up a significant minority in Tanzania especially on the Indian coast. (I'm really excited to experience pieces of the Islamic culture here during my service by the way) Hence they had Ramadan in during the last month and the day we arrived marked the last day of it. This delayed our introduction into the local Tanzanian life for the first two days because most of the local shops and restaurants were closed for the Islamic holiday with the city center and dala dala (a form of popular public transportation) much less crowded than they would be on regular days.
We had to get started on our orientations in downtown office though. So what we had eaten during these two days for lunch were Subway (yes, they do have Subways over here) and at an Italian restaurant which were open for the tourists. Both of them were ridiculously expensive (you have to pay the same price in Tanzanian Shillings you would pay for a sandwich for a meal of pasta back in the West/Japan).

So yesterday, we were very happy to finally have a slice of the local life.

Some people went to an area in downtown called Kariakoo which is a vibrant local market place also famous for frequent pickpockets.
I and two others decided to hang around in our neighborhood and went to this moderately priced local restaurant for chakula cha Tanzania. I was told, by my Kiswahili teacher during the training in Japan, about a lot of good things about the Tanzanian food and it didn’t take much to confirm what she said. The food here is amazingly good! I had a plate of beef pilau (a rice dish cooked with spices and meat), kachumbari (tomato and onion salad tasted only with squeezed lemon juice and salt, but this has become my favorite!) and mchuzi wa kuku (chicken stew). I had doubted a little about the food here for the first two days because all I had eaten out then was Italian BMT and lasagna, but one bite of pilau and kachumbari was enough to get rid of my unsettling thoughts.

Just like ramen/soba noodles in Japan and Romados chicken and buffalo wings in the US/Canada, I guess I was successfully able to find my favorite staples here in Tanzania.

PS
I’m regretting to announce that I haven’t taken many photos here yet. What I was told was that people here are sensitive about being photographed, and that I need extra caution when and where to take my camera out and go nuts. I know I have to start photographing soon because I have already seen so many good moments and I’m sure within a month or so what’s entertaining will be a norm for me.

The First Day

I'm writing this from the volunteer dormitory in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania!

I and 11 others who were dispatched together safely arrived in the city from Tokyo via Osaka and Dubai, UAE (where we had 5 hours of layover).

Here're some impressions of Dar/what I did so far;

1. It's hot and humid even at 9 o'clock in the evening, but not so much that it becomes irritating. The weather reminds me of that in Okinawa (the southern island of Japan) a lot.

2. I've learned that my Swahili could effectively put into use outside of the classes after talking to some guys at a cafe nearby. They were quite friendly.

3. Starting from tomorrow, we are going through orientations and continuing with Swahili lessons for about a month.

I arrived here at 3 o'clock in the afternoon then went straight to the dormitory located in the suburban Dar, so I haven't had chance to see much hence no photos, but I will surely be exploring more and see stuff. The life in Dar at the first glance seems like that of any other cities; busy and crowded.

I'm exhausted but excited for the days to come!

End of the Beginning

A Short Update:

As of September 11, 2008, I have been officially recognized as a member of JOCV!

I’m now back home from the training center in Fukushima and I have 15 days to pack up and get ready.

Almost Done

The two months of the pre-departure training will finally be over in a week.
I’ve done my last practice lesson today about radioactive decay and half life (random I know lol)and the only thing I need to put my work into is the Kiswahili final exam on this Saturday, hence I have a little bit of time to update the blog.

The end of this month, I’m finally going to Tanzania.
Mt flight is currently scheduled to leave Japan on the 29th of September.

Looking back at this training, it was filled with the positive experiences which I didn’t really expect. I was surrounded by people with very unique background. Our ages ranging from 21 to the 70s, our walks of life were so diverse and the countries we are going to are spread across the globe from Southeast Asia, to the Middle East and to the continent of Africa. Yet, we all hit it off so well and I guess that is because there’s something in common to the people who are willing to take part in this kind of program. It was just stimulating to be with the kind people I’ve met here at the training center. (I’ll upload some photos on facebook when I get them from everyone else because I don’t have a camera on me here)

As far as my Kiswahili is concerned, I’ve got a lot better since I started my training. Now I can write journal entries and carry out really basic conversations. I can’t wait to continue learning the language in a month of my in-country training when I get to Tanzania.

Anyways, that’s it for the short update!

The Language

July 14, 2008

First of all, I made it safely to the training facility and been enjoying the training program so far! I’ve met tons of interesting fellow trainees and I think we got quite a good crowd over here. There are 171 of us in total and 12 of us are going to Tanzania.
After arriving here and taking number of orientations, I’m now starting to grasp a much better picture of what’s this training’s all about.

So, here’s what the language classes are like.

The training center offers wide variety of language courses such as English, Swahili, French, Arabic, Thai, Lao, Spanish (in Nagano) etc. If you’re taking English, you’ll be assigned to two different classes depending on your language proficiency; home class (H) in the morning where you learn general English language and technical class (T) in the afternoon where you learn to improve your technical skills (teaching in my case) in English.
If you’re assigned to take a language that is not English, you will only have H classes of your assigned language all day.

Prior to the training, I was assigned to take the English classes, but upon taking a placement test and going through an interview with my T class teacher, I was able to switch into Swahili class in the morning! So, my schedule is looking something like this at this: take 3 hours of Swahili in the morning and 2 hours of teacher’s training in the afternoon for 6 days a week.

I’m pretty happy with their decision to have me switch into the Swahili class because I’m absolutely going to need it to be able to get by in Tanzanian daily lives. My teacher is from Tanzania, been teaching at this training center for more than 10 years and speaks really good Japanese and English. The class is lots of fun!
As for my T class, I’m currently preparing for a 20 minute long mini lessons on Wednesday. I’m going to do the characteristics of living things just to make it simple and fundamental. I’ll be doing more complicated topics later on though. A good news is that I’ve found out that the Tanzanian syllabus (Our library has the text books and syllabi from most of the host countries JOCVs are going to!) spends quite a good amount on parasites probably because parasitic infections are more prevalent there. Since I did parasitology in my undergrad, I’m planning on making a practice lesson out of it sometime during this training.

Anyways that’s about it for now.
Tutaonana tena! (We’ll see each other again!)

PS
My flight date out of Japan has been scheduled to be Sept. 22!

The Training

July 8, 2007

It is a well-known fact, at least for someone going into JOCV, that the program was modeled after Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) program in the United States. Two years of volunteer service in the third world countries in your specialized occupations, that pretty much sums up the two programs.
After doing a bit of research however, I came to realize that there are some differences as well.
What drew my attention the most was the way two programs conduct their trainings.
JOCV does most of its training at two training facilities located in Nagano and Fukushima, Japan. After the two months of training and arriving in your country, you’ll finish it up by going through three weeks of on-the-job training and continuous lessons of local languages (Swahili in my case). On the other hand, PCV has training facilities in each country the volunteers would work in and the entire two to three months of training is conducted there.
I’d like to find someone who’s gone through two trainings and see what they felt if I could, but it’s just impossible as each program requires applicants to have citizenship of the respective countries. (If I ever get the American citizenship in the future and have some energy left by then, I’ll try to join PCV.) Just by the look of it though, PCV’s method seems more appealing for me. Sooner you get to your country, better adjusted you are to the new environment.
I guess the reason JOCV conduct its training in the way it is, is probably because of the fact that most of the trainees need to learn at least two languages before getting stationed, English (or French or other common/official languages) and a local/national language (a language widely spoken in the region. Again, Swahili in my case). Obviously PCV (and some JOCV trainees like myself) have their English done, but most of the JOCV trainees are required to learn English to begin with. Now, I’m not sure how they’re going to make us acquire sufficient linguistic ability to perform our volunteer services within a time span of two months, but that is not my concern really. (I’d like to comment on my language training but that comes in later.)
So, when someone, who has never really gone out of his/her own country for fair amount of time, needs to learn at least two languages and how to teach, JOCV’s method I think is reasonable. The trainings are conducted in middle of nowhere surrounded only by mountains and forests. (I’m going to be in the Fukushima facility, located about 200km north of Tokyo. Apparently it takes 30min by bus from the facility to get to populated areas of the closest town.) It sure is an ideal place for you to focus just on improving your skills and your languages without having to deal with drastic changes in environment and number of obstacles caused by it such as getting new infectious diseases and diarrhea.
Now, just to make it clear, I’m not saying which one’s better or worse. It probably is meaningless and impossible to judge. Whether the JOCV system works the best for me or not, I’m a Japanese citizen and going with JOCV is the most reasonable and only option for me at this point.
In any case, the only way for me to get to Tanzania is to go through this training.

And it begins tomorrow.

Where I'll be

Here’s a bit of information on my work place and its current situation according to my assignment profile.
As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve been assigned to work at a secondary school, teaching either Advanced or Ordinary level of high school science (two of biology, math, physics and chemistry) 24 periods a week.
The school is located somewhere on the Indian coast also known as the Swahili coast of Tanzania (just for the security reasons, I won’t disclose my exact location on this blog, but I’m sure many of you know and might find out from my future posts where I’ll be). It’s a co-ed school and has about 1000 students currently enrolled (!) with 40 teachers (!) and 7 of them being science teachers (!). As you can imagine, the school is divided up into two sessions each day to accommodate the gigantic number of students. Thus obvious shortage of the science teachers led to the request for JOCV.
The assignment profile I have is at least 6 months old and I’m not sure how accurate the contents would be considering frequent resignations and relocations of teaching staff and policy changes in Tanzanian education system (as the massive education reform has been taking place recently).

At least, I know this should be an interesting experience.

The Blog

Welcome to my blog!



I am going to serve as a JOCV (Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteer) in Tanzania starting September 2008. I will be teaching science, mostlikely biology and chemistry, in a local secondary school there for two years.



As far as I know, my schedule for the next few months looks something like this;



1. First week of July: starting my pre-departure training in Fukushima, Japan (200km up north of Tokyo).



2. First week of September: end of the training



3. Second/third week of September: Departing to Tanzania



4. Sept.-Oct. : 3 weeks in Dar es Salarm, Tanzania to finish up my training.



5. Sometime in Oct.: begin my assignment at the school.





I have no idea how often I will be able to get internet access once I'm in Tanzania, but I will try to update my posts as much as possible.