Tanzania

Interesting thought from Rebecca in this post: here.

We were in class making clocks. Okay, so you need a circle to make a clock, no probs, there are compasses for such things, well that is if you are in a school in the West. We don’t have compasses so I found round things for the student teachers to trace around. They weren’t really big enough but I thought we could make do.

Well to save myself some embarrassment I really should have asked the students for their ideas first because after I had handed out the things for them to trace and given a detailed explanation of the problem they set to work – completely ignoring everything I had said.

I watched as they were folding paper. Hummm, I didn’t remember talking about using folded paper, but then I saw it. Did you know that if you fold a piece of paper several times, put a hole in either end and then use one pencil as the centre point of the circle in one hole and the other pencil to draw in the other hole you can move the folded paper and make a perfect circle? Well I didn’t. I was quite impressed though and told them so, to which they all laughed, not being able to believe I didn’t know that.

To make it worse I came home and told Patrick all about what I learned today. Well he listened patiently and then laughed. I asked why he was laughing and he answered by telling me about another 5 ways one could draw a circle with no compass or model to trace.

It is quite a clever little trick, really.
It kind of talks to what I mentioned after Christmas:

It's so interesting, living here in Africa for a short time to see the good and bad effects of westernism. In some ways it is fantastic to see an attempt to advance the education system of Tanz, and a goal to push the millions of students to a high level of education, and to increase the number of children able to attend High-school (a tiny amount at the moment). But, of course, it is also a danger as we will probably (unknowingly) impart some unhelpful parts of our culture onto them if we aren't not careful. - Dec 26

Its a great privilege to still be doing some work for The Joshua Foundation via the internet while here in New Zealand, as well. I have been working on some sponsorship cards for them, and doing other little graphic design bits.