Almost New Year's Eve - December 30th

This will be one of those meandering posts. It's been raining every day since the 27th...today the sun peeked through for the first time in days. Add a nasty cold to that (why, with all the medicines I packed, didn't I think I might need something potent for cold and sinus conditions), and yeah, I'm feeling a wee bit blue.

I guess it shows on my face. As I walked home from lunch in the village this afternoon, at least two people sympathized with me for being so tired. The real clue that my mental state may be a little on the obvious side, was when Maalai popped by to say hello, and I learned through Joseph's translation that he was asking me how I was doing with my loneliness problem. Yikes! In my best efforts at African-ness, I certainly have never told anyone that I was even a little bit lonely. On top of everything else my favorite askari is a mind-reader!

Mostly though, I'm just more than a little tired. Yesterday I taught a dozen people the basics of preparing business plans. I actually had quite a bit of notice that I was going to be leading this class...a whole week in fact...but of course Christmas and the Boxing Day adventure took priority over course planning, so I was less than well prepared to do this. Apparently though, the very fact that I'd pre-done a course outline was downright impressive, and as a result the man who was supposed to co-facilitate the session with me decided I was more than able to handle the full day solo! A quarter of the scheduled participants missed half the day because their vehicle had been stuck on the road from their village (probably the same crevass that caught us on the Maasai wedding trip, only with a few extra days of rain added to the problem!)

Teaching adults, here at LOOCIP, is a whole new experience. Essentially, anyone who has any information that might be considered useful to others, is a potential teacher...with or without benefit of any notion of how to actually teach. And, the most surprising people have the capacity to simply stand up, without any preparation, and teach a class for hours. Of course, I was determined to create an interesting day out of potentially dry material, especially once I discovered that most of my students had really limited reading or writing skills. Language, of course, was problematic, but the head trainer here at the centre did a valiant job of translating my efforts a sentence at a time, even doing his best to mimic my tone and delivery. We did have some fun...I tossed in a few little dramas, got the participants answering questions (and led wild applause each time a correct answer was given), and told as many personal stories as I was able to toss into the mix. I learned a fair bit about the ins and outs of some of their proposed microbusinesses -- buying and selling goats, making bricks, setting up a 'dry grocery' kiosk in a remote village. And the class learned a fair bit about me. I opted to teach them the principles by using a simulated business, and chose in true Canadian style, to establish an imaginary sort of Tim Hortons by the roadside here in Longido. Coffee (kahawa) and Mandazi (almost doughnuts) were our only products, and the name "Kahandazi" seemed to fit well (yes, I did check first to ensure it wasn't a swear word in Swahili). The class was a little taken aback by my enthusiasm for ensuring we set ourselves apart from other eateries by having a super-clean latrine, assuring my rather skeptical audience that this could have make-it-or-break-it consequences when it came to attracting the passing tourists. Mostly, it worked out well though I'm a little concerned that next time I come to Longido I may find a rash of coffee & doughnut shops have sprung up along the roadside. I wouldn't mind a bit if a whole lot of super-clean public latrines were to spring up along the same stretch.