Early Sights of Tanzania

These pictures were taken during our first week in Tanzania before classes started. The first three photos were taken on one of walks home from the school. It's about a two hour walk filled with wonderful scenery but it can get tiring with a bag full of books and hot from the relentless sun.




This last photo was taken at the school. The week before classes started, a group of students from MIT came and did various workshops with the students and the local women's group. They helped the students make water filters and batteries, among other projects relevant to their lives. And for the women's group, two MIT professors helped them make corn shellers out of metal cans.

Shopping

Grocery store in Arusha:


Market day in Monduli:

The Spark

When Scott and I set out to volunteer abroad for a year, our main goal was to do some good, to hopefully make a difference, even if it was in the smallest, miniscule way. We had other motives as well – to live abroad, to experience a new culture, to get to know a community in a way that’s not possible by just being a visitor. When we found out we were going to be teachers in a school for under-privileged, under-served youth, our friends told us the kids were lucky to have us. Scott and I weren’t so sure. And less than two weeks into the school year I think we’re both a bit uncertain if we’re affective in the classroom (or is it effective? Yep, I’m a great English teacher).

For the past few days, I’m been pretty down and pretty discouraged. I don’t feel like I’m connecting with the students. I don’t know if I’m dynamic enough. I don’t get the feeling that my students are engaged. In other classes, especially Thomas’s classes, I hear the students laughing. When I peak behind the door window curtain, I see all the students’ hands raised, eager to answer the question posed, eager to win the respect of Thomas. Don’t get me wrong, students raise their hands in my class too, but not in the same volume, not with the same oomph, not with the same spark in their eyes.

I’ve always had a love for English, so one would think teaching it would be fun for me, challenging yet enjoyable. But I’m constrained by bad textbooks (“CHAPATER TWO”), a confusing syllabus, lack of resources, and a mentality (of students and Tanzanian teachers alike) that secondary school learning is all about passing the crucial national exams.

Basically, for the past several days, I’ve been wondering if I should even be here in Tanzania teaching at Orkeeswa Secondary School. After all, if I’m not helping the students, why the hell am I here?

Well, this afternoon I got some well-needed encouragement that perhaps there is a reason I’m here. Today was the first day of clubs. Each teacher along with Peter, the director, is in charge of a club, which means there are seven clubs. When Scott and I first got acquainted with the school and its practices, we knew we’d have to run one. I kept hearing about a past volunteer teacher who had a cooking club which was a hit with the students. Since I love to cook, it seemed a perfect fit. But when only four students (out of 73) signed up for the cooking club, I knew I had to change it. The idea of a newspaper club came naturally to me. A school newspaper for Orkeeswa, their first ever.

Nine people attended today’s club and we got a lot done. We talked about what news is, what a newspaper is. I showed them examples of real newspapers – international English ones and national ones in both English and Swahili – and the students were excited to comb through them. We thought of a name for our newspaper. Nine names were in the running and it came down to two – The Orkeeswa Eye (my idea) and The Orkeeswa Journalist Paper (a student’s idea). The Orkeeswa Journalist Paper won, and under my guidance, it got shortened to The Orkeeswa Journal. It may sound boring and over done, but it was the students’ choice and this is their paper.

We discussed what the focus of our paper would be – the school (Orkeeswa) and the local community (Lashaine). We went over the definitions of terms like ‘fact,’ ‘unbiased,’ and ‘neutral.’ We went over the big questions associated with any story – who, what, where, when, how, and why. We decided that the paper should be a monthly since a quarterly would mean too much waiting. And, as a group, we decided that our paper would likely include school news, sports, opinions, comics/cartoon, an entertainment column, and a classifieds section (i.e. Wanted: a fellow student to walk to school with).

The students asked about selling the paper and I said the paper would be free. They asked how many copies would be printed and I said we’d figure that out as the club developed. They asked if their paper could also be written in Swahili so the villagers could read it and I said that since it was a school publication, it’d have to adhere to the all-English school rule. They asked who would take the pictures and I said they would be. “With what,” they asked. “With my camera and whoever else’s we can borrow,” I said. They asked who would be typing the stories and I said they would be. “On what?” they asked. “On my computer,” I said. And as each student asked a question, they each had a spark in their eye.

It’s true, isn’t it? If you’re excited about something, that excitement translates. Now, I just need to figure out how to be excited about conjunctions and prepositions.

In Africa*

In Africa, your feet are always dirty, even if you’ve just washed them. In Africa, you listen to a song that reminds you of your old home and you want to cry. In Africa, you get absorbed in reading a good paragraph, and then get distracted by the incessant buzzing of a mosquito in your ear, a mosquito that you know will bite you in two seconds increasing your risk of getting malaria. In Africa, you mess with a tiny, plastic alarm clock you just bought at the market whose second hand sometimes goes backward. In Africa, you struggle with saying even the most basic of greetings. In Africa, you don’t know how to act around other people, especially other western people, and realize your only friend is your boyfriend who came to Africa with you and who has to be your friend. In Africa, your hair is short and greasy and you wish you had kept it long. In Africa, the holes of outdoor squatters just don’t seem big enough. In Africa, the guards who protect your house at night knock on your window at 6 am to tell you they are leaving. In Africa, there’s an orchestra of wild noises during the evening. In Africa, you know you have a lot to learn.


* Of course, I’m referring to “my” Africa, which is living and working as a volunteer teacher for Orkeeswa Secondary School in Tanzania.

In The Company of Men

I’m the only female teacher at Orkeeswa Secondary school among six other men. Scott’s teaching Biology and Agriculture I. There’s Thomas who’s teaching Math and Physics. Thabit is teaching History and Geography. Godfrey is teaching Agriculture II and Chemistry. And then there’s Robert who teaches Swahili and Civics, and is also Orkeeswa’s headmaster. Scott and I are the only volunteer teachers, which means everyone else is Tanzanian. All of us teach in English and, throughout the day, converse in English.

The Calm Before the Storm

After hours of mind-wrenchingly looking at our respective syllabi for Form 1 and Form 2 as written by Tanzania’s Ministry of Education and Culture, Scott and I went for a walk around 5 pm to clear our heads. Just shortly before departing on our walk, I had heard distant thundering. Thunder is something that both Scott and I are fond of and something we’d been deprived of it while living in Wrangell (while it perpetually rains in southeast Alaska, it almost never thunders).

We chose a different direction to walk in and saw more new sights and different roads and paths and greeted, as usual, a plethora of people, young and old. We continued to hear the distant thunder becoming closer and closer. As we walked, I unleashed a lot of my fears and frustrations and, like a good boyfriend, Scott tried his hardest to make this challenging situation we’ve put ourselves seem not that difficult. It seems like I’ve poured and poured over books and syllabi and worksheets and still have no clue what I’m going to do tomorrow for the first day of school.

After walking for a bit, we decided to turn around and picked up our pace. The grumbling thunder seemed at our heels. When we got home, we realized the power was out. We sat outside for a few minutes to watch the rain arrive. The trees danced, the air seemed to change, the temperature dropped. And then they fell – the drops of rain – big and splattering.

It didn’t rain as hard as I had thought or wanted. It certainly wasn’t a storm.

I Should've Read Teaching For Dummies

When I was younger I thought teachers wrote a script before each day of teaching and rehearsed it in front of their spouse or the principal. It amazed me that each day teachers would be prepared with hours of things to say and do. It still amazes me now. On Monday, it’s my first day of teaching and I’m at a loss. I realize now that it’s impossible to write a script because you have no clue what the students will say or how they’ll react.

A secret that many people might not know (certainly the people at IEFT who made the decision that I was fit to teach at their school didn’t) is that I really have never taught. I’ve been a “teacher” before. For two months the summer after sophomore year at Trinity I was at the Bo’ai Experimental School in Xi’an, China teaching two summer sessions of students. But really what I did was dread each day, walk to class with trepidation, end up playing UNO or Bingo with the students, try to answer their questions, or write meaningless exercises on the chalk board.

Some people think I was essentially teaching when I worked in Hong Kong for two years, but I wasn’t. There were real professors who did that. I just edited papers, corrected tests, held help sessions at the library, ran fun activities, and a bunch of other things that wasn’t teaching. But I wasn’t supposed to teach; my job title was ‘Visiting Tutor.’ I know there were other visiting tutors (there were six of us each year) who did sometimes lead the class. Whenever the professors I worked with would mention that possibility, I would dread it, and lucky for me it never happened.

While in Hong Kong, I did do some teaching on the side for extra money, but again, it wasn’t real teaching. At the Asian Association of Lifelong Learning, I would be in charge of a group of five or six young kids and would help them fill out workbook sheets, watch movies with them, or help them pronounce English words. They were students whose parents thought an extra hour of English practice after school was a wise thing.

All of these things look great on a resume when applying to be an English teacher – I guess this is a confession of sorts – but I don’t know the first thing about teaching, English or otherwise.

The only aspect of teaching that I do have concrete experience on is being on the receiving end of it. I must say that I’ve been an excellent student. Lately I’ve been racking my brain thinking about the teachers who I loved, who were effective at what they did. The first one that comes to mind is Mrs. Bernstein. I think she is the one about whom my script theory was derived. I had her for second and third grade. She was always in charge of the class in a firm, matter-of-fact way, but somehow managed to still win the respect and love from all her students. She was great at what she did. I saw her years later – maybe fifteen years later – when I was a waitress in Chappaqua. It was after I was done with Hong Kong but before I realized Alaska was in my future. I don’t know what I was expecting from our brief exchange, but our interaction wasn’t anything memorable. After all, she was just a normal person, someone meeting up with friends for lunch. She wasn’t the perfect woman wearing the perfect dress in the perfect classroom.

Besides recalling the great teachers I’ve had, and there were many, many more after Mrs. Bernstein, I’ve also been thinking, naturally, about the foreign language teachers I’ve had throughout my education. There was Madame Baker for French who had us cut out pictures and words from magazines and newspaper that illustrated Le Monde Francophone, explained what a Bouche de Noel was, and said in her very real French accent, “Now I will show you how to cut the cheese,” to the howls of an eighth grade class. From the five or six years of French I took in middle and high school – I had Madame Michelle in later years – there are only a handful of phrases I can recall. Granted, this is hardly the fault of the teacher but more so of a distracted, non-caring student.

And then there was Ma Laoshi at Trinity. She really was trying to teach a group of native English speakers how to speak her native tongue, and I think she did a fairly decent job. She was terrible at the tones – making us do them, that is – but she was good at everything else. I remember we had a pretty good textbook, and she supplemented it with vocabulary tests, making us go in front of the class with a partner and act out a scene, and other writing exercises.

The thing with teaching a foreign language is the teacher can only do some much. Ma Laoshi could’ve had us make a thousand flashcards and write a million exercises, but it was up to us to go out into the world and speak, to use the tools she gave us and communicate in Chinese. I never did this. Others in that class have.

Right now, Scott is sitting across from me with a science textbook in his lap. He asked me a while ago what I was doing. I said that I was writing about not being able to teach, to which he replied, “Instead of writing about not being able to teach, why don’t you prepare to teach?” I guess that’s the only thing I can do. I can prepare, not with a script, but with a plan. I can only do the best that I can, that’s what I can offer my eager Tanzanian students, and hopefully the teaching will fall into place.

First Introductions

There have been so many new sights for my eyes – the plants and trees and hills around us, the herds of goats and cows passing by and the young boys with whips that make them go, all the different kinds of people young and old and what they’re wearing, the Orkweeswa school and all its components, the students’ smiles.

And there are so many new names and words – Petro (the boy who gave me a tour of the school who was way more talkative than I was at his age), shikamoo (the greeting towards someone older than you), marahaba (the reply to shikamoo), Robert (the name of the headmaster), Ma Billie (the woman who cooks and cleans at our house), Rose (one of the cooks at the school), and so many, many more.


School wasn’t supposed to officially start until next Monday, but a group of MIT students have come with different scientific and technological projects so the students started school today. Scott and I went to observe, see the school, and meet some of the students. And that was the best thing we could’ve done on our second day in Tanzania. As individual students asked what I was doing in Tanzania and for how long, their face would just light up when they heard the answers. Often their reply was, “Thank you. Welcome.”

Before the students left for the day around 4 pm, Peter introduced Scott and I to the group. When Peter said, “This is Lisa. She will be teaching Form 1 and Form 2 English,” all the students clapped. The same thing happened when Scott was introduced. I just looked from face to face and they were smiling these big, warm, welcoming smiles.

In some ways, part of the hurdle has been conquered – I’ve met the students and they seem to like me. But now I have to teach them, and I’m more terrified than ever. I don’t want to let them down.

Side By Side

A week and a half ago, when Scott and I were walking around New York City, we could barely walk side by side with just two people. Sometimes it’s just not possible in that crowded city. Cairo was worse with its smaller sidewalks. Yesterday when Scott and I were walking home from school – they said it was a three mile walk, but it must be longer as it took us nearly two hours – we met up with three students and, for a while, the five of us were walking side by side down the road with nothing to get in our way.

***

Since our first interview with IEFT when Scott and I were still in the States, all we’ve heard about their students is that they’re bright. We’ve heard other adjectives as well – determined, eager, motivated. But ‘bright’ has been the most constant. And I believed it when I heard and read it in emails; I wanted to believe it.

The students at Owkeeswa Secondary School are supposed to be the most intelligent of the poorest, students who’ve been singled out through testing. There are two classes of 40. The first group – now Form 2 students – are the brightest 40 among the 125 who showed up to test. The second group – now Form 1 students – are the brightest among 400. These students come from Masai families who cannot otherwise afford to send their kids away to secondary school for $400 a year. At IEFT, they spend only $25 a year on tuition and their child doesn’t have to get sent away; they get to stay at home and remain with the family.

Melissa, the volunteer office manager who lives in our house, told us last night about the house visits. After the big enrollment test, three heads of IEFT, including Melissa, make house calls to every potential candidate of Orkeeswa. The goal of the house visit is to interview the parents and the potential students, and to make sure that the family is indeed poor enough, that they really cannot afford another secondary school. Melissa talked about some great kids who just could not be accepted by IEFT.

Of course, testing is not the only means of determining aptitude but, unfortunately, that’s how it works here, for the time being at least. From what I can tell so far – and I know I’ve only been here a few days – the students are indeed bright. I’ve had a few long conversations with individual students and I can tell immediately that they’re brighter than I am. English is their third language, after their Masai dialect and Swahili. They ask about my former work and education background. They ask me details about my life. They talk about their goals, of going to university and getting jobs in politics or medicine or teaching. They talk about climate change. There is a group of MIT students visiting Orkeeswa this week, and the MIT students are blown away by the students’ questions on subjects I often turn a deaf ear to.

On the other hand, the students are also still young and carefree. They like to play crazy ball, a game that has no rules, and tug of war. They are happy and enthusiastic when they sing songs. The female students, like teenage girls worldwide, laugh when they’re embarrassed.

Here We Go

After a quick less-than-24-hour pit stop in Addis Ababa, Scott and I finally arrived in Kilimanjaro Airport around 2:30 this afternoon, a day later than we expected thanks to Ethiopian Airlines.

Peter Luis, one of the co-founders of IEFT, was there on the other side of customs to greet us and drive us to Monduli, where we are to live for the next year. On the way, we stopped in Arusha, the gateway city to the Serengeti and Kilimanjaro. I took out my first bundle of Tanzanian shillings from an ATM and we ate a late lunch. From what I had heard about Arusha, I expected tall buildings and city blocks, but what I saw was a lot more quaint. It was certainly busy but not nearly as metropolitan as I had thought. Another volunteer had said that Arusha is where they go for the weekends, to have a proper shower and to go out, where things cost just as they would in the states. I ate a lunch of chicken and rice that cost around US $4, but I guess it depends on where you go.

Neither Scott or I knew what to expect in terms of our housing, but I think we’re both pleasantly surprised. We have our own room, as does the other volunteer who lives here. There’s a living area, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a spare bedroom/storage area. Lush green surrounds us and there are beautiful, colorful flowers growing around our house. There’s an outdoor sitting area in the front. To get to our house, you drive through Monduli’s small town, up a lovely, tree-lined road (planted by the Germans), and down some severely uneven dirt roads, making for a bumpy ride at the end.



Right now, we’re getting ready to go to sleep. We’ve put sheets and blankets on the bed, and a mosquito net hangs above us. There are two Massai men, who serve as our night guards, sitting outside our front door. At this point, I’ve used the squatter toilet a couple of times. I just wonder how long it takes to truly get used to that. I’ll let you know.

Even as I’m writing, it’s hard to pinpoint what I’m feeling. I’m happy we’re finally here, that our physical journey from Wrangell that started on December 16 is finally complete, but I’m pretty sure I’m still apprehensive about teaching, which is, of course, the whole point of why Scott and I are here. Everyone has told us that we’ll do great and the students are lucky to have us, but I’m still not so sure about that. I’m anxious to get that first day of school over with, just so it can be behind me.

We have one week until school starts.

The Excitement of Arrival

As the lights of Cairo appeared below us from the plane ten hours after leaving New York, I felt that I ought to be feeling something momentous, overwhelming. Each step that had led us to that very moment – leaving Wrangell, leaving Wyoming, leaving New York – had felt so grand like we were doing something that was a big deal, but as we were landing in Cairo I couldn’t conjure up any of that. The moment felt, in fact, normal and right. Scott and I were about to start our African experience not with any fanfare but simply, as two people among hundreds landing in their destination.

***

We touched down in Cairo around seven this evening – seven hours later than scheduled. We lost a whole day, which is a big deal since we started with only five, but there is nothing that can be done about it. We just have to be appreciative that we are finally here – in Africa, alive and well.

Scott and I are traveling with two big backpacks each – one very large bag and one medium sized bag. This means that we stick out as obvious tourists, which I have mixed feelings about. But when we were standing outside the airport, among the new sights and sounds, waiting for our arranged taxi and my posture was all screwed up from carrying a large bag, all I felt was glee. Carrying a heavy, awkward-shaped bag on my back means that I am traveling, that I am somewhere brand new, that I am exploring again. I could never fully express how much I loved living in Wrangell and feel fortunate for having had the experiences that I did the past four years, but I’ve never stopped longing to travel, and now I’m back at it.

Some Thoughts Before Departure

It’s around 10 pm New York time and Scott and I are sitting near gate A4 in Terminal 4 at JFK International Airport. It’s our second time being at this airport this week. Just days ago, we landed here from Denver and were picked up by my mom and Cam Ly. Tonight, just my mom dropped us off because Cam Ly and her boyfriend Brian were already on the road back to Kentucky. I called my mom an hour and a half after she dropped us off to make sure she made it home okay. She’s been feeling sick the past couple of days and I was worried about her drive, about the weather, just worried in general. But she was home, safe and sound. We talked briefly and when we got off the phone, I said, “I love you.” I hadn’t said it so clearly or firmly since I was, perhaps, nine-years-old.

Maybe it’s because I’m going to Africa for at least a year. Maybe it’s because I was so worried and thankful that she was safe. Maybe it’s because I’m finally wiser. Whatever it was or is, I’m glad for it. It’s allowed me to get over whatever barrier was there and tell my mom, the one person who deserves to hear it the most, how important she is to me.

In a couple short hours, Scott and I will be on a plane headed for a new continent.