attempted update!

Look! I think I finally figured out how to shrink photos down to a size that Tanzanian bandwidth can handle! Here are David and Liza, posing for me during our walk from the beautifully village district of Bangata.




In other news, our fellow teacher, Jessica, arrived in Tanzania yesterday and it's really nice to have her here! I'm looking forward to getting to know her better, learning from her teaching, and becoming friends.

I jammed with Liza's band last week, and I think I'm going to be "hired" (the band's pretty casual and wonderfully fun) to do some backing vocals and even a little bit of keyboard! Liza's good friend Janelle appears to be the de facto front woman of the band, and she's a REALLY talented songwriter and fantastic person! They were extremely warm and welcoming people; I even played one of my own songs for them. They gig around town when they can, and there's even talk of traveling to Nairobi to play a gig at some hotel ... I think studio recording time is quite cheap here in Arusha, so if my salary will allow, perhaps I can record my first full-length solo album here! That would be exciting.

I start teaching lessons TOMORROW. My first student is a piano student. It's a little boy who's never had a piano lesson in his life. Right. Sooooo ... since Liza, Jessica and I are the most highly trained classical musicians in all of Northern Tanzania (and perhaps beyond) right now, this qualifies us to take on piano students, with the disclaimer that we don't ACTUALLY teach piano (by American standards, that is). Liza's mother is an awesome Suzuki piano teacher, so I hope to be able to correspond with her regularly and get advice about my piano students. In the meantime, little Simon is going to play clapping games with me tomorrow ...

We hired a wood fundi (fundi is a word used to describe anyone who works on anything: car fundi, wood fundi, bike fundi) to build me a set of shelves and to build my bed frame. However, contracted labor is quite a more lax process here than it is in the States, and the "fundis" are far less qualified to do their work. My fundi is now 2 days late with the cabinet installation, and we're hoping he doesn't make off with my $90 cash advance. This is particularly annoying because, as my Mom said in a recent email, "Dad could make you a bed frame in about one hour." The shipping would be a bit steep though ...

We had our first registration meeting on Saturday with the parents of our Tanzanian outreach students. There are about seven or eight families whose children take lessons from us at the rate of about $2/hour, and the kids play on the instruments donated to us in the States. I was struck not only by the incredible feat of getting these people (who are quite poor, and whose society barely runs on any kind of real schedule) to the right place at the right time, violins in tow, quite dedicated to their children's music education, when music education is virtually nonexistent here. I also witnessed for the first time the practical consequences of Tanzania's extremely high illiteracy rate. Although these parents are some of the most smart, dedicated, and forward-thinking in Arusha, it probably took them an hour to fill out a simple registration form, even with English-Swahili assistance from Liza and David. To me, this was staggering. As I told Tyler about it later, I wondered: how does anyone pay taxes? how does anyone read a newspaper? how does anyone sign up to have their baby at a hospital? To read and write at such a low level slows the entire pace of the country to a crawl. It is no small feat to successfully bring Suzuki string education to such a community, and there are still many challenges before us.

Happy Sunday!
Ellen