After my time at Peace House, I returned to Dar for a few days before leaving again on a trip to the Moshi region to stay with a friend in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro. However, before I take time to tell you about that incredible adventure, I should first fill you in on what I'm doing right now. After a week and a half postponement due to prolonged discussions in Parliament surrounding education budgets, courses officially began at UDSM last Monday, but classrooms are still relatively empty. Operating on a true to form "Tanzanian Flexible Time" basis, almost all students here understand the start date of class as the date of their arrival on campus and beginning of the lengthy process of filling out countless forms, standing in lines for signatures and various approvals, paying deposits, receiving stipends and configuring room situations, all of which needs to be completed before even thinking about showing up for class.
As international students, our process was completed in August during our first week in Dar. Given such, I attended all four of my lectures last week, but out of roughly 100 students in each of my lectures, I was the only student in attendance. Fortunately, the T.A. in one section and the actual professor in another showed up to two of the four lectures and gave me the syllabus as well as the first few texts to begin photocopying. That's one of the most shocking differences between school at Luther and here; instead of buying your textbooks for class, the professor brings a copy of the required texts to the lecture, and students are responsible for getting photocopies of the texts to use during the course. Although it is much cheaper than shelling out hundreds of dollars each semester, it is both a minor pain convenience-wise and a major waste of paper, which is slightly alarming given the absence of a recycling system. However, accepting the fact that a lack of available resources is a very real circumstance with such side effects, it's plain to see how it is the way things are done here - so we roll with it! Like I told my friend Kate, it's just another one of those things they told us last spring would happen while we were here, which I in turn assumed was being blown out of proportion, that those kinds of things "don't actually happen." Well, they do. :)
So, I've successfully copied almost all of my texts for the two classes where either the professor or T.A. attended, and this week, I hope to meet some of my fellow peers in the lecture halls as we begin our semesters' studies just as the halfway point of my trip floats past ever so stealthily. If all goes as planned, I will be taking all literature courses - African Women Writers, Children's Literature, African Literature, and Intro to Literary Devices. Seems a little one-sided, but seeing as I didn't have enough room in my waning time at Luther to take more English electives, this promises to be a fun semester packed with lots of interesting additions to my educational journey. Wish me luck!
*Picture is the sun setting over the orchards at Peace House.
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