Another Day at Pre-School

What a daladala looks like (note: I did not take this picture, I found it on google)

Today I volunteered again at the Women in Action preschool. We pretty much did the same things today as we did last week except one of the two teachers was not there so I was assigned to teach a class. Alone.

It was SO HARD because I can't really communicate with them. I taught probably about 10 of the older children (probably about 6 years old) some addition and they did really well! I was so grateful that the teacher that was there checked on me every 10 minutes or so to make sure everyone was behaving!

After snack time, my friend Katrina and I cleaned the dishes while the teacher mopped the floors. We then went outside to round up all of the children to come back inside from their play time. The children were whinier today than they were last week so it took some cajoling to get them inside!

Once everyone was inside, it was song and story time! The teacher really put me and my friend in charge of a lot more today. I wound up taking the lead on a lot of activities because it was my friend's first time volunteering there. We taught the children the "Hokey Pokey", "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" and "If You're Happy and you Know It" I really think those songs have some good vocabulary and hand motions. The teacher would also randomly turn to me and say, "ok now you teach numbers" or "ok now you teach another song". Overall it was a very fun but tiring experience at the pre school!

Getting home from Women in Action was an adventure! Katrina and I decided to brave the dala-dala system for the first time. A dala-dala for those who don't know are the public transportation mini buses that go throughout the city. They're SO much cheaper than a taxi (only about 450 Tsh which is about $0.30 instead of 4,000 Tsh) and much more of an adventure.

We asked the director of WIA which dala dala route to take back to the neighborhood where we are living and she told us the name we should look for on the vehicle but by the time we got to the place to get on to the dala dala, we had forgotten the name but we knew it started with a K. Fortunately, there was a nice guy standing near the dala dala station who pointed us in the right direction. We had to take two different routes to get home. The first dala dala we were on had maybe 5 people and everyone had a lot of room to really stretch out. We got out of that car at the central bus station and found the other dala dala we were supposed to take. Unfortunately we were the last people squeezed into this vehicle before driving away. This meant that I was standing smooshed next to the sliding door with about 24 other passengers in the van. Luckily it was less than a 5 minute ride!! I'm really glad I did that and now I'm not scared to take it again!

Now I'm taking a breath before writing a paper tonight that is due in the morning... the procrastination is BACK!