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