Pasha

-heat up

So we began our internship teaching this week. Everyone was a bit anxious as it would be our first time working with actual Tanzanian students. I was assigned to teach measuring mass and time to Form 1 students which is roughly 7th or 8th grade. This week Tuesday was our first day teaching. The students were very slow to open up as they are not used to having such interactive teaching and many of them really do not know English. At one point the head of school actually came by and started yelling at some of the students for not raising their hands. They slowly got better at it but were still not as involved as I like for a class to be, so on Thursday I tried something a bit different. I waited for the first student to come up and present something right on the board. Then I asked the students if they knew what “Pasha” was. The whole class all of the sudden got really excited clearly surprised that I knew what it was. Let me explain Pasha is a sort of cheer that Tanzanians have that involves rubbing your hands together really fast, hence “heating up,” and then when you yell “Choma!” (burn) everyone simultaneously claps. As the leader from here you have flexibility on what you do. If you are really lame you just end it after one. However it best to yell “Choma” a couple of times. After doing that a couple of times, how you end it is the really fun part where you can be creative. One of our favorites is yelling “Simba” where they all imitate a lion, or “ndege” where they all make a bird motion with their hands. If you really want to trick them you yell, “nusu” which is where they are supposed to do the first half of the clapping motion, but stop before actually clapping. Without fail somebody actually claps and ruins it for everyone. I managed to get them with this 3 times last class period. I would make fun of them for it but I dont think our training class has even gotten it right after 6 weeks.

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-Things are going pretty well here. My family has been making quite a few upgrades. I now have glass windows on my room (useful for blocking out music blasting from down the street), they moved the electrical socket in my room (not really sure why), got me a new mattress (once again not sure why, but im not complaining), and installed a light in the bathroom (not really sure what im going to use my newly acquired skills of going in the dark for).

-I got a little kids Arsenal backpack that is way to small for me, falling apart and absolutely awesome!

-The Kiswahili is coming along quite well, although I still fill in Spanish words for everything I dont know, articles, and prepositions (neither of which exist in Kiswahili)

-We find out and go to our sites in 2 weeks!!!