Chekechea Day 1

First off... Chekechea means Kindergarten in Swahili...

Today I began my job at the Montessori Kindergarten. I was very excited after briefly visiting the kindergarten on our tour yesterday. I met Amari in the classroom office at 7:30. We started by going over what exactly I would be doing there. For today, tomorrow, and maybe the next day I will simply be in the classroom observing. More specifically, she wants me looking at all of the material and possibly keeping track of what material is the most popular and what the students seem to not be interested in so that they can keep up with the needs and desires of the students. By the end of this week, I will begin my work on compiling a report that crosses the Montessori syllabus with the Tanzanian syllabus. The purpose of this is to show the village that the Montessori school is teaching to the Tanzania syllabus, but just in a different way. The village has had a difficult time accepting the Montessori school and the NGO is still working hard to gain acceptance from all community members. By compiling this report, they hope to have something to show community members so that they will begin to trust and realize that the Montessori school really is teaching the same things. Also, many surrounding villages are beginning to try and adapt a Montessori school of their own. So, the report that I will be compiling will also be put together and translated so that it can be given to surrounding villages to use as a guide when creating their Montessori schools.

            Overall, my workday was awesome. The kids were so cute and really smart. When I first arrived, I was greeted with hugs from 2 little boys named Tito and Godi. It was so sweet. The teachers were also very welcoming and made me feel really at home. For the most part, I just observed and helped some of the kids with their activities. Circle time was by far my favorite part of the day. I will definitely need to break out my video camera one day for circle time. The kids jump around and dance and it is just so cute and funny. At one point, the teachers even tied a Kanga around a child’s hips and then the child went into the middle of the circle and everyone clapped a beat while they shook their hips! I was cracking up. It was so cute and those kids definitely have some great rhythm! Also, all the kids wanted to be next to me and hold my hand at circle time. It was really cute. I was in love.

            I got off work at noon and then headed back to our house for lunch. For lunch today, we just had chipsi (basically like French fries). It was definitely weird to have that as a main course, but it’s actually really common here. The best part about it was that we had ketchup! They don’t have ketchup here normally. They have either tomato sauce (which is really not good) or chili sauce, which we normally use. I didn’t realize until today how much I really missed ketchup. It was really nice to have it again.

            After lunch, we had Swahili class. We knew we had class, but we weren’t sure where we were supposed to go. So we just stayed at our house. Eventually, Paulo came to get us and told us we were supposed to have class at house number 4 in the children’s village. So, we all walked there together. We had Swahili for a little bit and then we met with Justin to discuss our research projects. I’m thinking for my project to do a comparative analysis of the Montessori kindergarten and the kindergarten in the village. I’m not exactly sure what to do yet though and I have to figure it out by Friday. For example, maybe looking at the teaching styles of the 2 and comparing them. I’m not sure. I definitely have a lot of thinking to do before then.

            Right after Justin’s class, we headed over to the Tree House (Jenny and Geoff’s house) for a goodbye party for a group of Carpe Diem volunteers that have been here for about 10 days. The party ended up being a lot of fun. Each group had to perform a musical number in front of everybody. For ours, Julia played Don’t Stop Believing on the piano and we sang along. It didn’t go exactly as planned. Our singing was a little off but everyone joined in so it was good and a lot of fun.