Scott's Whiteboard Wisdom

I've been meaning to post these photos since March. We used to keep a whiteboard outside at the school with inspirational quotes for the students to read. The quotes would change everyday. I liked writing Henry David Thoreau quotes, but Scott's were more creative and made more of an impression. Since the new teachers arrived in April, the whiteboard has been moved to another classroom, so the daily quotes have ceased. But here is a sample of Scott's. Let's call them Scott's Best Of Whiteboard Quotes:

My Commercial

We all remember Sally Struthers and her plight for saving children by sponsoring them – “Just ten cents a day”. Sally and her naturally broken voice, her big blond hair, her pleading eyes. What we also may remember were the pictures of those kids she was trying to save – the ones with the bloated stomachs, the sunken faces, their pleading eyes. Emaciated child holding the hand of a fellow emaciated child. These commercials were always on in the 80s and early 90s. They’ve faded though from TV mainstream and I wonder if Sally Struthers is intuitively known for anything else but those commercials.

Last Friday, the school was filled with students who were competing for the chance to be sponsored. It was the start of Orkeeswa Secondary School’s annual selection process, which is quite involved and spans over a month’s time.


Step 1: Sign-up and interview day. This took place last Friday. Close to 400 students or student-age youth came to the school to qualify to take the test. Most of them arrived before 8:30 and the day didn’t end until around 4 pm.

The main reason Orkeeswa was founded and built was to have a school that was affordable for even the poorest of the poor. Private schools in Tanzania, as they mostly are world-wide, are astronomical in price. Government schools, the ones that are supposed to be for the greater, common population, cost a family $400 a year for tuition. This is above and beyond what most of our students’ families can pay. Our Form 2 students, Orkeeswa’s first class, is filled with older students (some in their early to mid-20s) whose families could never afford to send them to secondary school before Orkeeswa was built. Orkeeswa costs $25 a year, a charge that is meant to be low enough to be affordable yet high enough to insure buy-in from the families. The rest of the students’ fees are paid through a sponsorship program and other fundraising.

Due to this, Orkeeswa will only allow students who are proven to have a need continue to the next step, which is taking the test. To ensure that, Orkeeswa gathers a group of headmasters from primary schools in surrounding villages and various village leaders. Any student vying for a seat at the test walks into the room with this group of people and between the group of them, at least one of the “judges” is able to identify who that child is, recite their whole life story and know, in fact, if that child is eligible. Of the almost 400 students who showed up, over 50 were disqualified for lying about where they were from and how poor they really were. Some students come from as far as the city of Arusha in order to lie and try to make to the next step.


Each potential student who qualifies gets their pertinent information recorded, is given a number, photographed, and is told to come back the next day for the test. Last year, 178 made it through the first step and sat for the test. This year there were 179.

Step 2: Test Day. Five teachers and four staff members spent the entirety of a rainy Saturday organizing students into lines, sorting tests, proctoring tests, grading tests, and making sure test-takers weren’t cheating. I did all of these things. I was also responsible for “patting” the female students down. I wasn’t checking for firearms; I was checking for hidden methods of cheating, for handwriting on arms, for old tests and other pieces of paper tucked in skirts and pockets or hidden in the folds of khangas. I think almost all but a few that qualified made it to test day. The high scores of the day ranged between 40% and 66%. Seventy potential students move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Test Day, Part II. This is the first year Orkeeswa will administer a second round of tests to a smaller pool of potential students. This takes place this Saturday. Instead of an hour and a half, this second test will only take 45 minutes and will only have 25 questions.

The following steps have only been told to me. I’ve never been here for them so I don’t know about them from firsthand experience. After the high scores are recorded from the second test, 2-3 Orkeeswa staff members – usually Peter, the executive director; the office manager’ and maybe Rapha, the deputy director – make a number of boma visits. They go to the homes of the high scorers, meet their families, drinks sips of warm goat milk or leshoro (ground corn cooked with milk and flour) that’s usually offered, talk with the potential students, take pictures. This is how the school is able to definitively judge the need of the individual student as well as assess their personality to see if they’d be a good fit in the school. From there, the list of potential students narrows further and further until they finally pick the 35 members of Orkeeswa’s third class. The 35 will get new red and blue uniforms, red ties, and black shoes and start pre-Form in September. Pre-Form goes until the end of the school year in December and consists of full school days of nothing but English. Next January, they will start Form One wide-eyed and eager.


If you're interested in sponsoring a member of Orkeeswa's newest class or donating money, go to ieftz.org

Why We Sometimes Need Weekends Away

It was one of those crazy days at school. That statement is deceiving as crazy is actually the normal mode at school. When things are calm and run on schedule as they should – those are the special days, the rare days when I go home not feeling like a mad woman. Is this what teaching is all about? Do all teachers feel constantly pulled in a hundred different directions?

Here’s a very small dose of what’s been going on at or around school this week –

- Three students were diagnosed with malaria in one day (malaria is quite common among the students and the local teachers, but three in one day is not normal). On top of this, with the weather change, up to ten students a day will come up to me saying they’re sick with headaches, chest pains, stomachaches, and a variety of other symptoms that I’m mostly clueless about.

- There was a parents’ meeting at the school today so all the students wanted to introduce their mother or father to the teachers and staff. I shook many hands today and said ‘shikamoo’ (polite Swahili greeting to those who are older) countless times.

- Scott became extremely sick on Monday afternoon during our staff meeting and had to go to the hospital in Arusha that evening with a 103-degree fever (thank you CVS digital thermometer). His white cell blood count was through the roof at 1400, which (I guess) showed that his blood was infected with something. He took Tuesday off from work, recovered in bed, and was back to work today. He went to the local clinic and discovered that he has hookworms in his system. It happens to the best of us, doesn’t it?

- Two students were caught stealing brand new cleats that were just donated to the school from PlayAfrica, a non-profit based in Spain. They sold them to a shop in Monduli. The headmaster and the second head were able to save the cleats before they were further sold. All the teachers and staff are beside themselves with shock and disappointment. Orkeeswa students are better than that, period. But I know nothing of hunger or having to support your family, so really I know nothing about what was going through their heads when they stole the cleats. The headmaster still hasn’t taken full action on it as far as punishing the two boys, and the rest of the student body is thinking that he’s become soft and lax.

- Two of the volunteers that I live with are moving into another staff house, one that’s newer and much nicer. While I’m relieved about the present house being less full, I am green with envy that these two will get to enjoy sitting on a toilet.

- Monthly tests are being given in all ten subjects in preparation for next month’s finals, which means lots of test making, lots of make-ups, and lots of grading.

- The school almost lost two Form 2 girls to other pressures going on in their lives that I know so little about. Luckily, each of them was either convinced or made the choice to come back to school. Hopefully they’ll stay for good.

… and so many other little events and details that seem so insignificant when I even think about writing them, but that somehow managed to be a source of stress and confusion.

When I am feeling more than stressed, I just think back to the weekend Scott and I just spent at the Ngorongoro Farm House near Karatu. We had two days and nights of eating organically grown vegetables and other delicious food, lounging about playing cards on our deck overlooking beautiful flowers and acres of green land, enjoying running water and warm showers, sitting around a fire at night with new faces and stories, drinking wine and other cocktails, and generally not exerting ourselves at all or thinking too hard about anything. It was lovely. Here are a few photos from our luxury weekend that we paid low-season, resident rates on:


The view from our deck. It was the perfect setting for games of cribbage.


This gardener gave us a tour. Look at all the carrots in the bed between them!


We didn't bring a cork screw with us, so guess how Scott managed to get the wine open.

Fall In Africa

I woke up this morning thinking about Halloween. That’s how cold it’s become. The chill in the morning is brisk and I wake up knowing I’ve been cold the entire evening. It’s fall weather here in Africa.

We’re out of the rainy season. I was in the garden with four students yesterday and they said the rains were finished, end of story. When I asked how I knew, they said, “That’s what the old people say.” We transplanted some bell pepper plants (does that work?) and the students think they will be doomed without our manual watering. We surveyed the rest of the garden, which Scott has mainly been responsible for, with the just planted fruit trees – mango, lychee, orange and papaya. The garden has become quite expansive with new beds of onions, several thriving beds of tomatoes, sunflowers, sweet potato, cassava, barely there (but there enough) eggplant and broccoli, Chinese cabbage, all kinds of squash, newly sprouted pumpkin, carrots that the students will eat from the ground and get reprimanded by Scott for (not for simply eating them, but for the fact that the students doing most of the carrot pilfering haven’t been the students working in the garden). Even the corn and okra have survived after being munched on by dikdiks, goats, and whatever else got through the old fence. We looked over the school garden and all the hard work that’s gone into it, and wondered what would survive.

After having a fairly good day at school, being in the garden with those few students – Suzanne, Samwel, Langoi, and Nemama – made it end on an even higher note. It was nice to get my hands in the dirt, which after being hoed and tilled by the students for the new beds felt moist and rich. It felt good to weed, to separate the intentional from the unintentional. It felt good to be quiet with the students, without feeling like I needed to entertain or teach, knowing the quietness stemmed from all of us working together.

***

These aren’t photos from yesterday’s gardening experience, but photos of the students in garden throughout our time here.


Here is Suzanne during a successful harvest of zucchini. Her bed, which thrived early on, has since been badly affected by the rainy season. In the background of the picture you can see Scott with some other students.


Here are Edward, Saing'orie, and Lais building a scarecrow, which we no longer need. A five-foot tall chicken wire fence has since been installed.

***

When I first sat in front of this computer screen this morning, my mind was blank of anything worthy to write, anything productive. Instead of giving up on writing altogether, I turned to an email that I had saved in a word document on my desktop that I needed to reply to. The email was from a friend in Wrangell (who’s actually not in Wrangell right now). Her email touched on many things, one of them being on the school garden and wanting to know more about it. While I write these blog posts knowing people I know and love are reading them, I always find my writing to be better and more honest when I’m writing to someone in particular. I think this is true for many people. Maybe that’s what dedications in books are all about – that person, dead or alive, near or far, who would always listen and eagerly read.

The Princess and the Pizza

I usually love books and movies that depict a sense of novelty in the seemingly familiar and mundane. The main character of the book, A Man Walks Into a Room, which I just recently finished, has a type of amnesia that wipes out his memory from age 12. He can recall with vivid clarity his adolescent crush, but cannot recognize his own wife. I have watched documentaries on Hmong people and on the Lost Boys of Sudan, in which turning on a light by flicking a switch, using a flush toilet, or buying meat at a grocery store are totally new experiences. I’ve often thought that my own family must have experienced such sensations when they first landed in America.

Since coming to Tanzania and working at Orkeeswa Secondary School, I’ve seen with my own eyes the sort of wonder, awe, and potential fright that comes with being exposed to – what to me are – ordinary things. I can see through my students the sort of novelty that I probably at one time in my life felt, but never fully expressed.

The students at Orkeeswa have spent their existence in the Tanzanian bush in a Maasai village, living in bomas, which are dwellings made of sticks, mud, and cow dung. They don’t have electricity. They don’t have running water. Besides the school, most of the students live a traditional Maasai life, which involves fetching water and firewood and herding cows, among so many other ways of life that I know absolutely nothing about.

When I first started the newspaper club back in early February, I taught the students how to use a point-and-click digital camera. For most, if not all, of them, it was their first time holding one. They had trouble with the concept of holding the camera still while pressing the shutter button or the fact that they could control what they saw in the viewfinder by simply moving their hands. I was more than pleasantly surprised when Suzanne, a form one student who was the photographer for the first issue of the Orkeeswa Journal, took the camera after only getting one lesson on it and came back with some quality photos (if you haven’t already, please check out the photo attached with the story, Faces of Orkeeswa Football, in the first issue of the school newspaper, which is posted in the previous blog entry. That was all Suzanne). When non-newspaper students ask if they can use my camera, I happily turn it over. When they’re in possession of this little piece of technology, they walk around with confidence and it’s more than just the item itself, it’s that they know how to use it. One of my favorite things is letting students loose with the camera for an hour and seeing what they come back with. There are a lot of posed, glamour-shot type photos and of course the crooked, blurry variety.

This past weekend, some of the teachers took four female students to Arusha for lunch and a trip to the movie theater. This was the prize for winning Orkeeswa Idol, a talent show event I organized last term. Big Rose, Nengai, Jackline, and Eliapenda had practiced every chance they were given, were chosen by the judges during the competition as one of the top three teams, and then overwhelmingly won the audience vote. This was back in April so for weeks they’ve been asking about their grand prize trip to Arusha, rightfully so. All of the students have been on various field trips out of the village with the school – to Snake Park and to Arusha several times for different sports events at other schools, the Mama Africa circus, and for World AIDS Day. But they, of course, still get so excited when the opportunity arises to go to Arusha. What was exciting about this particular trip was the chance to go to a movie theater, something none of them have ever done before.

The movie theater in Arusha is located in the Njiro shopping complex, which is just like any shopping complex in the states. There’s a nice courtyard in the center with dark stained tables and green umbrellas surrounded by restaurants serving pizza, burritos, Indian food, burgers, and salads. There’s a coffee shop on the second level, various shops selling movies, electronics, and clothes, and a grocery store that could be located in any American city. Suffice it to say, the Njiro shopping complex is for people of a more Western persuasion.

The girls were told they could wear whatever they wanted, meaning they didn’t have to wear their school uniform. Jackline and Big Rose came wearing khangas (patterned pieces of cloth that are worn by Tanzanian women in so many ways – as skirts, head wraps, capes, the list goes on and on), which they quickly shed to reveal jeans underneath. Eliapenda and Nengai were decked out in what appeared to be their Sunday finest – skirts and tops that shined. Eliapenda was even wearing heels. They carried purses and all four of them sucked identical red lollipops.

Scott and I were responsible for driving the girls into the big city and we were meeting Melissa, Jeff, and Jenny at Njiro, who had already bought the movie tickets and pre-ordered lunch. They had searched for some kuku na chipsi (chicken and fries, a staple in Tanzanian cuisine) but couldn’t find any so ordered pizza instead, basic cheese pizza. The girls had never seen nor eaten pizza. They all asked what it was made of and were hesitant when it first arrived to the table, Jackline the most hesitant. The other three ate two pieces, but Jackline’s first bite, if you could call it a bite at all, was Jackline’s last. She reluctantly held the pizza in her hand as she saw the rest of us do, put part of it in her mouth and quickly retreated her hand, her face contorted in disgust. She didn’t touch it again. Thankfully, we had also ordered fries, which she familiarly munched on and stayed quiet for most of the meal. In fact, all four of the girls didn’t say much during lunch. I had imagined endless gabbing and smiles and excited eating, but I think there was just so much newness surrounding them – the atmosphere, the food, the obvious tilted ratio of white people to black people. I guess it was a good thing that there wasn’t too much talking; we only had ten minutes to eat before the start of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog.

Scott had tried explaining to the girls that the movie screen was bigger than the classroom walls, although I don’t know if the girls even got the concept of a movie screen. But there it was before them as we walked into the theater, shuffled into our row, and sat down in cushioned seats. All four girls sat together while the teachers and staff filled in the row on either end. They watched the giant screen holding bags of popcorn. When the iconic Disney castle appeared before the movie, it occurred to me that these girls have lived a Mickey Mouse-less life, haven’t been tainted by the dream of a Prince Charming, or tormented by Cruella De Ville. The demons in their lives are in the very real form of pregnancy, becoming orphaned from HIV/AIDS, and forced marriages.

I was sitting next to Big Rose who’s the oldest of the four of them. She’s in Form Two while Eliapenda, Nengai, and Jackline are in Form One. I was lucky to witness Rose’s moments of uncontrollable laughter, her speechless shock and confusion. At one point during the movie, she asked me to explain a part of the movie, which I did. She showed signs of understanding and quickly turned to her other side to relay this understanding to the other girls. For an hour and half, these four students were able to experience a world in which people turn into frogs, people kiss frogs, animals can play musical instruments, where everything ends happily ever after. It was glorious. Their eyes remained peeled on the giant screen the entire time, and at various times during the movie, each one of the girls would be sitting forward, their bodies angled in eager anticipation for what would happen next.

When the movie ended, we all walked back into the light of the day. Jeff, Jenny, Melissa, and I asked questions of the girls to gauge how much they enjoyed it, how well they understood the story line, but again, there wasn’t too much we could get out of them. They all said they liked it but didn’t elaborate.

We ended up having to wait a while in the Njiro shopping complex for our rides back to Monduli and the village. So we all sat back down around a wooden table with a green umbrella. The skies were turning grey. I let the girls loose with my camera and watched as they took turns posing and holding their gazes still for picture after picture after picture.

Hot Off the Presses*

* Bear in mind that as of two years or even one year ago, these students didn't even know the English alphabet.