Daladala

The holiday is over and after making appointments for meeting with the microfiance and wells coordinators on Friday, I headed to the University to meet with the Finnish IT professor here and have our work permits added to our passports. Tumaini is a few miles away and I took the local Daladala public transport. Daladalas are well packed mini buses with a the side door open and a conductor hanging out collecting fares. It costs 250 shillings or about 20 cents per ride. I wasn’t sure which bus to take but knew all along this road would be going somewhere close to Tumaini so I got in. The daladala crews do not speak English but the gentleman sitting next to me assured me that we were heading to Tumaini. He turned out to live near Tumaini and we got off together where he showed me a foot path shortcut through homes. It started to rain heavily and we were stuck and ducked into someone’s home after saying hodi hodi to announce our presence but we did not see anyone at home. He was about my age and we talked for 15 minutes or so waiting for the rain to stop and he turned out to be a physics teacher at Pomerini Secondary School, which is a diocese school about 70 km from Iringa. This is the school that teams from Global Volunteers have been helping. He told me that many students at his school are not very interested in science and, surprisingly, he thought that was because they did not see a very good future in science. Few of these students would go to University and the job prospects would probably be limited to being a teacher (many teachers are Form VI graduates who have never attended university because of the shortage of advance degree teachers). A teacher here has an income of about $200/ month, I believe. I think the lack of science resources must also contribute to its low popularity. After the rain stopped, he escorted me past his house to the gate of the campus. He had a cow grazing in the front yard, a tv dish on the roof, and his house looked much nicer than the one we ducked into. I took care of business on campus and had a lunch of a big plate of rice with a tomato vegetable broth, some tough pieces of meat, and some green vegetable with the Finnish professor in the school cafeteria for about $1. I enjoyed meeting him and we had a good discussion of his experiences with the first term. Sounds like I may only need to teach two courses and they may be different from what was proposed on Monday but that is typical of the dynamic planning that happens here. Apparently, the university thinks that the daladala is not suitable transport because they gave me the keys to a Toyota Land Cruiser to use while we are here. I agree with them.