Email No. 7: October 29, 2004

Hello all!

So, here I am in Mtwara, on my way up to Morogoro to help out with the training of the new volunteers. I'll be doing that for two weeks, spending a few days possibly in Dar familiarizing myself with some of my PCVL duties for next year, and then back to Morogoro to help facilitate a Head of Schools Conference. All being said, I won't be back to my site until the 27th of November (and will have phone and email until then).

I knew my schedule was going to be busy this month away from site for quite awhile, but still, it caught me by surprise yesterday as I finished teaching and realized that I was never going to teach those girls again. I guess reality didn't really hit as it doesn't feel like I'm leaving; I'll still be in Tanzania next year, and I'll even be back at site again for a few days before moving to Mtwara. I'm not sure how I feel about it, in part, because I'm not done. There isn't this huge sense of closure like I expected. One thing that is great though is that the past two weeks of teaching have been really good. We managed to finish the syllabus a bit early, which gave me a chance to do some more 'experimental' stuff with the review topics... mostly integrating HIV/AIDS topics into my lesson plans.

The Peer Leader Group girls had a farewell party for the Form IV's on Saturday, and although it wasn't supposed to be so, I somehow got included in their farewells as well, which was really nice. It's very difficult to believe that I'm finished with teaching and that my time at Ndwika is pretty much up. It will be hard to hand everything over to the next volunteer... a part of me will want to help him or her out with knowing all of the details of life Ndwika, but I also know that some of the things that I treasure the most about my site are those details that I discovered for myself, without Cyndie's help (the volunteer before me).

So, I'm off to hang out at PST with the new volunteers and am pretty excited about that. It will be really interesting to see how much I've changed since that time and I think that being at PST will bring a lot of those changes to the surface.

Love to you all! Jessica