Friday, January 06, 2012

Arrived at Language School

Today we traveled by car to Musoma (about 200 km from Mwanza) to the Makoko Language School, where we’ll be living for the next 3 months. It was an easy ride up along a main paved thoroughfare and the scenery was so beautiful through the entire ride! We went along the edge of the Serengeti and saw some zebra, wildebeests, gazelles, and baboons just chilling and doing their thing along the side of the road. So cool!

The drive along the Serengeti

Zebras rolling in the dirt

This week we got to visit all of the placement sites for the new missioners, as well as have individual meetings with our future supervisors.

Me and my future supervisor outside the Caritas offices

Chris and his supervisor upon meeting the first time

It’s really exciting to hear about the cool work I’ll be able to do after language school is finished. Though I have to say, I can get easily overwhelmed when I think about the fact that I can’t speak the language, know very little about the culture, have little to no information as yet about the current gender issues in the region, and am quite scared to drive on the roads. Yikes!

I’ve been feeling kind of sick and yucky on and off throughout the week and I’m still not sleeping totally well through the night. But I think I’ll start to even out a bit now that we’re at language school and I will be able to establish more of a routine. And, one of my major accomplishments for the week is learning how to pee in a squat toilet without it splashing all over my feet. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

We haven’t had a chance to take any picture of the school, but we’ll be sure to do that in the coming weeks. Also, click on any any of the pictures in this post to see the rest of the pictures I've uploaded onto Flickr (that is, if Flickr would speed up and load my pictures!)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, that toilet looks tough...I would imagine #2 a bigger challenge. P.S. Are you able to get your regular coffee intake where you are staying? I remember this was a challenge in the D.R. ;) Cheers on all of the accomplishments thus far!! -Kaiser

Anonymous said...

Katie love. Your amazing. Love u- Rachel

Waldie said...

Kaiser, the Swahili (squat) toilet is actually not that bad once you get used to them. Chris and a few of the other missioners even prefer them. I don't know if I'll go that far, but it's not too bad.

As for coffee, there's not too much ground coffee here. Most people drink instant, even though TZ grows and exports a lot of its own coffee. :(

Anonymous said...

love to see the pics and see how you're doing. we love you - joanna, jordan, eli, sonny, louisa