Pommern- Week 3

As our third week of service began, we all could hardly believe that our time Pommern was winding down!  We spent the week at our usual posts, secondary school and primary school.  This week was slightly different, however, since the students at both schools were taking their annual exams, marking the end of the school year.  

Most of us spent the week helping teachers grade exams.  Teachers were very happy to have help, as they had stacks and stacks of papers to grade.  We all hoped to mark multiple choice, as the long answer questions often had a level of subjectivity to them.  The students will pass a class or "standard" based on their results on these tests.  Overall, a lot is expected of Tanzanian students. 

Aidan, our youngest team member, had been working on a project for the pre-primary for the students for weeks.  He made somewhere around 75 bottle cap necklaces of 10 bottle caps each for the young students to use as math manipulatives.  Here he is handing them out to the young students in the kindergarten-age class.  This is primarily the class I worked with, so I even got to see the young students using them in the classroom!  

A couple other small projects this week included Scott working on improvements for the tippy-taps.  With help from a carpentry student, Nicholas, and Edward, Scott added a notch to keep the rope from slipping off wood, nail reinforcements, and sprinkler-type cap on the water jug.

Scott and I even took a turn working at the clinic on Thursday morning.  Every Thursday, the clinic hosts a specific AIDS clinic, in which patients diagnosed with HIV/AIDS come from various local villages to be seen by the doctors and receive medicine.  Scott and I were tasked with creating paper envelopes for the pills to be dispensed into (no bottles).  It was less than glorious, but we appreciated getting to see another part of the community at work.  This is a picture of the Pommern clinic.

Our time in Pommern was coming to a close, and our final days were spent saying our goodbyes and some loooooong travel days.  Coming in the next post!