Tro-Tro

A man yelling from the side of a van with the door open and waving his hand; lots of people sitting inside, four to a bench; and a man driving through chaotic traffic, beeping his horn. This is the tro-tro. We have nothing like it.

Today was my first ride on the tro-tro. To get to my internship from Opokonglo Junction, an intersection near the University, takes about thirty minutes on the tro-tro. It’s quite a distance away from my home. When we met with the headmaster today the first question he asked was “What do you want to teach?”

Wait; excuse me, me actually teach a full classroom full of children, alone? I think this may be the case though. I won’t actually start until next week or the week after, so in that time I need to prepare myself for what may greet me at Tot To Teen school.

Every day so much happens that it’s impossible to write about it all but what I learned today is that the accessibility and ease of the Internet has disabled us in some ways. And by that I mean that without the Internet available or things going the way we think they should or are used to because we have Internet capability, we get frustrated. The “we” here being us students in CIEE. This has become apparent with the registering of courses.

In America, I would think that at this moment all universities do registration for courses online. I could be wrong but I think this is most likely the case. So now, imagine going to a university where they tell you that they have only been doing online registration for one year. You may think okay, that’s not very long, but I’m sure it’s still similar to what I’m used to. It’s not anything like we’re used to. The campus is very large and the departments are spread throughout. Registration requires you to walk to every department you think you may want to take a course in and find out what courses are posted on the bulletin board and then find the timetable of when those courses will occur. But there are restrictions. Such as you can’t take economics and philosophy because when the final exams occur those may coincide with one another. And when you walk all the way to a department they may not have the courses listed so you have to wait another day. I think this has caused some stress in the group because we are not accustomed to this system.

I’ve realized in this situation that all one can do is to be patient. To wait and realize that you have no control, that at some point they will post the course timetable and then hopefully a course fits into the schedule you want. Maybe I should be more worried – but why? There are many things different here and this is one of them, that you can’t go online look up the courses you want to take, find the times, even create a schedule online that tells you whether the courses will conflict or not. Also, they don’t even have exam dates posted until a month before exams. So this is what I mean when I say the internet in some ways has disabled us – that we find it hard to imagine this new system of walking around, of courses being posted on bulletin boards (where anyone could take the paper copy with them or the wind could blow it away), and that it all happens one or two days before courses start, not weeks or months.