Teeth and Steve

Hello! So, our placements are in full swing. Most of the schools are closing this week for Christmas, which originally we saw as a hindrance, but the head teachers have kindly let us use classrooms over the next few weeks to teach both children from the school and other community members.

On Thursday we had our first session with community members – that is to say, young people from Nyakahanga who aren’t primary school children. We’d arranged the session with a Nyakahanga chairman and the head teacher of the primary school to let us use a classroom, and we arrived early to start our session at 10 am. People started to trickle in at around 10.30 so we could eventually begin at 11. Relaxed is not the word!!!

It was an especially productive session; partly due to the older ages of attendees – 13 to 20 – and partly due to the smaller group size. We could play the ‘SRH Teeth Game’, which sounds terrible, but is wicked. ‘Teeth’ is a game in which the group stands in a circle and each player assigns themselves a name – Sexual Reproductive Health – related in this case. A player starts by calling another, e.g.: ‘condom, condom is calling gonorrhoea, gonorrhoea’, then ‘gonorrhoea, gonorrhoea is calling syphilis, syphilis’, etc etc. The game is that you have to cover your teeth with your lips while playing, and if you laugh or show your teeth, you’re out. It’s a silly energiser game, which gets everyone more comfortable talking about SRH and with each other.

We used role plays and group discussion to raise the group’s awareness of the most common STIs. Interestingly, in Tanzania this includes Trichonomiasis, which none of us UK volunteers had ever heard of before. We know about it now! Next week we’ll move on to HIV and AIDS and their prevention. The best part about today’s session happened afterwards: a boy who’d been at our session asked if he could lead a part of the session on HIV next week. Awesome! This is especially great because it directly addresses one of the aims of the SAWAKA/Million Hours Fund project, which we’re working for, which is to encourage volunteering among young people in our placement communities, including encouraging them to facilitate their own sessions. Yay!

This is a short one. I’m not really sure why; there are obviously so many interesting things I could write about. But, having been in Karagwe for 3 weeks now, a lot of things that would have been remarkable 2 and a half weeks ago are now unremarkable!

We’ve all acquired a new ‘friend’, though, who we’ve named Steve. He’s a roamer, I suppose, of Kayanga. He’s always outside the building we’re in – be it SAWAKA, a bar; another meeting venue – and follows us to our next destination, asking to come with us to Dar Es Salaam, apparently! He speaks in Kinyambo, the regional dialect, doesn’t seem to understand Swahili and definitely doesn’t speak English. He’s harmless, trotting along a few feet behind us with his sack of plastic, but he’s currently the main topic of conversation among our volunteer group!


(photos not uploading - soz)