During term, the secondary students study and live at the second campus of the school near the township of Usa River. You can supposedly see Mt Kilamanjaro from here, but it has been too overcast as yet.
This campus was opened in 2008 and this year has Forms 1-3. In 2014 the first students will graduate from the School of St Jude.
I will spend most of my time here at Usa as my role is as an ESL teacher/mentor to the secondary staff.
I moved into my room in the boy's dormitory (who knows?) on Monday 20th having spent one night at Moshono. As I will commute most weekends, I am lucky enough to have been allocated a room at each but it means I need to plan ahead so that I am not carting too much stuff back and forth.
There is a daily shuttle service to and from each campus. The trip takes about 45 minutes.
It apparently used to be shorter when the drivers went cross country, but now they are expected to stay on the sealed road!
There are only a few volunteers here - Helen (the teacher-librarian), Bernice (the boarding supervisor), Ian (the art teacher) and Lucy (the PE teacher). The rest of the teaching and administration staff (about 60 in all) are either Tanzanian or Kenyan.
In addition to the teaching and admin staff I also have one lesson a week with the 15 boarding teachers who work from 3pm-7am. That makes 14 hours of teaching a week in all.
First bell shatters the silence at 5.30am. Last bell is at 9.30pm.
Students do all their own cleaning and washing with "chore time" both before and after school.Every surface including the footpaths are wiped down daily, toilets scrubbed, gardens weeded and tables set and cleared for 500+!
In the kitchen there are large wood fired cookers on which enormous pots of rice and beans are stirred with wooden spoons that are about two metres long! It takes a lot of muscle I'm told especially to cook the substance that looks like mashed potato, but tastes like................ nothing. It is in fact maize flour and water which is cooked and stirred until it takes on that consistency. Not one of my favourites I admit but it is good for soaking up the sauce from the beans.
The students have a blue day uniform, a sports uniform and a burgundy night uniform.Both boys and girls have closely shaved hair for ease - not a hairdryer or straightener in sight!
Staff have their own washing machine. Bliss! (And can wear their hair as they please of course).
In the evening I can eat dinner with the students or cook in the volunteer kitchen/ common room. If I eat with the school we all have our set places and I sit with Agnes and Neemah who are both in Form 1. Grace is said before each meal. There is only ever the main course. No bread or desert but it is good nutritious food, hot and plenty of it.There is water to drink. (Oh yes, more bliss, you can drink the water straight form the tap here).
Incredibly I have my own large room for teaching in with a desk and a computer. When I arrived on the Monday afternoon the Headmaster, Rasul said I should wait until Wednesday to start classes (which was good as I did not have a timetable or even a list of names) . This gave me a day to set up the room, get some resources and nut out the timetable and who would attend when.
Again I feel totally welcome here and I can't wait to get my teeth into the teaching programme and getting to know everybody.
PS: Photos will follow. Technical hitch. After all this is East Africa!
