Tuesday 8th March: We were met at the airport by Gasica who has been looking after us ever since. We spent the first few days acclimatising to our new, beautiful home.
Friday 11th March: We visited Unguja Ukuu primary school for the first time and were surprised by the large number of children that are learning in this relatively small community. All the children were very excited to see us and it was great to finally meet them all.
Sat 12th March: We were invited to Pwani Mchangani with the ZL4LF school trip. Everyone had a great time and the students were very happy to practice their English with Philip and me.
Tuesday 15th March: Meeting with the teachers and community leaders at Unguja Ukuu. It was a chance for the teachers to give us feedback on the past 3 months with Ann and Caroline and to let us know what they would like for the future. In general they were very happy with how things were going, although they also wanted to change some things.
The teachers decided they did not want to continue English lessons They are possibly interested in having computer lessons. We need to find out which teachers will attend classes, and how many days a week they would like them. The students who are engaged and interested will continue to have after school English (and computer?) lessons. This will stay at about 40 students. The teachers told us they would prefer us not to teach during school hours.
Wednesday 16th March: Our car got broken into and all the power windows were stolen! This annoying incident caused us to miss the last day of school before it closed due to the re-run of the election. I was sad to be away from the kids again as it felt as if we had to stop before we had started.
Saturday 19th March: Due to worry over possible violence during the election (it was a re-run after the first election was declared void by the party who did not win!) we were invited to stay at a beautiful hotel in Kizimkazi for 3 nights which is a quiet, rural part of the island. Philip and I had a wonderfully relaxing time and we are happy to report that there was no real violence or organised uprising.
Tuesday 22nd March: The school in Unguja Ukuu remained closed during the week following the election. Philip spent his time working on the kiokits (more about that to follow) while Chloe spent the week making a film with the older students at ZL4LF. The students really enjoyed the drama games, songs and dances and were enthusiastic during the filming. It was interesting to see the difference between European and Zanzibari culture. When I’ve done this project before the kids want to copy a famous film like Pulp Fiction and then change it to make it funny and relevant to them. But here the students wanted to make something that educates. So we have made a film about how you should go to the hospital and not to a witch doctor. All the filming is finished and now I need to edit it, but I am having issues finding a firewire adapter. We are on the case though, and I am confident a solution will turn up so that I can get on with the editing process!
Saturday 26th March: Feroz returned to England. It was great to have him around and we will miss his advice and company.
Tuesday 29th March: Finally the school in Unguja Ukuu is open and we had a great week really getting stuck into the teaching. It feels like we have found a good way of working together. We are concentrating on enabling the students to be able to introduce themselves and talk about their lives in great detail. For grammar we focused on articles and adjectives. And the vocabulary has been about body parts.
I think we have hit a good balance between serious learning, interspersed with fun, energetic exercises which back up the lessons. Students have been drawing, acting and singing during class with much amusement. We were sad to see that not all the students were receiving lunch due to lack of funds from the teachers, who had said they could pay for half the cost. After talking to Ann and Caroline about this we'll fix the problem next week.
This week has also included 2 trips to Bomba radio station where both Gasica and Chloe were interviewed! Philip has been continuing with the frustrating task of getting the KioKits usable for our lessons. (see below)
Friday 2nd April: During our meeting a few weeks ago the teachers told us they need a printer and copier at the school. Feroz worked his magic with Stone Town Traders and today we picked up the free copier/printer! Learning how to use it properly will be a part of the teacher’s computer lessons.
KioKit Update from Philip: It's been quite a difficult task to enable the KioKit to perform as a usable system for TESOL education, but it would seem there is light at the end of the tunnel with a proprietary technician agreeing to come on line and reveal the connection protocols that will allow the user to upload content to the kit for display in class. The software program I've been working on these last few weeks is a vocabulary builder which will take from 1 to 10 words, currently nouns have been enabled, and develop a number of multiple selection exercises to be automatically developed and then uploaded to the kit for use in class. If all goes according to plan, the next report should include pictures of a working Kio!