Good Hope

Hi everyone, sorry for the lack of posts lately, as I have been on safari with little internet and battery, I will be trying to catch up in the next few days. First Nov 6.

This was my first day at Good Hope, a school I will be teaching music at for a few days here. I got to sleep in that fay which was very nice, and after getting a little lost I made it to the place where I would meet Heather, the volunteer coordinator for the music project. It took a decent amount of time to get there in a blue land rover along the run down dort roads typical to rural Arusha. Good Hope is much more developed than Upendo Face. They have orphans living there as young as two years old, and they stay untill they have graduated grade 7. They teach kindergarten to grade 7 at the orphanage, and there are 8 classrooms, much more roomy than Upendo Face as there are many more students. The desks are nicer and they have much more school supplies. As well there is a football field, and playground. The music program is currently run by an American volunteer, and a local teacher. The teacher has dreadlocks and wears rasta colours. The music room has 4 beat up guitars, a keyboard, and many hand drums. The main focus of the music program is to spark a passion for music in children early on, so they can pursue music better later on in life, giving them an outlet for their creativity, or maybe even a career. A typical class involves a lot of singing, accompanied by a teacher or two on guitar. As well some technical aspects of the aforementioned instruments are taught. The students who are more interested come in at break to better master their instruments. After class Quincy (the other volunteer) gave me a tour of the school and the volunteer housing at the project. Quincy will be leaving in a week so I will be taking over for him in the transition period to a new volunteer. We then took the dala dala back to town and he gave me a little tour of the more authentic places that the volunteers from my house did not know about. For lunch we went to a local place in a jacaranda forest behind a casino. It was outdoors, and consisted of a wok over a fire, and cinder blocks arranged around it as chairs. The meal served there is fried cassava, sweet potatoes, bananas, and potatoes, with pili pili (kind of like hot sauce) poured on it. Usually there is also avocado but today we were not so lucky. We stood out as the only mzungus to visit are Quincy and me. For a big bowl the price is 1000 tzs, about 50¢. Nothing much else happened untill we went out to dinner that night, where I ate meat for the first time in probably 5 days. Then I went home and packed for the safari...
More to come soon!