Saturday, I met with Mr. Li, who introduced me to Ms. Wu, who is the actual teacher. Mr. Li will be returning back to China in two weeks, but Ms. Wu has started working here for just a month or so and will be staying for the foreseeable future. Both of them were interested in doing the teaching because they saw it as an opportunity to help spread some Chinese culture (They felt particularly strongly that China needed to do a better job in building a cultural and not just business presence), and in addition, to learn some Swahili. Mr. Li in particular was interested in how he could teach the woodcarvers to better save their money. He insisted that due to colonization, many of the woodcarvers just spent the money that they got each day and saved none of it. I’m not sure how accurate this is, but it could be true. Anyway, Mr. Li is an actual success story himself, and probably could be a poster boy for China’s educational system. He grew up in a rural area, but with good test scores, was able to attend college and now is doing quite well for himself. I think partly due to his background, he sympathizes with the poorer Tanzanians.
As of now, Ms. Wu can only teach once a week on Saturdays because her work schedule is really busy. She says she will try to find more time when things get lighter. In addition, there are about 8 young graduates from China coming over to work in the company, and she will “require” them to volunteer to teach the woodcarvers Chinese. I really like how she sees teaching the woodcarvers as an exchange of knowledge rather than her taking time out of her schedule to do something solely for the sake of the Tanzanians. Anyway, while once a week is not ideal for Chinese learning, it is much better than nothing, and the woodcarvers were indeed just happy to know that they will at the very least be able to keep their Chinese at the level which it is at.
Later that Saturday, she also came to take a look at how class was run. Because right now I am preparing the students for some skits (in which I hope the Chinese Embassy will attend), class was a bit different than usual. I split my class into six groups and the day before (Friday), we had started working on dialogues that I had written. Sadly, I don’t think many of the students are yet capable of writing dialogues for themselves, and because I am tight on time, I decided to write them myself. I assigned students parts in each dialogue, and during the class they worked on it within their groups. When Ms. Wu finally came (with her cousin who’s much younger than she is), the woodcarvers gave her a very warm greeting. I told her about what I was doing, and she immediately helped the woodcarvers with their pronunciation in each group. At the end of class, she finally introduced herself officially, and she left to a standing ovation from the woodcarvers.
Today (Monday), in class, we further worked on the skits. At the very end of class, I had each group do its’ presentation in front of the class. It was an absolute blast. The students made a ton of mistakes, but I was really proud of what they were attempting to do. One student in particular had some hilarious acting skills (in that they were not good, but he was trying hard), and the class gave him a hard time about it. It was neat, however, that the students could tell when a student was pronouncing things correctly and they even caught on to some of the mistakes other people were doing. I am currently on a mad rampage to find someone with a video camera. The ones sold here are at cheapest over $500, so buying one is not really an option. This is something I’d really like to record and show to the world.
Today I also called the embassy and told them that I had found a teacher who was willing to teach. I also asked Ms. Wang to try to make this Saturday or next Saturday available, and as usual, she said she’ll see what she can do. Things on this front are not looking that promising. Maybe the embassy really is busy, but can they not just take one hour to recognize some Tanzanians who are working their butts off to learn an aspect of their culture? It just seems something that the Cultural Department of the embassy should be eating up. I mean, , sure, doing business with Tanzanians is one thing, and certainly deserving of respect, but educating Tanzanians about Chinese culture, that is completely on another level in terms of building a solid relationship.
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