July Girls Leadership Workshop

The first week of July John and I helped facilitate a week long Girls Leadership Workshop at a secondary school 10 km from our school. We had 5 secondary students and 10 elementary students participate in a variety of activities and lessons. These included: lessons on adolescence, What is Love?, early pregnancy, HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention, assertiveness and negotiating with boys, food preservation( papaya, apple and pear jam making), nutrition and permaculture gardens, computer skills, Banana tree art card making, and group initiative games for confidence and collaboration.

We had two guest speakers from the area. One was a 26 year old women who had gotten pregnant while in school, telling her personal story, consequences and how she has managed to go back to school at this age. The other was a woman living with HIV/AIDS. The third day we had a panel of all the teachers participating from the four schools (men and women) and the guest speakers. The students had over 25 questions in a question box from all the sessions that the panel addressed. It was a very rich time together. After answering the first set, the students asked us all to leave and compiled another group of questions for us!

This Saturday, we are having a 1 day workshop by popular request after the week workshop. There will be more people from our community who are living with HIV/AIDS, many of the same students bringing their friends, and more teachers that want to learn jam making and permaculture techniques. This time we will make orange marmalade because this is ORANGE SEASON! I will be teaching composting and planting a nutritious "guild" in an opportunistic area where the water naturally runs off the roof or from the water spigot. Our guild will be a papaya tree, lemon grass for tea, and matembele (a dark green plant rich in iron and other vitamins).

May -June In Tanzania

Habari za leo?
I know it has been a long time since an update. We have had busy days with writing exams, correcting exams, and writing end of term reports. In addition, we have had bad luck with electricity, such that the days we go to town there is no internet. The computer that we were able to get internet at school sometimes died.

Good to be back to writing a blog update!

Since I wrote last we had Peter Jensen the PC biointensive gardening consultant come to our site. He worked with students, teachers, and school shamba workers to look at the current gardening techniques, consider spots to construct a demonstration garden for the schools and to teach some basic techniques for composting and for planting in beds that are double-dug to allow more food to grow in a smaller area. The reason these are important at our site and for many Tanzanians is that the good soil is at the bottom of the mountain in the valleys but many people plant both the valley and the steep slopes. The steep slope planting further erodes the soil, so there is less food and also a great loss of trees. The idea is to get more food from the low lands and plant trees on the slopes that are better at holding the soil and creating habitat for wildlife, and good for the ecosystem as a whole.

Students built two compost piles by my garden, 1x1x1 meter using brown and green plant material and then cow manure and water. I have turned these piles once after three weeks and already it is starting to look like rich soil.
Peter sculptured four matutas (beds) with water meandering from my sink outlet then around the beds. So, even on the dry days, my garden gets watered. Two village farmers came one day to help me finish double digging these beds, add manure to the lower soil, and plant French beans, potatoes, leeks, carrots, and nasturtium. I added a few smaller matembele mounds around a papaya tree. Last week I had our local carpenter make a garden bench that will seat three-four. When he delivered the bench we all sat and had sodas, enjoying the comfort of the bench (with a back rest!).

Peter is returning in September to work again with the community to build a demonstration garden. The primary school next to the secondary school where we teach can use this garden for students to learn biointensive techniques and to grow more food for school lunches. We have been told by the headmaster that currently they do not grow enough food to feed the student’s lunch everyday and if the school does not feed students, many do not eat a good lunch because families do not have enough food either.

My sister visited our site in May-June. She helped me work with the primary school leaders to draft a proposal for a partnership grant to build teacher housing. I hope to submit this proposal and have it approved by January so that Americans can donate funds for teacher housing. Currently the school has 13 teachers, but many have to travel a long distance to teach and then return home every night. This has really hurt the students learning, as the teachers are stretched beyond reason both physically and mentally.

John and I finished our first school term May 30th. Form I and Form III students went home and will return July 12th. Form II and Form IV students remained at school for three additional weeks to attend classes for further tutoring. These two Forms take the national exams in October which determine if they will be able to continue their education. If they do not pass or pass with low scores, the Form II and IV students have to repeat or find another school. Of course often this means school fees that the family cannot afford. SO… continuing classes and studying during the school holidays is an assumed necessity. Many teachers are hired to continue teaching during holidays.

John and I went on holiday with my sister Barb! We first went to Morgoro to visit our Tanzania family that we lived with during training. This was wonderful as it did seem like returning home to see our family, without having to go to school! After four days we traveled by bus to a beach area by Pangani. We had four days of swimming, snorkeling to see a coral reef, and paddling a kayak up to see the mangrove forest. After 5 days back at site, meeting with two schools to design a girl’s workshop on life skills training, we went on Safari through Tarangire, Lake Manyara and Ngorngoro.

We feel very refreshed and I have a long list of new birds seen which I can boast about!

Got to go! More later….

Randee

HIV/AIDS and Permaculture Training

We were at a workshop in Moshi on sustainable agriculture with our counterparts (teacher partners from our school). It was a fun day of working outside making a garden with permaculture features to capture and hold the water and then double digging beds for the vegetables you want to grow. John and I and our counterparts are planning weekly sessions at school to teach about HIV/AIDs, safe sex and good nutrition through sustainable farming strategies including permaculture, biointensive gardening through deep, rich beds, hexagon planting closely and companion planting. I love this part of the job. We hope to have the neighboring villages participate in a 2 day program where we show the demonstration site the students will develop and let folks try some of the techniques. We have lots of erosion at our site from the loss of trees and the methods of planting crops on steep hills without terracing or constructing permaculture techniques. The pictures I put on the blog show the people shoveling sand out of the river after a big rain storm. The sand is left behind and all the soil is washed away with the water. The water is so muddy with soil it cannot filtered for drinking as another problem. Lots of water and none to drink! The villagers like it when this happens because they can shovel the sand in pile along the road and sell it for construction such as making cement for buildings and for roads. It really makes me sad to see this when it rains, so I am glad to teach permaculture and biointensive gardening.

Tanzania in March

Hello Family and Friends:

It has been a long time since I have had time to write. Since school has started in January we have been as busy as teachers at home… but sometimes in different ways.

We just finished midterm exams and the students have gone home for Holiday break. Classes start the week after Easter again. The students take 2 ½ hour exams in every subject. It took 4 days to finish exams. For a student to pass on to the next Form, they must get a score of 30% or better for Form I and II, 20% or better for Form 3 & 4. Eighty percent of their grade is based the final exam. So, practicing taking huge exams is very important. It is also important to take exams to get used to reading and writing in English. Kiswahili is their national language but all secondary education is in English. Accomplishing a 30% score is not easy for this reason. For students here, education is not free and to fail means a lot of money to families and few options to continue your education.

As I have told you, I have three different subjects, Biology Form I, Biology Form II, and Chemistry Form I. The Form I students have two streams meaning 2 classes of 51 students. Form II has two streams of about 45 students. John teaches Form III Mathematics which has three streams of about 35 students.

Each stream has their own classroom where all their classes are taught. So, the teachers move each period and the students stay put. It is nice in that they do not carry books and supplies around. Teachers need to transport books and supplies around but, the students willingly assist with carrying things. Their help is almost excessive from the perspective of this American teacher. The students insist on carrying everything for you where ever you go. For science experiments there is a laboratory that seats 48 students (12 lab groups). My Form I students exceed this number so they have lab groups of 5 students and some stand. I am known as the teacher that uses the lab and have even earned the privilege of carrying the lab key. The first month of classes I spent as much time hunting down the key as preparing the lab materials. The academic master had the key locked in his desk and I would have to find him to get the key to his desk to get the lab key.

This opens another conversation about school keys. All rooms and buildings have locks except for the toilets, although I have noticed that during holiday these have padlocks. What is most amazing is that the key to every room/building is available to anyone at any time, including students except for the laboratory, the headmaster’s office and any padlocks that teachers or students put on their personal trunks or desks. I was told that they used to leave the lab “open” but the national inspectors visited and said that the lab key had to be kept from students.

One day John set his watch down on his desk and left. When he returned it was gone. He searched his desk but could not find it. Finally he told another teacher. The teacher was so surprised. She told John that the students would never dream of taking anything from a teacher. She told him to look again in his desk. Sure enough, it was buried in the back of his desk. SO… we have learned that although everything is open it is safe with 400 students watching over us and our things. There have been cases where students take things from each other but teachers are different as we have learned.

Our school is built on the side of a small mountain. This means that every trip is either up to a class or an office …or down. My legs are getting a work out. Especially when I run to get forgotten supplies for a class or when we get electricity. It seems we have electricity about half the time. When there is umeme everyone runs to plug in their cell phones, the office madly makes copies needed and a few of us charge our computers and ipods.

A similar kind of mad-dashing around happens when it rains. I was astonished when my whole class jumped up and ran out the door the first time it rained hard during class. After the herd of students passed, puzzled, I asked a teacher standing under the eaves. She calmly stated that they needed to bring in their clothes so they wouldn’t get wet. The students hang their washed clothes and kangas (a large cloth used to wrap-up in the morning and evening to and from the shower and toilets) outside to dry during the day.

Well, this made sense. Then later in the day, I passed the student dorms. The dorm windows have bars on the outside and shuttered glass windows that close from the inside. I saw that the dorm windows had clothes stuffed between the bars and the glass. Socks and kangas were tied around the bars and shirts and panties were stuffed in-between. I thought a minute, then remembered that the dorms are locked during the day. The clothes were stuffed in the windows, under the eaves, to keep dry in the rain, of course!

The food at school is simple but nutritious. Students eat porridge in the morning (6am) porridge at tea time (10:45am), ugali or rice and beans and cabbage at lunch(1:15pm) and the same or mkande for dinner (6:30pm). Mkande is a thick stew made from cracked corn and beans. If available there will be onions and tomatoes added. Porridge can be made of many things but the school uses mostly corn. The school has a farm that grows corn, beans, sugar cane, cabbage, onions, bananas, and mango. The students get fruit that is in season from the farm and on very special occasions, meat or fish. The school has chickens, goose, turkeys and cows in moderate numbers. The school soil is good because of the manure and composting. Fish is easy and relatively cheap to get. It is dried so all the fish dishes are made from dried fish.

We can make just about all the African dishes because Mama Flora taught us. I had two of the school nuns over for lunch and made vegetable coconut soup and chapatti. They said that because I can cook African food and know how to wrap kangas like an African mama, they were going to give me an African name . It is really nice to have such fresh food. My garden has fresh greens, carrots and fruits such as some kind of apple with lots of seeds (sort of like pomegranate) and papaya. Our neighbors give us bananas for eating and cooking regularly. The local vegetable stand has tomatoes, onions, coconut, fish, and mango regularly. Other stuff we buy in Lushoto. We eat little meat because John doesn’t like fish and meat is hard to keep without refrigeration. We buy pork and goat meat to cook as a treat. When shopping in town, we usually have chicken at a restaurant.

African fashion varies but there are some rules that I have made for myself to help me know how to dress in a culturally appropriate manner and to “fit in”.
Rule I
A dress or skirt below the knee is a must. Longer is better.
Rule II
Wear outfits that have matching top and bottom as well as a matching head wrap. Beads that match and dress sandals are even better. This assures you look “smart”.
What to do if you do not have matching components… go to Rule III.
Rule III
If it doesn’t go with anything, it goes with everything.
Rule IV
If your skirt or shirt has a spot or you have a bad hair day, cover it with a kanga. If you can’t decide which kanga to choose… refer to Rule III.

Other news is that I walked in the Kilimanjaro ½ Marathon on March 3rd. We were in Moshi for a Peace Corps training on HIV/AIDS and permaculture the week before, so I decided to join some other PCV to do the ½ marathon. Most ran but a few of us walked. It was so fun to be with some amazing Tanzanian and Kenyan athletes as well as those just out to do it, just like us. Definitely years at the Birke ski race and coaching made me the loudest cheering fan. Because I was walking, I got to see everybody looping back and I had plenty of energy and breath to cheer. And, I have learned the African women’s celebration call to use, too! (This sound is made with a high pitch “who” while moving your tongue side-to-side, back and forth quickly, between your lips).

We had our first overnight guests. Two PCV’s that had come to run in the marathon followed us home to see the Lushoto area. One was from Iringa, TZ and one from Zambia. Both were environmental volunteers and we had fun learning about the things we could do here at Kongei to encourage the community to make environmental improvements.

It looks like my sister, and brother-in-law will be visiting in June. We have a break in June and start teaching the second week of July through November. Right now we are having BIG rains that come about one a day or every other day. I need my mud boots to get to school and I am learning all the Kiswahili words for mud, slipping, falling, dirty, BIG rains, and weeding the garden. (Last month I was learning to say “watering the garden”--- no more watering! June starts the dry season, so it looks like a two more months of rain.

Palm Sunday was a one hour hike up a steep mountain to the one church having a huge service with special music and of course, palms cut from the surrounding trees. It was worth the hike. On our return the rains made for deep mud and a wait under eaves of a goat barn until we were invited in by the children of the home to wait in warmth. I went with one of the school Sisters, and I was amazed to watch her climb through the mud trails and rain in her white habit. No problem she says.

We hope to get two of the non-working computers at school going and we finally got a modem to try to get internet at site. Don’t hold your breathe. This is Tanzania.

I enjoy just imagining spring in Minnesota. Your days are getting longer, spring green colors. We have the full moon but our days will stay the same.

Peace to all,
Randee

Kongei School Life

School started mid January. All is going well. I teach Biology to Form I and II and Chemistry to Form I. John is teaching mathematics to Form III. Form I and II is similar to middle school grade students and Form III and IV like high school(9-10). For the first two months, Form I has Language Academy to improve their English. I am enjoying teaching language academy for the Form I as it reminds me of all the kinds of strategies we used for SPPS ELL learners. Also, it is what I went through to learn Kiswahili the last four months. Form I students and I are both “new” to the school so that helps us build a close relationship.

Students live at the school. The get up at 5:00 am and eat porrage and milk tea at 6am. The girls have cleaning jobs until 7:15am such as cleaning the ground and water channels of leaves, bathrooms, classroom floors and blackboards, ect. At 7:30 am all students gather in the main courtyard for Parade, which is a formal gathering for announcments, demontrations of student projects or writings, prayer, and inspection of uniforms. Classes start at 7:45am. There are 9 periods in a day with a 15 min break for tea at 10:45 and 45 min lunch at 1:15. Classes end at 3:30pm. Every Form has some days of 45 minute classes for each subject and some 90 minute classes. Math is always 90 min. after Form II. Every Year the students take Chem, Biology and Physics as well as Math, English, Kiswahili, Civics/History, Agriculture, and Religion. I teach one single period and one double period of Chemistry Form I, Biology Form I and Biology Form II every week. SO that is 18 periods a week of teaching. I also assist with Science Club, Music Club and Library after school.

I have already taught Saturday classes to catch-up on things we could not finish during the week for Form II. I like the option to teach evenings and Saturdays, it seems more relaxed and the students seem to like it too. Last Saturday, I coached my first Music Club session. There was not a plan to have a music club, but people heard me playing my Native American flute at night and when a group of students asked for a music club so that they could learn how to play the flutes in the school store, I was recruited. So, now I am discovering how to teach flute and it is a fun adventure so far!
I have found the resources I brought from my teaching and colleagues in America very valuable, both for teaching science to English Language Learners and for collaborating with my colleagues in creative lesson planning. These are simple things that can make a huge difference for the learner. These first months at site I have already had many opportunities to collaborate with fellow teachers on planning lessons and sharing ideas and resources. The Anatomy Coloring Book, a molecular model building kit, and the Bakken (Minnesota)curriculum for teaching static electricity by building your own equipment to generate static electricity without the use of current electricity have been a hit(Thanks Greg!). Also, the Atlas (vol 1&2) from AAAS has been useful to many of us in planning. The computer sent by MN friends and family has also helped gernerate reproducible documents that students can read and can show the video clips I brought from the SPPS Biology Curriculum on a flash drive. I am having students build life size human anatomy models using their own bodies as “forms” (taken from Ann Oubaha at Jackson ELementary.

In turn, the faculty of Tanzania has shown me how to get local supplies and how to engage fundis(carpenters, plumbers, masons, etc,) to build needed equipment. We have had fun scheming together to use the village people and landscape materials to create teaching tools.

Several Students have asked about wanting an American Pen Pal. Let me know if you know students in your class that are interested.

I have already experienced one of the frustrations of teaching children – anywhere in the world— a few students stealing from each other and bullying when adults are not watching. It has been very helpful to be part of this Tanzanian faculty and learn the way this is handled. The biggest contrast to my American school system experience is that the participation of ALL teaching staff members is required when the matter is discussed, when students come to be questioned and when students “fess-up” to their wrong doings. Although it was terribly sad to be missing teaching time, it was clear how important to the Tanzanian culture to have all the adults contribute to the problem solving equally and for the students to see that they are watched-over and concerned for by all adults. Obviously this can go awry depending on the integrity of the adults and leaders of a school, but for me, this was a positive experience even though frustrating from a teaching standpoint.

The biggest challenge at site is cooking in the dark. At first light I need to be walking to school to get there on time and more often than not, I return home just as it is starting to get dark. Without electricity, cooking by lantern light is a challenge, but it has made for some interesting meals. The month before school started, I had several people over for dinner, trying out all the different dishes that I learned in my host family home. I have had such a great time cooking and learning new dishes from neighbors and colleagues, I can do OK in the dark, but a few meals have ended up on the floor when I missed the jiko (stove).

One of the greatest joys has been expanding the garden outside my house. There is a papaya tree just outside my window where I planted the chaichai(lemon grass) cutting I brought from our CCT PEPFAR training in Morogoro. Then, I discovered the run-off from our roof could drain right to the papaya tree if I dug a little trench with my jembe. I then made two consecutive rings of plant beds around the papaya for planting matembele. This attracted the attention of the school shamba worker and the night watchman. They both offered to help water and this led to expanding the garden to include carrots, matenga, vitunguu, swiss chard, and herbs. After this, the school sisters offered to give me cuttings of flowers to put by our house. A few days later, a student was sent home with me, cuttings in hand, to plant flowers. Devota is still one of my favorite students to greet each day because we have the shared memory of planting flowers and talking together (in my “special Kiswahili “and her “special English”).

It has been fun and helpful to explore as much of the surrounding neighborhoods by riding bicycle. One day we were riding from school to town and met a man that was carrying a sack of corn kernels on his bike. The sack had fallen and corn kernels spilled on the road. He was patiently picking them up, one by one. I felt reverence for this culture to see that these golden kernels were so valued. It reminded me how dependent people are on the food that comes from their village land – especially with the decreasing rainfall. (In contrast, the value of a corn kernel in America is long ago lost due to subsidized farming and overproduction of this monocrop.) I stopped, to greet him and to help with the task at hand. We talked and laughed and enjoyed the time together. It started to rain and we worked a bit faster and eventually every corn kernel was retrieved. Because of this time together, he is another person I so enjoy seeing on the road when traveling to town.

Happy Valentines day!

Randee