Culture Shock!!!

So culture shock is just like walking into a glass door: the more confident you are the more it hurts, and you never see it coming. I thought I was all prepared for the bugs and food and language, and all of those things are pretty hard, but its the subtler cultural differences that are really going to take some getting used to.

The school where I'm teaching exemplifies all of this frustration. Two major factors are effecting the Tanzanian education system right now: Lack of money(sound familiar???) and lack of teachers due to a number of things, including AIDS. At my school, we "have" 44 teachers, most of which are M.I.A. and off at university or other places. From the 15 or so that I've met, all of them are over worked and most are extremely young, especially the science teachers. During the day I will tally how many classes are actually being held at any given time. Once three classrooms actually had teachers out of the 10 or so that should. That was amazing. Most of the time the students, who still show up for school because they really really want to be there to learn, will just hang out. The four other Peace Corps Trainees and I have taken to wandering the classrooms and teaching anyone with questions. It would be easy to blame the teachers, but its not their fault. Nor is it the admistrators. Its just the way things are right now and most are doing the best they can. So as you can imagine we are all filled to the brim with purpose and inspiration to teach as much as possible. It dawned on me while teaching some students the other day that I came to spend two years at a blackboard and spend as much of that time fulfilling these students hunger for knowledge. It was an incredible feeling, unlike anything I have felt before.

Of course, after feeling awesome I slammed into a glass door. You see, I had come to the classroom that day to observe a teacher. I tried finding her, and asked around, to no avail (no one ever knows where anyone else is here! you get like 5 different answers!) anyways, I decided to wait in the classroom. When I walked in all the students stood up and I was like "no, no, sit down I'm waiting for the teacher" in broken swahili and ended up making small talk with them for like 20 minutes. I found out that only 4 of them, all boys, have text books. Then I tried to find the teacher, again to no avail, and by this time 30 minutes of our 80 minute period had gone by. Finally, this student walks in with chalk, hand the chalk to me, and explains that the teacher gave it to her. So I'm thinking, the teacher is giving me chalk? The teacher wants me to teach? The student says, in broken english, that she spoke with the teacher. Ok. So I ask the students what they last learned and picked up from there. It goes pretty well for 20 minutes, and some of the students are really getting it, and then I hear this knock on the door. Oh shit, its my teacher, and she is like " I thought you were going to observe today before starting to teach" and I'm like "didn't you give a student chalk and tell them I should teach" and she says "no, the student just asked for chalk and I gave it to her" so I'm thinking great. great. now this teacher thinks I'm a pompous american who thinks I knows so much better (which isn't true in the least), but I erase the board in shame and the teacher picks up from there and I really really wanted to cry. After 30 minutes of her teaching she ends class and we leave. I'm doing all but getting on my knees and begging for forgiviness for usurping her classroom, and she is surprisingly calm and says "oh, I didn't mind at all, I was relieved that they were doing something. I did ask them how it went, and they said it was fine, you might just want to speak slower next time". What?!?!?! she didn't even care?!?!?! that was when I was like, "I can't do this, its too different, I don't understand this culture at all, what's going on!?!". It was a glass door.

Hopefully in the coming weeks/months/years I will come to understand more about how the schools here work and why they look so chaotic. Right now I just look around and am incredibly confused, but I know that there is something going on underneath that I can't see.....kind of like the new york stock exchange. Yes these cultural differences are like coming into a blue country with yellow sunglasses on, and all you see is green.