[note and photos]Jan.31.2009

I’ve talked about the site, my work and food, so I guess it’s time to talk about my living situation.

Before I go ahead, here’s how the system works.
Accommodations for the volunteers are provided by the host institute (the ministry of education in my case) and what kind of living situation a volunteer would be in is entirely up to the host. JOCV coordinators have a little say over the volunteer housings except when there’re serious security concerns and that urgent measures should be taken. It is also up to the volunteers themselves to negotiate with the host institute to make necessary improvements in their housing situations such as doing a minor renovation, installing additional furniture, adding some extra locks to the front door or putting grills up on the windows.

Basically, housing situation varies from a volunteer to another. Some of them (mostly in community development and health education) would live in a remote village without running water and electricity, some of them live in an urban/town environment with somewhat stable source of water and electricity and there’re a few of those who work in Dar es Salaam, living with all the electronic gadgets including AC and hot water.

Having said that, here’s my living situation.

I’m living in one of the government apartments built with foreign aid from China. It is located about 20 minute daladala ride away from the town center where my school is at. Water source is unstable; water comes out 3 to 4 hours a day. Electricity is somewhat more stable although power cuts do happen once in a while.

Here are some photos.


Living


Bedroom



Bathroom

Kitchen

When I first saw my place, I was really surprised how nice (and also out of place) it was. I wasn't expecting at all to be live in an apartment style housing, because most of the education volunteers are put into one of the teacher’s residences, living side by side with other teachers. Back in university when I was telling my friends about the plan of joining the volunteer service and going to Tanzania, a friend of mine jokingly said that she’ll be visiting my hut one day. I guess living in a hut is a little too extreme, but I imagined my living situation in this country to be not too far off from what she had said. As I read blogs of Peace Corps and JOCVs in Tanzania or countries elsewhere in Africa about how they started their morning, shuttling back and forth between their house and a communal well to get buckets full of water and how they planned their lessons at night under candle lights, I was excited that I was about to experience something similar, but it was just a part of my fantasy about my experience living in what we call a “developing country” and I’m happy with what I got.

[note] Jan.24.2009

Some things I’ve learned about the students and myself in classrooms over the past two weeks;

1. Having been a student of a high school where students and teachers call each other with their first names (I guess that’s a little unusual), being called my name with “Mr.” or “Teacher” in front makes me feel a little awkward.

2. Having classroom rules works quite well.

3. The students, especially in lower grades, focus more attention and listen to me when I use my lousy Kiswahili to explain things than when I use English.

4. So I started extensively using what they call “Kiswanglish” in class. Mix of English words in Kiswahili sentences as the name suggests.

5. They seem to enjoy making posters as a group.

6. Also they could start beating each other up for no particular reason if they are in very close proximity to each other. This actually happened when I was having a demonstration of waves in physics class and told the students to gather around.

7. Consequently, the other students could be my allies to stop them.

8. The students are amused when I say “inshallah” the famous Arabic expression, “if god wishes.”

9. I’m getting used to writing with a chalk on a blackboard, something I haven’t done in like 10 years.

10. Kachori, a deep fried snack made of mashed potatoes that are sold by this old lady in the courtyard during recess has become my favorite.

11. Students seem to have a tendency of saying “yes” to the question, “do you understand?” even if they haven’t understood what we talked in class.

12. Consequently, marking their assignments and quizzes is a little depressing.

13. My colleagues are often concerned that I’m not married at my age.

14. I haven’t come across a situation so bad that I had to put the students into some form of discipline, but in some occasions, talking through to the students to calm them down or to explain what they did and why it’s wrong to do so has been working quite well, thanks to the classroom rules. This makes me wonder if the other teachers have ever tried setting rules up in their classes.

[note]Jan.17.2009

Being in a Tanzanian school, you will almost certainly witness some forms of corporal punishment and my school is not an exception. A commonly practiced one is stick beating. I’ve heard that it’s even legalized to some extent: if I remember correctly, you can find a clause which says that teachers are allowed to beat one student for three lashes a semester under a permission of the headmaster. Not so surprisingly, it is done more often than what the law might say.
Ever since I started working at the school, I’ve frequently seen teachers using sticks to either beat the students or simply to threaten them to move into their classrooms in the morning or after recess. I’ve been told numerous times by my colleagues that stick beating is the “African Psychology” and that the students need such threat for them to do anything. The sound of beating and screams of the students are unsettling enough for me, but what makes me cringe is the fact that the teachers are enjoying themselves doing it with a big grins on their faces and others watching are laughing at the students getting beaten in their thighs or buttocks.
In my personal view, I do not tolerate any forms of corporal punishment, because I don’t think it has any positive effects on the students’ behavior both physically and psychologically. I do however think that I’m in no position to start advocating for abolishment of it from my school because doing so would mean that I am imposing my values from outside onto an established community and doing so is extremely dangerous. If the corporal punishment was to be banned, the proposal and the decision to do so should initially come from the local teachers and the students.
So most of the time when the beatings are taking place, no matter how painful it is to do so, I would just pass by with a quick glance or wait in the distance if it is in the morning and the staff room is locked, but this time it was different. One morning, almost half of the school came in late. The late students were gathered in the courtyard and because there were so many students to be beaten up, an enraged teacher brought out a bunch of sticks (I didn’t know they had so many because I’d only seen one or two of them) and asked other teachers to participate in the beating. Most of the teachers willingly took the advantage of the situation and went right ahead on the beating. As usual, all I could do was to sit around on the side and wait until it’s over. But then one teacher came by with an extra stick on his hand. He put the stick in front of me and asked me to join in. I was a little confused, because I’d never been asked to do so before and, me being from a part of the world where this form of punishment had long been abolished, had assumed that the other teachers already knew that I did not practice it.
Although he was very persistent trying to make me do it, I kept politely refusing by simply telling him that I don’t do it. My response was probably amusing to other teachers around me that they started laughing at me again saying “this is African psychology!” I told him to go on with the beating but again firmly stressed that this was not my thing. He finally went back to the crowd of students with a stick on his hand after jokingly telling the other teachers that I wasn’t capable of doing such a thing.

An instance like this makes me realize that I was brought up in an entirely different culture with different set of values from the ones the people around me have been brought up in, and that I could never understand or accept some things they practice. It’s been more than three months since I came to this country and now I’m no longer in the initiation phase where I could look at everything with an excitement. I’m beginning to settle down, thus starting to discover both what I like and what I don’t appreciate so much about various aspects of life here.
So what do I do now? Not only in terms of the corporal punishment, but also other cultural practices in general, I guess I need to draw a boarder line and tell myself not to go beyond the line and ask others to respect my choice as well. Working in a school setting, sooner or later I will inevitably come across instances that will require me to penalize students. I’ve heard from some other education volunteers that they have had a hard time dealing with misbehaviors of their students because without a stick in your hand, the students often don’t take you seriously.

The corporal punishment however, definitely is and will always be way beyond the line for me.

[Photos & Notes] Jan.09.2009

1. [Photos] Jambiani

Happy New Year!
From Dec.30 to Jan.2, I decided to venture out of town to Jambiani, one of the East Coast villages (though it's quite built up with hotels).

Here are some photos from the trip.


From the town to Jambiani, it takes about an hour and half to two hours by daladala. Unlike the ones in the mailand, we get trucks with wooden seats and roof on the deck. It's overpacked most of the time, but I find it slightly more enjoyable than the regular bus or van daladalas.


An elementary school in Jambiani. The village is build on the stretch of white sand which leads directly into the ocean.



The Village's main street.



The beach. Water is shallow for seveal hundred meters out of the beach. It gets dry when the tide is out and you can walk out quite faｒ.


2. School Resumed
The school has started on Monday this week although half of the students haven’t arrived yet. New Form1, Form3 and Form5 students need to wait for their National Exam results (until early February, I’ve been told) before entering/coming back to school. But I’ve started teaching my Form2 and Form6 classes and they’re going okay. I’ll have to teach more lessons to figure out what kind of adjustments I need to make. It seems that the level of English language proficiency varies greatly among the students. I see some students getting bored when I repeat things in Kiswahili after saying something English and others are so focused. One of my challenges therefore is to find the fine balance in the amount of English and Kiswahili I use in classrooms. Remembering everyone’s name will also be a challenge where one class has 35 to 40 students with similar names such as Mohamed and Fatima. (Population of Zanzibar is predominantly Muslim. I’m enjoying my first experience of living in a Muslim community although it reduces my drinking opportunity.)
So, what I did on my first lesson was to give each student a piece of paper and told them to write his/her name, birthday, where he/she is from, favorite and least favorite subjects and what he/she wants to do/be in the future. I put these information in Excel and carry the printouts to help me remember their names.

On top of Form2 and Form6 Chemistry, I will be teaching Form3 and Form4 Physics. Last year at the end-of-year staff meeting, one teacher made a comment that there was no adequate number of physics teacher at the school and that current Form4 students are not learning any physics for several months now.
With no additional teaching coming in at the start of the year, I decided to take the From3 and 4 physics classes. Although I’m not an expert on physics, I figured the topics covered in these grades are doable after consulting with the syllabus. Adding physics to my lessons makes the total number of periods per week to be 30-32 which is a little overloaded but not impossible either. I wanted to have as much interactions with the students as possible anyways.　
After all, someone needs step in resume the Form4 physics lessons which stopped in October when an old physics teacher left the school to go to university.

A side note: The government guarantees teachers the right to leave school after certain period of time to go back to university and obtain higher qualifications. They are expected to return to teaching higher grades (A-level) after finishing up their studies, but majority goes on to find other jobs (especially in science) with higher salaries. This is one of the reasons for the shortage of science teachers.

That's it for now.

PS
This blog is for friends and family (I should have mentioned it earlier.) Although I sometimes get feedbacks from some of my friends, I'm just curious to know how many people and who are reading this blog. So just this time, if you could post a comment below or write me an e-mail, saying who it is from and letting me know you've been following, it'd be great.
Thanks!