Visiting other regions..safari njema..

The time is passing and slowly we will be off to our respective sites on Thanksgiving day. The beginning of next week is our final language exams so wish us luck. More ongoings of Morogoro include finally trying out Mama Pierna's which is an Italian Greek restaurant. I tried the pesto there and it is fantastic.

Also we visited local NGO's, one that we visited was Chadoye which uses traditional dancing and drumming to talk about HIV prevention and life skills here in Tanzania. It was interesting to visit and we got to dance to the drums at the end. Apparently they are having a performance on Tuesday and some of us are planning to go. We have secondary projects here besides teaching that we will implement, which include talking about life skills and HIV prevention as it can be a problem here at a young age (whether young gals sleeping with teachers/villagers because they are poor and need money or female circumcision). Also there are various other secondary projects to implement which include: helping villagers generate income, girls empowerment, building a library, etc. We learned how to do a Needs Assessment to find out what the community wants and needs which was interesting to learn how to do. I think this will be very useful at site and I hope to focus on girls empowerment, as women here do all the chores and end up being the ones that drop out of school.

After the exams next week, I will be traveling with another fellow trainee, he is also from Michigan. We will be going to the Kili region to shadow another education volunteer. Our first long distance trip on local transport in Tanzania..I am excited! Though I will definitely hate the sitting on a bus part. After that we are going to Dar (we will be there during my bday) for site announcements. All the possible places for the ICT volunteers (there are only 3 of us) seem great to me, I have no preference of one over the other, they will either be in Southern or Central Tanzania. We will also have a early Thanksgiving dinner while in Dar which will be nice considering we go to site during real Thanksgiving and will not be with the rest of the group.