I'm Back

Wow, it has been a while. We have been busy at school and I think feel so at home here now that it sometimes doesn't feel like anything interesting to blog about. Of course that is only because we have become accustomed to the interesting because this is still a very interesting place. I am now teaching three and a half courses because of the shortage of instructors in the IT department and concern by the students about missing courses required for their graduation. For those computer people, I am teaching Procedural Programming in C, Data Structures and Algorithms, and Software Engineering plus helping with Application Project in Java. There are only two of us qualified to teach the programming courses and the other person is also new to the department. Josephat is from Kampala University in Uganda and has been teaching for 4 years in Dar. He is also teaching three courses and we will work together on the Application Projects.

This means that I have 9 hours of lecture a week to prepare for. Fortunately, I found some good lecture notes for Software Engineering by the author of a book they have in the library but the other two courses I am making new notes for. This should help for future years. We just had Thursday and Friday off for Easter and have Monday off too. Then Wed is off for a national holiday. I didn't find out that there were no classes on Thursday until Wed afternoon. School communication is very loose here, much of it by word of mouth. Classes were also canceled half a day last week because a student died on campus. Students are often older here on average than they would be in the US and the student that died was in his 30's I think. He collapsed suddenly while talking to other students outside and was taken to a hospital but it sounded like he may have died suddenly.

We have really settled in at the house and Sue has found several interesting classes in Counseling that she has been participating in. She is also arranging a group of students to help with English. It has been fun for her to interact with the students who are really nice and interesting and she has been learning quite a bit about cultural issues in these classes. I am sure she will blog about it soon and we are making a resolution to update more frequently with shorter blogs. Bottom line is we are doing fine and still having fun.