Week 2 & 3 - Bagamoyo, Tanzania

This week we’ve decided to try out headings. Here goes…

Sports Day:

One of the orientation activities that our volunteer organization, CCS, arranged was a sports and games day. Around fifteen volunteers and CCS staff went to an oval nearby Max’s school and played a game of football/soccer. Some of the guys are big football fans and pretty good players. As we got tired, we let the local children take our places. The kids had turned up to play on the oval – barefoot and with a bunch of plastic bags squashed together and then sewn over with material as a ball.

We played egg and spoon games, and when we had finished the staff and children ate their eggs. We also played “Red Rover”. This is a game where two sides line up facing each other, with arms linked. Players are then chosen one by one to charge at the opposing line and try to break the link (or arm, whichever gives way sooner).

For the last game, the staff pulled out a chicken from the back of our minibus. The idea was that they would set it free and we would try to catch it. We weren’t so keen on this sport – the chicken had been locked up in the hot van all morning and looked close to death – none of us wanted to be the one to tip it over the edge. We diplomatically suggested that we were tired and perhaps we’d sit this one out. The staff looked disappointed but cheered up when they had the idea that the kids could chase the chicken instead. Poor chicken!

That evening we went to see the family of musicians that we had visited the week before performed at a local restaurant/bar. This time they were dressed up in traditional costumes and it was even more impressive to watch. At the end they grabbed us to come dance with them on stage. The youngest boy who really knew how to shake his booty insisted that Max dance with him. Max now has some new dance moves to showcase when you next see him.

As it was a CCS event, we were allowed to stay out past curfew, but as usual we were exhausted and headed home to bed at the first opportunity.

Traditional healer (Witch doctor):

Last week CCS, arranged for us to visit a traditional healer. The healer didn’t speak any English, so his brother was there to help. Both were in their 70s. When the brother introduced himself, Didas, the CCS staff member with us, started to laugh – the brother’s name translates as “Professor Excuse Me”.

The healer and his brother were quite nice, and for the most part they seemed to be reasonably sane people. There were a handful of things that we did find peculiar however, for example:

1. Apparently there are two types of HIV/AIDS: the real kind, and the other kind. Although traditional healers cannot cure the former, the latter (which is caused by a curse) is not a problem when treated with the right potion. Just as a side note, HIV/AIDS is a massive problem in Bagamoyo – the national infection rate is 5%. In Bagamoyo the rate is 9%.
2. They showed us their ‘x-ray machine’. This is a chunk of amber the size of a small fist. Somehow this lights up the parts of the body that need to be treated, although the lighting-up was not demonstrated.
3. They had laid out a number of potions and tinctures for us to examine. The items that they chose to present were: a love potion, a medicine for female arousal problems, and their own version of Viagra.

Anne’s placement:

After my week of observing, I was totally thrown in the deep end. On Monday, one of the teachers didn’t turn up, so I had two classes (about 70 children) and I was told to teach them Maths. Maths is taught in Swahili, and since I can barely count to ten in Swahili this puts me slightly below the level of the children.

Somehow I managed, and we learned to count in English and Swahili as well as covering some basic sums. There is no real comprehension around sums – like most things they are taught by rote learning. This means they can pratlle off 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, 1 +3 = 4 … but as soon as I mix up the order they just look at me with a confused expression.

So, this week when I taught them Maths I went back to basics – i.e. teaching what the numbers mean. They know the numbers but don’t really understand that 3 is representative of 3 units. I used flash cards from 1 – 10 with corresponding numbers of animals drawn on them. I covered up the numbers and asked how many and then revealed the numbers – it seemed to go OK, but I’m not sure how many really got it.

For the rest of the week the other teacher didn’t turn up so I was teaching two classes all week and for half of this week. Although theoretically I would have a teacher supervising me, in reality a member of staff would occasionally pop in to check that things were Ok, leaving me alone to do whatever I wanted to with little guidance or input. It was pretty overwhelming at first, but I’m getting used to it.

The hardest part is that the kids often get rowdy and start playing up. I find it hard to manage them since all I can say is “Hapana” (“No”) or basics classroom commands. This makes it very difficult to maintain discipline, and it’s not helped by the fact that the rest of the teachers hit the kids (as is customary Tanzania). They use sticks to hit the children on their hands, legs, heads – wherever really. It’s really upsetting, especially because it often seems arbitrary – if the kids are being loud, the teacher will walk into the room and just hits whoever is nearby until the class becomes quieter again. Most of the time it will be a light smack on their palm, but often the teacher will hit the child really hard until he or she cries. It’s horrible to see the children cower and flinch in pain – and I can’t really say anything. Even if the teachers did speak better English it would be difficult for me to tell them to stop doing something that is so common and accepted.

The CCS line on corporal punishment is that we should just try to lead by example, and hope to change things that way. We try to do this, but it’s difficult as the kids don’t take our attempts at discipline seriously. One time I gave a kid a time out, and it seemed to work OK. But the next time I tried this the class thought it was a great game. They all tried to stand in the corner and kept calling for me to put them in the corner…. Anyway, I’m still very much learning what works and doesn’t. And although I have mornings where the thought of trying to teach 70 kids who don’t speak the same language as me in a small under-resourced classroom exhausts me – it’s hard not to smile when you see the kids.

Some of the children wait for me on the streets on the way to school so that they can walk with me. When I get to the school they all run towards me. They hug me and laugh and smile and start chattering away (in Swahili… but I’m sure they are saying nice things ). And then when I’m teaching (or trying to teach) and starting to lose patience they will do something really sweet. Sometimes when they particularly like something I’ve done they sing me a song that goes “Well done, well done teacher…. And you are the best, and you are the best”. The song ends with each of them giving me the thumbs up

This week Max helped me draw some pictures to go with the alphabet to put up in the classroom. The room needs brightening up a bit. The kids LOVED it – they were soooo excited as the pictures were being pasted to the wall. They were running around, dancing and singing the alphabet – I got a loud round of the “you are the best” song that day!

Max’s walk to school:

One of my favourite parts of the day is my ten-minute walk to work in the morning. Most days, as I walk out of the CCS compound I’ll see a few women walking by, balancing huge tubs on their heads.

As I turn onto the Dar Highway (with two lanes it’s the largest sealed road for miles, but has little traffic) I might be overtaken by someone pedalling an ice-cream cart. Or maybe a guy pulling a trailer on foot where you would normally expect to see a horse attached. Often I will pass a man cutting the grass in the overgrown graveyard with a machette. Sometimes I see one of the school-kids, bareheaded on the back of a motorbike, clutching his dad. He recognizes me, waves, and gives me a huge grin.

I turn off the highway and onto a dirt road. I pass the goats and chickens before I get to a neighboring primary school where the African drums are played loudly every morning for assembly.

Within a minute I am in view of my school – as soon as the children see me they come rushing towards me for hugs, and to find out how many children can climb on top of me before I can’t lift them any more.

Discipline at Mwanamakuka (Max’s school):

Two lowlights from Max’s teacher’s repertoire of cruel kindergarten discipline:

1. When busy marking work, if the class is not reciting excercises loudly enough, the teacher should go round to every single child in the class and smack them – regardless of whether the child was loud or quiet.
2. When smacking a child, if the child runs away, choose a small lynch mob of around ten children to chase the child, the same mob can then hold the squirming kid while the teacher hits him or her.

Bugs:

There are a lot of insects in Bagamoyo. These are mostly flies and mosquitoes, with the odd preying mantis. The strangest thing is that around 6.45pm, just after sunset, it seems to rain bugs. Hundreds of black, ladybird-sized bugs fall from the outside canopy just as we finish dinner. They drop on our heads, in our food, in the washing up and down our clothes. We’re reasonably blasé about it now - but the black bug shower usually signals the end of dinner.

Zanzibar:

We took a trip to Zanzibar last weekend with all but one member of our volunteer group. Getting there was quite the ordeal – we thought there was a 2pm ferry from Dar Es Salam, so we set off from Bagamoyo at 10.30am. About an hour into our drive, our dala dala (a small minibus, commonly used for transport in Tanzania) broke down. Luckily it only took about half an hour to get it all fixed, but it was a fairly anxious 30 mins. The only thing that we could understand was when he told us “five minutes… five minutes”.

Anyway finally we got to the ferry terminal and it turns out buying the tickets is yet another ordeal. We were swarmed by touts who told us that there is no 2pm ferry – we had to catch their 4pm ferry. They insisted that if we followed them they would “sort us out”. We were so confused about what to do we called Mama Christine back at Home Base, and she took charge by giving one of the touts a tongue-lashing over the phone, and then placing us in his care. We arrived at our beach-resort at 6.30pm – eight hours after setting off.

We had a really nice uneventful Saturday at the hotel. It was low season, so the resort was almost completely empty, and it rained for most of Saturday. It was good to relax in a slightly more luxurious setting for a day and a half.

The journey back to Bagamoyo on Sunday was even more epic than the outbound trip. We caught a different ferry called the Sea Bus. It turned out that this boat was half ferry, half puke machine. The ferry rolled so much that everyone except Max got very sea-sick, filling plenty of sick bags. It looked like 90% of the passengers were feeling ill, with many lying on the floor. The boat was sweltering because the air conditioning was broken for the whole two-hour trip.

When we got to the Ferry Terminal, we were again overrun by touts. There was a huge confusion because our original dala dala driver had sent another driver in his place without telling us (the substitute driver spoke no English). When we tried to call the driver’s phone around ten times before we could get through. And then the person who answered was not the driver and spoke no English. We had stressful hour or so while we tried to figure out if we should get in the bus with the strange driver. All the while a number of dubious characters were vying for our attention in order to ‘help’ with the situation, for a small fee. Once again, a phone call to the CCS staff eventually resolved the situation.

By the time we got back to the Home Base at around 10pm we were exhausted again.

Stay off Max’s mzungu patch:

This week we had a visitor at Mwanamakuka - my school. She drove up to the school in a newish 4-wheel drive – a real sign of wealth in this part of the world. When she stepped out of the car the children grabbed me and shouted “mzungu” (which means either ‘white person’ or ‘person who walks with his farts in his trousers’).

My initial emotions were highly territorial – this is my patch; the children hug me when I arrive at school; I know how to sing the Bagamoyo song with these kids; and I know how to speak about 10 words in Swahili. From talking to the other volunteers I get the impression that this is everybody’s response to being usurped as the only novelty foreigner.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the visitor to my school was lovely. She is called Jenny, she is a researcher, and has a long running project with Bagamoyo hospital. She brought a video of her five-year-old’s kindergarden class saying hello to my class. And she recorded my class sending a message back to them. The children absolutely loved it.

That’s it for this post. We don’t have any plans to go away this weekend, so it’ll probably be a quiet weekend in Baga. Hope this finds you well – take care, and send us any news.

xox

Week 1 - Bagamoyo, Tanzania

Before we start our first entry we wanted to say one thing – we didn’t realize that writing a shared blog means that we have to write using a strange blend of third and first person (using “we”, “Max” and “Anne”). We apologise to all you grammar snobs (and we know a number of our friends are indeed this way inclined).

We left Hong Kong late last Friday night – we were running around doing things right up until the last moment, so it was pretty chaotic. We intended to have a couple of hours to relax and enjoy a bottle of champagne we’d received for our wedding and had decided to savour on our last night in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the bottle was skulled while we desperately packed and cleaned. We said goodbye to our apartment and rushed to the airport where we boarded the flight and promptly fell asleep. We arrived at Dar Es Salam airport in the morning to baking heat.

We met with the other people in our volunteer group – everyone is really nice. There are Jen and Staci (sisters from Ottawa, Canada), Mina (studying at Boston Uni), Adil (a student from Halifax, Canada) and Tracey (originally from Detroit, but now living in Arizona). They range in age from 19 to 42.

We were told that Bagamoyo (the town of our placement) is 90km away – and that it takes between 1½ hours up to 5 or 6 hours to get there. We did pretty well and arrive at the home base around 2 ½ hours later. Immediately the Swahili started – there are lots of different greetings to learn, and each greeting has its own specific response. The home base staff tries to encourage us to learn by always greeting us in Swahili and getting us to respond appropriately.

The home base is basic – a bit like a hostel. But by local standards it is the height of luxury. We have guards at the gate, we have a driver, and there are three cooked meals a day. The meals are excellent – mostly vegetarian curries with a little meat or fish. Anne is particularly pleased that so far we have not had a bat in our bathroom or bedroom.

The home base staff are fantastic – very keen to share the Tanzanian culture with us, and are also very progressive and tolerant.

Mr Zik runs the Bagamoyo program – he is in his 60s and claims to have been Tanzania’s first DJ, he’s spent a lot of time in Denmark and is a great authority on all things Tanzania.

Mama Christine is a lovely woman in her 40s. She hobbles on a crutch because she broke her leg abut two years ago in a bajaji accident (a bajaji is a 3 wheeled motorcycle taxi that we would call a tuk-tuk in Asia – we’ve taken to calling them b’dodgies after just one ride in them). The bajaji was hit by a truck – Mama Christine was left unconscious by the roadside – both the bajaji and the truck drove off. Luckily someone finally found her and took her to the hospital – a year later and she is still recovering.

There are a bunch of other CCS staff who are great – including Tuma (24 years old), the security guard who takes great care of us and only gets four hours sleep a night because he has to study – he is at secondary school and wants to go to college.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday were spent doing orientation activities. These included:

1. An exercise where we walk around town carrying out assigned tasks just to familiarise ourselves with the geography. Our activity was to go to the post office and find the cost of posting various items to various destinations. We completed the task, but managed to irritate the lady working at the post office – she must hate having new volunteers come and do this task every couple of weeks – and then not buy a damn thing.
2. Swahili lessons with a guy who looks a lot like Richard Pryor. These lessons are fairly useless since Richard Pryor just gives a list of words that we could get out of the phrase book.
3. A visit from the doctor who gives us a brief lecture on malaria, HIV/aids and cholera – and then took us around the local hospital. The hospital is in really bad condition. All six wards were extremely dirty with soiled mattresses and dated medical equipment in each one. During the tour the doctor just marched all seven volunteers into another doctor’s office in the middle of a consult with a female patient! Many patients looked like they were in pretty bad shape amongst the filth and squalor. Mr Zik had impressed upon us that we had to tell him if we were feeling sick – on finding out that this was the hospital that we would go to as volunteers, we felt that there was not a lot of incentive to confess.
4. A visit to the District Commissioner – the District Commissioner didn’t show.
5. A meeting with representatives from all the volunteer placements. We met the teachers that we would be working with. This is where we figured out that the teachers spoke only very basic English –it was very difficult to get a good sense of what we would actually be doing in the classroom.
6. A trip to visit a very talented family of musicians who entertained us and asked us if we could maybe get them a show in Australia…. We said we’d try so if you have any contacts, send them our way!

There were a bunch of other activities – some of them were interrupted by the frequent downpours (it is rainy season). We were also gradually getting up earlier and earlier. The Tanzanian day starts at 6am (this is sunrise all year around) – this is their 12 O’Clock. So when a Tanzanian tells you the time, you need to add 6 hours. We have a curfew at 10pm (regular time) – but this feels pretty irrelevant since we tend to go to bed at around 8pm, exhausted.

On the Sunday, the previous group of volunteers got back from their weekend away. A few of the previous group have left, or are leaving, but there are four volunteers who are staying on for a few more weeks. These guys are the cool kids – they know everyone, know their way around, can give us the low-down on our placements and are regulars at the local bars. If we were in ‘Nam – they’d be the cynical, hard-bitten guys on their fourth tour and we’d be the fresh meat. Given our newbie status, we were pretty chuffed when we managed to find a new bar nearby that none of them knew existed – they put it down to Max’s English nose being able to sniff out beer anywhere.

Our first day at our placements was on Tuesday. Our van dropped all the volunteers at their placements at around 7.30am. Most volunteers (including both of us) are working with kindergarten-aged kids. When our van showed up the kids started to get excited and stared at us, when the door opened they started to flock, and when the volunteer stepped out of the van they all ran full pelt toward him/her, arms outstretched and smothered the volunteer in a chaotic forty-child group hug – stamping over each other to get closer – screaming “mwalimu, mwalimu” (teacher, teacher).

Max’s teacher, Madam Rachel didn’t turn up till a half-hour later. The head teacher told him that he could start teaching them some English if he wanted – somewhat terrified at the prospect, and having no clue what to do he decided to just hang out with the kids until Madam Rachel showed up.

Madam Rachel is pretty scary in class. At first Max was quite impressed by the way that she maintained discipline, but after the second day it became apparent that this was pretty much a reign of terror. Kids are very regularly smacked – most often with a stick on the hand.

Mr Zik had told each placement that the volunteers had to be allowed to observe for the first week, and then start teaching the next week. However Madam Rachel had Max teaching by the second day. The teaching is rote learning – you yell a word, and the class yells it back. It is highly tedious for everybody. By day 3 Max was taking the class for the first 1 ½ hours of the 4 hour day. And by day four he was taking the maths lesson in Swahili – this was pretty cool because he had to learn the words for numbers, the operators, and general match phrases really quickly.

The classroom is pretty basic and resources are very scarce. Lots of kids don’t have exercise books. When they practice writing, the teacher usually takes the class outside so that they can trace the letters in the ground. There are two or three text books for the whole class. When the teacher discovered that Max does a reasonable job of drawing she got excited and gave him a list of around 60 pictures to draw. The pictures can be used as teaching aids as a substitute for the text books.

Anne’s placement is more of a free-for-all. The class goes from 8.00am to 10.30am and the kids are taught a single subject for that entire time. Monday to Thursday they are in the classroom and on Friday they just play outside. There are lots of songs and dancing, but not a great deal of learning. The songs are cool and the kids love to dance – and have great rhythm. Their current favourite is a fairly inappropriate song to do with going to London to ‘get’ your mother’s boyfriend – but it is catchy, so they love it.

Anne’s school have kept to their word and allowed her to observe for the first week. Although this is good, it also makes her feel like a bit of a spare part a lot of the time – but that should change for the second week.

One thing that we didn’t consider was how hard it is to learn over 40 names. Some names are more memorable than others - Anne has a girl in her class called Happiness who cries every day.

After our placement we have lunch and then there is usually a Swahili lesson followed by some orientation activity. Then we will usually try to do about an hour of drawing for the class the next day, and then its time for dinner at around 6.30pm. While we draw pictures of hippos and apples, the volunteers who have done their placement with one of the HIV/AIDS organizations tell us about their days spent with those with AIDS who are shunned by their neighbors, literally can’t afford to feed themselves and sometimes share their huts with livestock. We hear stories of hideous wounds where the bandage hasn’t been changed for weeks, crawling with flies and smelling so bad that they have to wear a mask to dress it. It sounds difficult – and these volunteers have next to no resources to help. We can’t help but feel ridiculous for ‘playing volunteer’ with the cute kids. We know what we are doing is helpful too, but just seem to not be in the same league.

It seems pretty weird that we do so little – just a few hours of work every day – and are ready to drop at 8pm. Once we get a bit more used to the routine, we hope to work at some of the other placements in the afternoon, but at the moment we are just too knackered to even contemplate it.

On Friday we had some free time, so we helped out one of the other volunteers in our group. She works for an organization called AMAC – basically a local guy who felt sorry for the orphans in the area and set up a makeshift classroom in his back yard where the orphans can go in the day and learn a little. The back yard is built on top of a rubbish dump from an old sculpture shop – so there are bits of glass and wire sticking up from everywhere – very dangerous for the kids. We went to tidy it up. We spent an hour and thought that we had made a big improvement. We had to stop because of a torrential monsoon downpour. When the rain had passed we looked out to discover that the rain had washed away all of the area that we had cleaned to reveal still more broken glass, wire and sharp pieces of sculpture. However the AMAC guy subsequently promised to buy some cement and cover the dangerous ground. It will cost 13000 shillings for the cement (about US $10) which is about 10 days salary for the average Tanzanian – we’ve proposed that we’ll buy some art from the AMAC guy (who’s an artist in his regular life) so that he can put the money towards the cement.

Some of the other volunteers went to Dar this weekend (they went to stay in a proper hotel and have proper showers so they could feel clean – maybe after a month here, we’ll want to do the same!), but we decided to stay here in Bagamoyo. We have had a quiet weekend – mainly just getting settled and hanging out.

We are thinking of taking a trip next weekend – either to this island called Lazy Lagoon or maybe to Stone Town on Zanzibar. But first we have to get through another week of teaching!

We better head off and practice our Swahili before it gets too late. Hope you are all well.

BAADAYE!!!!!!

xo