[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!