One Year
Written on September 11th, 2025 by Ben Weber
Last year on September 2nd, my fellow volunteers and I arrived in Tanzania. It has been a full year since then. This year has been full of fun experiences, some hardships, and the beginning of great connections.
It has been a bit since I last posted. I have found it hard to write updates from time to time since I didn’t feel like there was much to share. I do have some highlights and lowlights from the last few months to share with you.
In June, my school had an end-of-term break. The school breaks system here in Tanzania is a tad different from the breaks I’m used to in the United States. Rather than a long two to three months break in summer, Tanzania only has a month-long break in June and July. Due to the shorter break during June and July, we have slightly longer midterm breaks in April, September, and December.
Because I had plenty of time on my hands during this June break, I went on a safari in Ruaha, celebrated my birthday with my friends, and did a lot of preparation for the upcoming term. On the safari in Ruaha, I was accompanied by three friends for two days and we had a blast. Ruaha is a national park in Tanzania, in the Iringa region. It is home to one of the largest elephant populations in Africa. In addition to the regular elephant spotting, we saw a lot of different animals like giraffes, zebras, lions, leopards, water buffalo, and others. I brought my camera with me and have uploaded the photos I took to a google photos you can access here.
One of my friends in Peace Corps has her birthday on June 26th, which is the day before my birthday. It was difficult to plan a large event since most people were using this time to return home, travel within the country, or show their parents around the country. But most people made time in their schedule to celebrate our birthdays back-to-back.
The first two months since school started up again have been a bit challenging for me. As I mentioned, I spent a good amount of the break preparing for this term. My students have not performed well on the exams, and I brainstormed several alternative teaching activities to try at the start of the new term. When I returned from break a lot of my planning fell apart quite quickly due to a variety of stressors.
Before departing for my break, I had communicated with my fellow teachers about the exam timetable for the upcoming term. I wanted to know when to start reviewing and when to apply new material from week-to-week. I was told that the exams would be on some specific dates at the end of July, but when I returned the dates had changed. Rather than having around a month to review the exam the students took in June prior to the break, I had a week and half of lessons until the next exam. It was particularly frustrating because there was no announcement about these changes in the staff group chat.
In addition to this change in schedule, many new teachers arrived in July. At the beginning of this term, the school introduced two new teachers. I really enjoy the addition of these teachers since they have brought new energy to the school which was lacking. After the July exams, student teachers arrived, who have been quite annoying for me and fellow volunteers. The four student teachers assigned to my school have several characteristics which irk me. Of these four, one is quite interested in DJing and spends much of his downtime between classes practicing his craft in the teacher’s office. Since he arrived, I miss the quiet atmosphere of the teacher’s office which is a rare occurrence in this country, before his arrival. The most distressing part of this behavior is that his DJing is subpar to say the least.
The student teacher I’ve interacted with the most was assigned to teach one of my classes. It was a difficult dynamic for us since I was not prepared to provide instruction for him on teaching practices. I am not necessarily a fan of his as he does not communicate with me about his plans with my class. So many times, I am having to change my lesson plans based on what he has taught or go over things again with one class since they were taught a different way. Additionally, I did feel a bit jealous because he’s able to connect to the students better and they started going to him for questions during office hours which didn’t make me feel great. I was able to have the class returned to my schedule, which I am happy about and looking forward to not having to deal with this issue.
After struggling a lot with school during July and August, I traveled to Zanzibar with many of my fellow volunteers. I was super excited to get a break from school and have lots of funs with my friends. We went to Zanzibar to celebrate three people’s birthdays. They have their birthdays back-to-back-to-back. I was in Zanzibar for four days and really enjoyed every bit of it. I was able to swim and get into the water everyday which was awesome. On the first full day in Zanzibar, most of us visited Prison Island and saw giant Galapagos tortoises. After the tour, we traveled to Paje and had a chill afternoon and evening. A cool thing I found about Paje was the club scene is simplified. Rather than multiple places being open every night, there is one spot where everyone goes and it rotates clubs each night. On the second day, in the morning we swam in a lake in a cutout of a cave. The water was clear and relaxing to swim in. In the afternoon, me and two others had organized a small, amazing race styled scavenger hunt around the town. On the third day, I had stayed out way too late the night before and spent the day recharging. I left on the fourth day headed back to my site. I want to return to Zanzibar before I leave to do some of the more touristy activities that I missed out on this trip.
I’ve spent the rest of this midterm break doing some light teaching, planning for the next month, getting chores done, and enjoying the weather before the rain comes in November.
