Confusion reigns.

Thursday morning was the worst part of my trip so far. The TL:DR (Too Long: Didn't Read, for you non-nerds) version is that I almost quit my placement but nevertheless woke up to my own stupidity, swallowed some pride and reasserted that the most important people are the children I'm teaching.

The more substantial version is that one of the students was sick, so Quirine and I went to his house at the request of his aunt to pick him up and take him to the hospital. As we went to pick up our bags, we were intercepted by the headteacher who told us we had to be accompanied by a member of teaching staff. At first we were told that this was simply because we can not speak Swahili, so we explained that there was a member of Projects Abroad already at the hospital who we had been in contact with already. They insisted we needed to take a teacher and this stand off lasted about ten minutes, after which we said okay, can you bring the teacher to accompany us. We just wanted to get the child to hospital as soon as possible. The teacher was brought, we were ready to leave, and then we were told that we needed to now wait for the director. After a period of further arguments over why exactly we needed to wait, the director showed up and took us into his office to yet again explain why we needed a teacher with us, while we sat with the sick child waiting for him to finish. I repeatedly tried to get him to let the kid go to hospital, with either Quirine and me or Quirine and a teacher, yet he was adamant that in doing so I was not respecting the rules and regulations regarding informing the office of the kid's whereabouts. At the end of the day, the whole thing was entirely trivial. He was being proud and stubborn, insisting that every box be checked without concern for any mitigating factors. We were just as stubborn and guilty of not seeing past cultural differences and the language barrier. That said, I stormed out after a while and from what I hear, he was less than respectful to Quirine. Anyway, all water under the bridge. Whatever, my thoughts on the situation or the people involved shouldn't cloud the fact that the most important people at Gohechi are the children who need their education. I was going to have an interview with the director for today but given Thursday's events I have pushed it back until Monday but it will still happen and I think that the children deserve the exposure.

Anyway, after that was a teaching workshop at Projects Abroad, which was really a feedback session on how Projects could improve their system for placing volunteers and where they could help us better while we are in Tanzania. Most of the feedback centred around improved pre-arrival information, as some care volunteers have found themselves teaching and some teaching volunteers have found themselves doing more care work. Most are fine with this but would like more information before they arrive and are thrown into teaching or care work. Much of what was discussed I had already been talking about with the next Gohechi volunteer so it was mostly rehashing that and other points covered earlier in the blog.

Onto other news. Arsenal are third! What an amazing turn of events considering at the beginning of February we were seventh. Whilst I have been in Tanzania, Arsenal are P4 W4 F10 A2. Maybe I should stay a bit longer, a year or two perhaps so Mr. Wenger can get his elusive Champions' League trophy.