"Winter break" is over

We have settled back into the PCV life again as our "winter break" is over and school has opened. I showed up at 7 am last Monday morning (the first day of school) only to find I was the only faculty member there with 30 or so A-level students. A few minutes later the academic master shows up and opens the administration office. Not a single O-level student arrived for the first day of school. This usually happens - the students (especially at boarding schools) don't arrive until a few days (or weeks) after the term starts. There are many factors as to why this happens. For one the students must pay their school fees before coming (or bring it with them) and that's a large amount of money they need all at once. Then on top of that they need money to travel to school. Starting July 1 the price of petrol/gas increased and therefore bus fares have increased. As an example from our site to Dar it used to be 8,000 Tanzanian shillings and now it's 10,000 T.sh. When many Tanzanians make less than 1,000 T.sh. per day it's difficult to pay just a little more. So I didn't teach at all last week. This week I finally had about half of the students I should have (about 40 out of 80 total) so I went into the classrooms and talked with them about their break and did a little review of Algebra, what we ended with last term.

Russ and I were invited to a circumcision celebration in a village. We rode our bikes out there and entered a drumming and dancing party. The boys in our tribe are circumcised when their father says they are ready. A bunch of boys usually from different families are all done together. They are circumcised then they live by themselves in a sort of fenced in area for a few days while the elders of the village teach them to become men. I didn't see any of the boys but Russ did enter the fenced in area and said they were covered in dried mud from head to toe with a cloth around their waists. They live like this for a few days, cooking their own food, then wash off the mud and re-enter the village as men.