[note]Oct. 04, 2009

Two weeks have passed since I came back to Zanzibar from the Ramadhan break. A week after the school started. Conveniently last week also marked one year anniversary since I first arrived in this country. Because the Ramadhan starts in mid August next year, and I have to report to Dar for orientations by mid September, I’ve got about 10 months left at the site.

1. The Two Years

Like most of my friends, I too had thought that the two years might have been a little too long, but now I feel it’s a fair amount of time if I really want to get down to earth to have an experience of working with the Tanzanians, see what works and what doesn’t.

If it was for three months, I would have finished happy, being blinded with initial excitement of coming to the new country and just being able to speak in Kiswahili. If it was for six months, when the initial excitement worn off and I was starting to glimpse negative aspects of the place, I would have felt like just giving it all up, never want to come back to the place again and forget about my involvement with the “developing” areas. If the program was just for a year, I would have felt lack of accomplishment on the airplane back home, because now I’ve got a good idea of how things work here.

I spent most of my first year trying to grasp the situation my school and the site was in (looking back previous blog entries, I wrote that I was going to do it in the first three months, but clearly a couple of months wasn’t enough.), and identifying what works and what doesn’t in classrooms. For example, with stable supply of electricity and plenty of places offering photocopy services, making handouts and giving them out to the students is quite easy at my site. And it’s been working quite well.

Now that I’m not a stranger to the people at my school any more, that I have a better idea about how the school runs and that its annual schedule has become less unpredictable, the second year is the time to see what I can do without the disadvantages of the first year.

2. Degree Obsession

I learned that lots of things change at the end of Ramadhan. Form4 students don’t come to school any more and get ready for the big national exams. This is also the time when many teachers leave the school to go back to university to pursue higher degrees. From what I know, at least five teachers, three science teachers and two art teachers are leaving.

Now I know why some of my colleagues had always lamented about lack of science teachers in the Tanzanian (Though they say Zanzibar, I maintain that the archipelago still belongs to the larger country.) schools when it seemed to me that the school had no problem operating with sufficient number of teachers in any subjects, even without me. Turn over of the teachers here is very high. If they see the opportunity to go get higher degrees (in no matter what subject), most of them will abandon their teaching for it because that piece of paper certifying they have a higher degree is a single important thing to have when getting a job or raise. Apparently, someone having a higher degree with no experience in the job is considered more favorable than someone with 10 years of experience in the field. This race to get as many and advanced degrees as possible is backed by the government: government regulation allows teachers to return to university with scholarship and other assistance after they have completed certain years of teaching.

So, high turn over of the teachers, on top of relative scarcity of science teachers, inadequately supplied schools and syllabi that require us to cover unreasonably large amount of highly advanced topics such as electromagnetism and radioactivity. The result? Unstable education especially in the science subjects, which leads to poor understanding of the subjects among the students thus wide-spread lack of motivation to learn, which in turn leads to few number of students pursuing science subjects and becoming science teachers.

And this is where the volunteers come in.