From Isack in Tabora

Hello friends around the world – this is Isack! I hope that you have been enjoying the stories from South Africa by Erik, James, Beruk, Jody, Charles, Ben and others. On my side I’m back at school. I’m studying at Uyui High School in Tabora region.

I am now very happy to tell you about my friends Bryony Kite and Nadia from London. Bryony is Jody friend. She came to Tabora with her friend Nadia to visit me, Roots & Shoots and the Orphanage. It was my first time to meet with them but we became good friends and we ate together most of the time and discussed different issues.

Nadia and Bryony are primary school teachers and when they were in Tabora, they used to come to school to teach students English. In the evening they would go to play with the kids at the orphanage, so when I came back from school I would meet with them at the orphanage and we would play with the kids. Bryony and Nadia don’t know how to speak Kiswahili, our national language, but most of time they asked me about different words so that they could use them to communicate with the kids. They played with kids from 1 to 5 years old; they loved the kids and the kids loved them too. In Tanzania, it is not usual to see people playing with kids in the orphanage like Bryony and Nadia, so from my side I learned something new. I think kids they feel happy to play and they need people like Bryony and Nadia who can play with them.

After playing with the kids Nadia, Bryony and me would go to the school to meet with Root & Shoots members. My dear friends, you can’t believe what Nadia, Bryony and I introduced as a new thing in Tabora…. we introduced a girl’s football team at the school! The first time when Nadia and Bryony came to our school they meet with Roots & Shoots members to discuss about Roots & Shoots Uyui High School action plan for 2008. Mr. Arimas, president of Roots & Shoots at the school, told them about the club’s sports plan - here at Uyui we have a plan to establish a Roots & Shoots football team. During the holiday we will be going to the villages to educate people about different issues then we will play football between Roots & Shoots team and village team from the place we visit. We have agreed that football is a way of joining people together and also we can teach them before the match. We believe that so many people will come because they like soccer.

Now, Nadia and Bryony have introduced a football team for girls!!! It is new because we had no girls playing football before but now we have been introduced to it by Jody’s friends, Bryony and Nadia. Nadia gave exercises to the girls and then Nadia and Bryony gave two footballs to the girls to use for practice.

Nadia and Bryony then went to visit Gombe National Park (the land of chimpanzees) in Kigoma and after that they went to Arusha to meet with Salley. Right now they are in Zanzibar after that they will travel back to London on Monday. I wish my new friends all the best and I hope that one day we will meet again. Thanks for introducing a football team here at our school. That is a gift for us. It is a golden chance because you show us new ways to go forward.

Thank you Jody for introducing me to Bryony and Nadia. Also thank you all for visiting our blog. You are welcome again and you can tell others to visit this blog too to here about different programs in Africa.

With love,

Isack Nyasilu

Hello from Hippo River

Dear Moms!

This next blog finds us all well, despite a weekend where many of us turned as green as the creamy-whipped-spinach we ate for lunch on Saturday. That night was a long night for most of us, although the lucky few with their own unique strategies, managed to get a full night of beauty sleep. Strategy #1 - Stick to familiar KFC-like chicken legs and avoid the green stuff (Jaime). Strategy #2 – Develop a hearty resistance to any baddies lurking in your food and joyfully embrace a large rich portion of greens (Beruk & Ronel). Strategy #3 – Avoid carbs at all cost, unless presented with any edible form of mucus (Erik). The alternative analysis of what happened, however, is much more exciting. You see, the woman who prepared the creamy-whipped-spinach, also owns a funeral parlour. Culturally, the man who slaughters the goat (symbolizing the spirit of the person who died), is not permitted to attend the funeral for fear of bad spirits transferring to the food that has been prepared. Unfortunately, when news spread that a number of people had become sick following the creamy-whipped-spinach lunch, rumours then started to spread that bad spirits had entered our food. Luckily, further gossip was nipped in the bud through discussion with the local chief, although we are still nibbling cautiously at our lunches this week. Basically, you never know….

Otherwise, greetings from Limpopo Province! On Friday night, we drove three hours north from Johannesburg to a beautiful riverside lodge, just past the town of Groblersdal. The place we are staying overlooks a wide river filled with hippos and crocs but other than a boat trip during the Sunday sunset, most of our time here is spent traveling past the orange groves to Groblersdal and then on to the smaller town of Motetema, for this week’s professional development program (PDP). The program, which consists of innovative sessions for educators on Early Childhood Development, Numeracy & Literacy, 21st Century Skills and Digital Arts for young learners, is based on months of work by Maskew Miller Longman (MML), Pearson Education, and the Pearson Foundation, and was launched last week in Johannesburg, Gauteng province, South Africa.

The week in Gauteng was a great success. The PF team was joined by MML representatives from Cape Town and Gauteng, Longman reps from Nigeria (Femi) and Tanzania (Belinda), Pearson reps from UK (Michael and Duncan) and expert facilitators for three of the programs (Mariam, Jenny and Vanessa). My personal highlight was the Family Book Night. Preparations included visiting five different schools and taking pictures of the sweetest kids holding random objects followed by late nights huddled in our room working out how to print the stickers of the kids holding the random objects. Those evenings, conversations were pretty basic, with the main line of dialogue being, “He is SO cute!!”, “She is SO cute!”, “Ah, I love her!”, “Ah, look at her smile, she’s SO cute!”, “He is hilarious! Look at Busi’s smile!”, “Ah, she’s doing a Busi!”, Ah, he is SO cute!”, “Ah, she is SO cute!”…(See the Shutterfly link to the right). Ronel performed an amazing logistics feat to get everything else ready, and then the whole community came to attend a wonderfully lively family book-reading night as well as graduation of some of the PDP participants. On the Friday we held a Movie Premier afternoon, with the cool young students sharing their Sara movies and then the ‘old’ people (teachers – ha, love it!) proudly sharing their Movie-Maker extravaganzas.

So far this week, things here in Limpopo are going well; lots of hard work during the day, and evenings spent by the river, listening to the cicadas and frogs, and trying to save Erik and Ben from likely death-by-hippo if they were to row row row the rowing boat into the darkness of nighttime… Erik has developed a fanciful new language, named by Jaime as ‘Germanskin’ or by Beruk as ‘Jah-Man-ski’. By day, Erik claims to speak English with a New York accent while by night he transforms his own style of Afrikaans-German-totalnonsensense-ness and spends hours in hot political debates with Krista, the Afrikaans-speaking lodge owner who is fond of pink. Fortunately, Ronel is able to translate this elusive language. Krista very much enjoys Erik’s attention and adorably, Erik ‘gets into the moment’. We’ve also had Ben’s measurements taken (long story but in summary – fiancée Staci on the phone with Ben asking for Tuxedo measurements…we heard one side of the conversation…and then Mariam asking, “What measurement must be taken before the wedding? Ha...), and yep... we’ve done the Macarena!

We will be here until the end of the week, and then all of us are flying back to Cape Town. Half of us will remain in our new Cape Town home, whilst the other half of the team will fly home to the US. During our brief separation, Benyamini Don (yep, Ben) will marry his beloved, and from those of us who will be there, and those who will only be there in our hearts, we wish you and Staci a beautiful life of love together.

Keep it real. One Love.