Six years and End of Year Testing

December 12, 2019

Six years really does not seem like a long time. When I first planned to come to Africa with my first mission group I intended to spend six years there. I thought that would give enough time to get the ministry back up and running and have everybody working on the same page. We know what God says about our plans and it turned out to be true. After 3.5 years I switched ministries to the school I am now involved with. In January it will have been six years since I started this journey as a full time missionary in Tanzania. And NO I am not planning on stopping now. This school feels like one of the most important opportunities I have to do God's work so I have no intentions of coming back home to stay. Only God really knows how long I will be here, but I hope it is through the completion of the school in 5 more years.

We officially closed the school December 6th for the end of the school year in Tanzania. The school will reopen on January 6th with a new class (standard III) and a bunch of new preschoolers in our Baby class.

The closing of the school is a formal event since they actually took their tests the week before and this week is normally the one where the teachers generate each students "report card" by hand. In the past they would have to go look up each students grade on test per quarter and average them out per subject and enter that onto their report card form. Then they have to average all of those grades both by subject and quarter to get their overall school grade. After they get the grades for all the students through the year they then figure out what place the student is (that is important here-class ranking is often more important than grades). The last part is for the headmaster to go through and put down what the parents have paid in tuition and transportation fees and how much they still owe. {A quick word here that many of our students from the more tribal area cannot pay their tuition and there is no penalty there. That is what the USA contribution assists with as well as those that cannot pay their full tuition costs. Inability to pay those fees does not restrict one from coming to our school}.

As I said that is normally all done by hand. Enter the American (sorry to my South/Central American friends but that is how they understand geography and what they call us if they want to be nice-mzungu if they don't want to be nice and think we are from Europe) who has a computer and some skills operating it. So last year I started this but this year I created databases in excel from the beginning of school so I could generate all that information as well as their letter grade. So the teachers/headmaster only had to write a comment and sign them.

This caused a problem though of unintended consequences. Having done their job, I expected them to do things in class or playground that were planned and organized and they wanted to turn the kids loose to do whatever they wanted. We came to a compromise and the kids read quietly in class with a teacher present. Win some lose some.

Now about our last test of the year and the pictures of the kids that did well.

Standard II-from left to right Grace in 3rd place, Theresia in 2nd Place and Gladness having trouble smiling in 1st place.

Standard I-from left to right big shocker Nice in 3rd Place, Clara in 2nd Place and Dorice (yeah!) coming out of nowhere to get 1st place

Pre-Unity from left to right: Betrice in 3rd place, Isaya in 2nd Place and Mineal again out of nowhere in 1st place (where has she been all year in the placings)