A Note from the Suggestion Box

Yesterday I spent much of the day traveling around the village of Orori visiting the families of the students we are trying to sponsor, and meeting their parents where possible.  I have been to some of these homes before, so it wasn’t shocking, but it was still a sobering experience to see how these families live.  The houses are mostly made of sticks and mud, and usually consist of one or two rooms.  There are a few small windows, but no other light; in some cases at night they use a home-made kerosene lamp.  The parents greeted me warmly; most of them came to the house from the farm where they had been working.  These families mostly live by farming small plots of land, which they cultivate by hand.

The village itself consists of these small houses, separated by stands of bananas, so if you didn’t know the houses were there you might think you were alone in a forest; however, if you stop anywhere, people quickly, because in fact there are homes everywhere and people working these farms all the time.  The landscape is very beautiful, but the roads are confusing and to me they look pretty much indistinguishable.  Periodically they are crossed by irrigation ditches in which it is easy to get stuck (more on that later).

You wouldn't necessarily guess that this is a densely populated area. 

Walking through this countryside is an incredibly beautiful experience.

In the morning Lukumay drove me around, with six Form-2 students in the back of his mini-bus giving him directions to their respective houses.  But at mid-day he had to go to a meeting, so he gave me the keys to his car and I loaded up 8 Form-4’s and away we went, accompaniedby the Second Master, Mattei, who is very nice but doesn't drive.  It’s wasn't much a problem driving on the left side of the road, because there is only one lane and no traffic.  But I had a hard time adjusting to the steering wheel being on the right.  Every time I wanted to signal a turn (sheer habit; there was no reason) I accidentally turned on the windshield wipers.  I also had a hard time judging where the left side of the car was, and I brushed up against one structure (no damage).  I almost immediately got the car stuck in an irrigation ditch and the students had to get out and push.  Had I not had the students with me I would have been completely lost within minutes.  But with their help I found my way to all the houses, and got us back unharmed, along with the car.

Silvia Mallya and her parents at their house.

 Lusina lives in this two-room house with her parents and six brothers and sisters.

At each house I had to introduce myself and give a brief explanation of what we were doing – trying to find sponsors for their children’s school fees; then I would ask to take a picture of the family, which will appear on the Friends of Foot2Afrika web page when we get this project going.  I did reasonably well – my Swahili has come along admirably.  However, periodically I would come to a complete dead end, midway through a sentence that I had no idea how to finish or even to back out of.  However, the people were very gracious.  I think they have such limited experience with outsiders that it wasn’t even surprising to them that a mzungu spoke Swahili at all.

Rozmery Kiondo with her mother and little sister.

Vaileth Kweka and her grandmother.

I didn’t know Tumona had a suggestion box, but it does, and as were heading out Lukumay showed me this note that he found in the box that morning.  

As far as I can make out the Swahili, it reads approximately as follows:

“Teacher, we wish to tell you nicely that when you chose the students to help, you left out Rozmery  T. Kweka and she has serious problems.  Her father and mother are dead of AIDS, and her younger brother is HIV positive. She lives alone with her two younger siblings.  The name Rozmery B Kiondo was given by mistake, she doesn’t have problems like Rozmery.  If you have the chance, kindly consider her.”  

You can imagine how I felt; Lukumay also was very distressed.  He is really very fond of his students, and he said that although he knows most of their families well he had no idea about Rozmery’s problems.  We lost no time agreeing that the original goal of sponsoring 40 students was arbitrary and that we could easily put forth 41 names.  I hope that anyone reading this will consider helping out with our school sponsorship drive, which will take place in August or September, as soon as I get back to the States and am able to get the information online.  Of course you can begin donating now at friendsofafrika.org.

On another note, tomorrow we are taking Peter Chami to enroll in vocational training, to learn metal working and welding.  I’ve mentioned him before, and we’ve finally found a placement for him at what looks like a very good vocational center run by a Catholic convent in the middle of a gigantic sugar plantation just south of Moshi.  Today we had a bit of an adventure finding the things he’s supposed to take with him to school.  Do you know where to buy welder’s goggles in Moshi?  I do now.

Peter, showing off some of his new welding tools with his parents.

Teaching and Learning in Narum

This week I had several interesting lessons.

I had several opportunities to teach science classes at Tumona when the teachers did not appear at school.   There are many reasons why a teacher may miss school or come late.  They range from simple reasons such as illness, to more complex ones such as challenges with transportation to school.  But there is also the matter of an underpaid and demoralized teaching staff who often have a side business outside of school or who may simply prioritize other personal matters above coming to work.  I’m not sure which of those reasons applied this week at Tumona, but both science teachers were absent or very late for several days.  Everyone I’ve spoken to here says it’s a problem all over Tanzania.

I had observed enough teaching that I felt comfortable taking over the Form 4 Chemistry class and the Form 2 Biology class.  In both classes I knew what the next lesson was supposed to be and I had observed Godwill, their teacher, presenting material to them.  I’ll start by saying that I don’t think the way material is presented in the classes I’ve observed is effective, but it seems to be widespread. Godwill’s usual method is to copy several pages of information from the book to the board, so that the students can copy it down.  Then he goes through the material verbally, explaining and elaborating.  He would generally do this in Swahili, though the material was written in English; my Swahili isn’t up to the task, so I used a mixture of English and Swahili.  Students are invited to participate by completing a sentence in unison.  Teacher:  “Heating copper hydroxide is the indirect method of preparing copper?”   Students:  “oxide.”

This approach to teaching is very different from what I’m accustomed to in the United States, and it’s apparent to me that some more student-centered approaches would probably help the students to appreciate and master this material much better than they currently do.  However, my efforts to engage students in discussion have all fallen completely flat.  The students clearly aren’t comfortable speaking out in class.  If they do have a question they usually ask me to repeat a definition or fill in something I left out.  Getting them to take a risk, to propose a hypothesis or argue a point seems to be nearly impossible, at least on short acquaintance.  I don’t have a clear idea in my mind about how to approach this situation.  I’m convinced that the customary approach is an inefficient and ineffective way to teach an understanding of science; however, it’s deeply embedded in the educational culture of Tanzania, and I don’t see an obvious way to bring about change.  But if and when we do additional teacher workshops here, this is an obvious point to address.

The Form 1 Chemistry class presented a different challenge.  These are the youngest students in the school, equivalent to 8^th grade students in the USA.  Their English is extremely limited, and I had to teach them in as much Swahili as I could, though at times I had to revert to English, and I suspect they understood little of that.  They were studying mixtures, and the textbook pages I was working from listed a large number of methdos for separating mixtures, from separatory funnels to fractional distillation.  But when I started to work with the students it was clear that they didn’t even understand what a mixture is, or what separating a mixture even means.  So I started out having them think of mixtures they knew of from daily life, and they were much more willing to participate in this than the older students.  I spent the rest of the class demonstrating how salt dissolves in water but mud doesn’t; how to filter mud out of water or to decant the water away after the mud has settled, and to boil the water away from a salt solution leaving the salt behind.  There were over 30 students in the class, far too many to take into the science classroom, so I brought materials in and demonstrated from the front of the room.  I would have loved to let them do these experiments themselves.

The students had some difficulty with changes of state.  I let them watch solid iodine sublimate, which caused them to ooh and aah, but they clearly didn’t know what had happened.  In trying to explain I came to realize that these children living without electricity at the equator had never in their lives seen anything melt.  With Kilimanjaro in plain sight, I tried to explain that very cold water forms ice, and that all the water running off the mountain comes from the melting of the ice.  I’m not convinced that any of them understood me.  Still, I felt that I left them with a much more tangible understanding than they had before of what the topic they are studying actually is about.

My second big lesson of the week came in discussion with Lukumay about the difficulties facing the village, the students and the school.  I had known that the village of Orori is extremely poor and that many of the students are unable to pay their fees.   I have been gathering information about a number of those students in the hope that Friends of Foot2Afrika will be able to recruit sponsors (this will be appearing on the website in the late summer/early fall).  However it turns out that almost all the students are behind in their fees.  As an illustration, the school fees for one term are about 50,000 shillings (about $30.00 US).  Two weeks into the second term, he had collected about 110,000 shillings from 300 students.  This money came not from a few students paying their fees, but from a large number of students coming to school with 5,000 or 10,000 shillings.  Somehow he is required to run the school on almost no money, with little help from the government and no capacity to get money from students’ fees.  It’s clear to me that sponsoring students isn’t just about helping students go to school; it’s about keeping the school afloat.  It’s not a long-term sustainable solution to the underlying problem, but it’s essential.

My third big lesson came yesterday when I went to visit three schools that had each sent a teacher to the workshop I organized two weeks ago.  These schools are quite different from one another.  

Lyaskika Secondary School is high on the slopes of Kilimanjaro where the weather is often wet and where lush banana plantations and streams abound.  Rundugai Secondary School and Longoi Seconary School are down on the flats where conditions are very dry and the vegetation is scrubby, almost desert-like.  It was a long drive across dusty tracks to find these schools, which are quite remote from any sizeable town.  Here also the people farm using irrigation to grow onions and other crops that require relatively little water.  

I expected to find that these schools had little to nothing in terms of science equipment and supplies; but I discovered that all of them have a decent collection of glassware and at least some chemicals.  Longoi has a large science room under construction through help from a European contact, and Rundugai has a "mobile science laboratory", which is demonstration bench with a sink and gas jets for Bunsen burners.  However, in all cases the materials seemed to be stored in a dust-covered pile in the back of an unused room.  Teachers apparently have the students do specific experiments that are likely to appear on the national exam, but do not integrate experimentation into the teaching of the subject. 

Lyaskika Secondary School

The Teacher at Lyaskika Demonstrates an Experiment

 Students Then Do the Experiment Themselves

 The Headmaster's Office at Rundugai Secondary School.  Those boxes in the back are full of 

the school's glassware, chemicals and other apparatus.

 A Building at Rundugai Secondary School

I'm getting used to the fact that everywhere I go I may be asked to give a spontaneous speech. 

This is the "Mobile Science Lab."  I have no idea how often it's used.  

I'm very intrigued by the setup for using Bunsen Burners, though.

Longoi Secondary School

The New Science Building Under Construction at Longoi Secondary School 

 The Teacher at Longoi Gives a Demonstration of Practical Chemistry

I went into this summer knowing I had a lot to learn.  At this point I think I am learning that the challenge of providing laboratory equipment and supplies is not as great as I had anticipated, but that the real challenge is teaching teachers how to make effective use of these materials.  I think, based on the feedback I received after the first workshop, that the teachers themselves would be receptive to this. 

I have a lot to think about.  But that’s a big part of what I came for.

Teaching Practical Chemistry to Teachers at Tumona Secondary School

Saturday I completed four days of workshops for chemistry teachers from 25 schools.  There were two two-day sessions.  Teachers ranged from quite experienced to brand new, and all seemed to enjoy the experience and appreciate the opportunity.  We covered types of chemical reactions, relative reactivity of metals, mixing solutions, qualitative analysis, stoichiometry and volumetric analysis (acid-base titration).

I also learned a lot, and was left with a lot of questions.  One of the biggest challenges is the availability of materials and equipment.  Though the teachers were very appreciative of what they learned, most of them made it clear that their schools had no materials to do the experiments, and no money with which to obtain them.  Creating science centers throughout the school district needs to be one of our priorities.

One challenge I faced while planning this workshop was choosing what kinds of supplies to bring.  In the US I rely heavily on small plastic dropper bottles, which hold standard solutions of a variety of chemicals.  They are an easy way to provide each student group with the solutions they need, and easy to store.  We also use small spot plates instead of test tubes for conducting experiments.  They are more economical than test tubes because they use less material, and they also produce less waste.  This would make them ideal for use in Tanzania, but the bottles and spot plates are not available here.  The teachers really liked them, but I question whether it is feasible to transport hundreds of these items to Tanzania.  Also, if the students learn chemistry using this type of equipment, how will they perform when they are given different materials to take the national exam?  Nevertheless, I chose to use them, largely because I didn’t think I could manage teaching so many labs in so short a period of time without them.

I also insisted that everyone wear safety glasses (true laboratory goggles were out of my price range), which is not one of the safety rules published in Tanzanian textbooks.

Clearly there is a lot of work and thinking to be done.

Preparations

The last two days have been a flurry of preparation, cleaning up the science room, purchasing supplies, mixing solutions, labeling bottles and dealing with emergencies.  Although the school is on holiday, various students dropped by to help out or watch.  One group was happy to label solution bottles and put the different solutions in them.  This was a fantastic help, and probably saved me at least an hour.

I took a moment with Mr. Mattei, the Second Master, to pose for this photo by a tree we planted just two years ago -- it was less than a foot tall then.  I don't think trees in the USA grow this quickly.

The workshops start tomorrow.  The first two-day session has 20 confirmed participants.  I expect a similar number for the second session.  This is very exciting, if a bit intimidating, given that I had expected to teach six to eight teachers in total.