Week 1 in Iringa

Well I have been in Iringa for one week now and here are a list of my first impressions:

- Its a small town of about 100,000 or so
- Everyone is friendly and wants to chat with me, in Kswahili. As you know i don't know Kswahili. I know about 10-20 words so at least they get a good chuckle when i say hello, how are you, or count to 4 for them at the shops. (mjeyo, mbili, tatu, nne, 1,2,3,4)
- The Staff at the high school are very kind and caring, they are trying hard to attend to my needs on the first few days i have been here. I am staying in someones home and they are taking very good care of me, I am eating better than i usually do back home (I dont eat bachelor food every night)
- Iringa does not have many amenities, restaurents, coffee shops, places to go and unwind, and unless you know how to barter or speak Kswahili, My trips in town have not been very useful. They might be more useful the longer i stay here.
- There are two nice restaurents that we have visited while i have been here. One place is really special. All the workers are deaf, and if you want to order something you have to write the order on a piece of paper and then try to show the waitstaff what you want, many times, the item you selected is not available so you go through your own sign language to order something, its actually very bonding. And since i dont speak Kswahili, its very neat to communicate in other forms.
- At the school there are over 700 kids from all over Tanzania, and some kids that are from Kenya, Uganda, and two kids from India whose parents have lived here their whole lives.
- There is a basketball court, a volleyball net, and a very large soccer field (one of the better ones in Iringa, although they dont cut the grass/shrub). I have played in a couple of scrimmages, and watched some inter-class and inter-school matches. The girls dont play soccer here, they play net ball.
- The 700 students are broken up into 7 different grades
Pre-Form I (kids that have no english and need to have prep before they enter grade 8)
Form I (Grade 8 back home)
Form II (Grade 9 back home)
Form III (Grade 10 back home)
Form IV (Grade 11 back home)
Form V (Grade 12 back home)
Form VI (Grade 13 US)

There is also O-Level (ordinary) and A-Level (Honors Level)

They study most subjects we have back home, Geography, History, Math, English, Computer Class, etc. They also have a mandatory religions class, and the Baha'i kids also do lots of activities, including a mandatory Junior Youth Program.
- My first Computer Tasks are as follows

Figure out how Windows 2003 Server Security work (Paul, if you are reading this, msn me, maybe you can step me through this. hehehe) I will also be building Access databases to centralize all the Schools data. They currently have all the data in many different spreadsheets on different computers.
- The computer lab has 20 working computers and about 10 computers that need something to make them work (UPS, moniter, keyboard, cleaning, new hard drives, etc.)
- I also plan on teaching the Staff more complicated stuff like Excel and Access and how to use the more powerful tools on the computers.

Anyways until next time, I hope this gives you a better insight of where I am in the world, and what i am up to.

If you want to email me use ozamani9@gmail.com
If you want to msn me use ozamani9@hotmail.com (add me to your contacts)

please click the comment after each post, and let me know what you think so far.

Cheers
Omid in Tanzania