[note] May 16, 2009

No matter if your house is shaken up by a close-hit lightning strike,

if entire grade of students are suddenly transferred to another school,

how many students are allegedly being possessed by shatanis,

how many times your daladala driver threatens your life by handling his fully loaded vehicle like a racing car,

how many times my lessons get cancelled because of unpredictable ceremony and exam schedules,

or how many times my lessons are interrupted by a group of teachers armed with the infamous sticks coming into my classroom to punish all the students in the class for not performing their morning cleaning duty,

your daily life gets into some sort of routine when you’ve lived in one place for almost 8 months.

5:30am

A day in Tanzania starts early. I usually wake up between 5:30 and 6:00, that is if I’m not waken up by the first praying call (Azan) of the day being blasted out of a speaker from a nearby mosque. I then take cold shower or when water is not coming out (which is mostly the case), rinse myself with water stored in a big bucket. The raining season is almost over and we are entering “winter” and it’s supposed to get (relatively) cold. It will be cold enough that you will need to use hot water for the shower. I’ll have to get an electric kettle or heating rod soon.

6:15am

I leave my place for work. It takes about 15 minutes by daladala from where I live to the town center where the school is at.

7:00am

Morning assembly starts. This could be finished in 5 minutes or could go on for half an hour mostly on Thursdays and Fridays when we have Islamic preaching session after all the announcements are made.

7:15am

Lessons begin but again if you have the first period, your lesson is likely to be cut short because of a long morning assembly or equally lengthy staff meeting which usually takes place following the assembly on Wednesdays.

A session consists of eight 40-minute periods and two of which are usually combined to make it four 80-minute lessons in one day. On Fridays, each period is shortened to 30 minutes so that the school would be over earlier than the other days and everyone can go to mosques for long pray.

There are no breaks in between the lessons except a 15-minute recess period.

I usually teach 1.5 to 2 lessons a day of Form 3 and 4 physics and Form 6 physical chemistry.

8:30am

I walk over to a nearby local diner to have a quick breakfast usually consists of passion juice and several pieces of catlesi (a snack made of mashed potatoes).

10:55am to 11:10am (or 9:15am to 9:30am on Fridays)

The recess. Vendors come to the school’s courtyard to sell snacks including orojo, kachori and mihogo (baked cassava). I’ve become a big fan of kachori. Again the schedule is loosely followed. If you have a lesson after recess, the start is likely to be delayed because the students aren’t back in the classroom.

As you may have noticed, time management can be quite a challenging task in this environment but you just have to learn to let go of “the first-world punctuality”. It would get too stressful otherwise.

12:50pm (or 11:30am on Fridays)

The morning session is over. When I first started teaching last year, I was told that the school would have two sessions, but it was revealed in February that the school wasn’t going to take new Form 1 students and the entire Form 2 got transferred to another school (which happens to be where another one of the volunteers is working at). So the school currently operates morning sessions only. In the afternoons however, they have what they call private students who have failed their Form 4 National Exams and are repeating Form 3 and 4 by paying full tuition.

1:00pm

I eat lunch at a local diner of which I’ve become a regular. This is where I get all of my daily protein consumption. After lunch I go home or stay in town to use the internet or walk around town market to look for teaching aid materials if I need to make one. (I’m currently trying to make a simple solenoid for electromagnetism lessons.)

Between 2:30pm and 3:00pm

I come back home after making a short stop at a nearby vegetable market to buy vegetables for dinner. I usually spend rest of the afternoon working on my lesson plans, marking assignments and tests or making teaching aids.

If I have nothing to do, I take a nap and read books or listen to the radio.

5:00pm

If I have some energy left after working, I walk over to see an old coffee vendor on the street. He’s usually there in every morning and evening and patiently listens to my lousy Kiswahili. I sit down; have some cups of coffee, talk to him and others or just try to listen to their conversations for more than an hour sometimes.

This is the place I could relax even if I have a bad day.

6:30pm

Dinner. I started off cooking vegetable stir fry and rice, but now pasta has replaced rice. It’s a lot easier to cook.

8:00pm

I hang out with volunteer friends who live close by, read books or listen to the radio. I’m hooked on “World Have Your Say” on the BBC World Service.

10:00pm

I take cold shower and go to bed, hoping not to be waken up at 4:30am next morning by the first Azan.

Weekends are usually spent on going to town to use internet, lesson plans, marking, reading books and sometimes getting out of town to hit the beach with the friends.

[note] May 08, 2009

I’d like to begin with a classic story.

“A volunteer comes to work in a rural community and decides to set up a project after a thorough research to dig a well and install an electrical pump. The project is largely supported by the community, goes smoothly and people in the community are happy to have the easy access to water supply. The volunteer, being satisfied with the outcome, finishes the service and happily goes back to his/her country. A few years later, he/she decides to come visit the community only to learn that the pump has been broken a few months after the start of its operation and left out to be rusty ever since because there is no one in the community who knows how to fix or maintain it.”

Whether this story is real or fictional, a story like this is often talked about among the volunteers to illustrate the point that consequences of seemingly good intentions are not always positive and that any projects need to be carefully structured to avoid any undesirable outcomes.

Although most of the volunteers I know are not involved in digging up wells, morality behind the story is still applicable today if “rural community” and “a well with an electrical pump” in the story are replaced with, for example, “a school” and “computers” respectively.

This could potentially be the case at my school. (I cannot conclude as of now yet though.) Two weeks ago we received ten brand-new desk-top computers from a major telecommunication company in Tanzania. We had a large ceremony attended by several important guests. The guests and the members of the school administration all praised the generous donation in their speeches and that it will certainly be helpful to development of the school and lives of both teachers and the students. The guests also announced that they will be working on installing the internet connection and told us that we could soon expect to do our researches with computers.

While I understand the importance of having easy access to computers and the internet, (I even think that they should be included in the basic human rights considering how web-based our society is today.) given the situation at my school and how the computers are donated, I cannot help but to think that consequence of the donation could be analogous to that of the digging-up-the-well story.

1. The number of computers.

We have more than 40 students in each class. If the purpose of the donation was to teach computers to the students, we need at least 20 computers so that there is one computer for a pair of students. We don’t have “computer skills” as a subject at secondary schools in Tanzania anyways.

2. Need for computer lessons.

Still, we could use the computers to research for student projects or lesson plans, but most of the students and teachers are not familiar with the machine at all and by “not-familiar” I mean that most of them have never touched it, do not know how delicate it is or what the viruses are (Except yours and your friends’, any computers you use in Tanzania should be considered to be infected with hundreds of viruses).

On top of that, web-literacy must be taught if the computers are used for research purpose. One of the guests at the ceremony pointed out in his speech that we didn’t need books if we had computers because everything’s already on the internet. As we all know, this is extremely a dangerous idea since not every information on the web is valid or reliable.

There should be a professional who could come and teach them these things in regular basis.

I could at least unpack the computers, set them up and organize sessions to teach some basic computer skills but in order to do so, I will have to deal with politics and bureaucracy. In schools and hospitals in this country, one way to signify authority to which a particular individual is entitled is to assign him/her to administer particular resources such as books and computers or a laboratory or storage room. My school is not an exception so you can imagine the difficulty of a young, relatively new foreign volunteer to initiate the process. (I will try to work it out during my service though.)

3. No Internet?

It has been announced at the ceremony that the internet will soon be installed. Some colleagues said that they are expecting have the internet hooked up in “a couple of months” which translates to some undefined time in the future. The school cannot afford the internet either, so the administration or the ministry of education needs to find another sponsor who could install it for free of charge. So there is a possibility that they might not even be able to use the computers for research for a very long time or worse, indefinitely.

We also need to put things in perspective.

Even if we have all these issues to think about, having some computers at school may still help in some ways. As I said, nowadays anyone should have access to computers. But the fact is there are so many other things that need to be purchased and to be taken care of at the school.

For example chemical reagents and lab equipments. We need not only to do experiments and visualize what we teach but also for the students to practice experiments for practical sections of the life-depending national exam which counts for 50% of their grade. (Due to the lack of reagents and apparatuses, the only experiments students conduct in most of the secondary schools are the practices for their practical exams and in my school we can’t even do these practices at this point.)

Back in January, I and other teachers wrote and submitted a letter to the school administration asking for purchase of essential reagents and apparatuses with estimated costs. The letter apparently has been forwarded to the ministry of education but we haven’t heard anything back since then.

The bottom line is that we cannot just donate things and expect a happy ending without doing extensive research to find out what a recipient really need.If they wanted to donate computers and see a positive outcome, they would have needed to increase the number of computers, installed the internet, renovated a part of the school to adequately set up the computers and had someone to teach the basics. Doing all of these would cost a lot more money than just giving away the machines, but I think these are the least that needs to be done or else those computers will be packed in boxes, sit in the principal’s room and won't see the light of the day for a very long time or ever.