Ruaha: Most Beautiful Place On Earth?

Ruaha National Park after the annual rains is an absolute Garden of Eden, a living landscape in the peak of health and beauty. Its lifeline, the Great Ruaha River, which has dried up every year since 1994 due to environmental damage caused by rice farming and cattle grazing, was flowing at full capacity when we visited this weekend.

The park is 50,000 square kilometers of natural stillness; the only sounds are wind and water, birdsong and animal call. Elephants spend hours every day rejoicing in the river, trumpeting their delight. Giraffe and zebra congregate by the hundreds along the riverbank to graze on the effusive greenery.

Guidebooks tell you not to come in the wet season because the bush is so thick that animals are difficult to see. Maybe we got lucky, but in addition to the grazers we saw thirty lion, three cheetahs and a leopard in a baobab. Of course, we wouldn’t have seen half of these animals without the incredible eyes, experience and instincts of our guide and driver, who has become a good friend since our first safari.

He routinely spots animals that are completely camouflaged, hiding in thick bush, or lying down behind baobabs - at a distance of 100 meters while sitting down and driving!
But then again, he is an extraordinary man by any measure.

After graduating from primary school at the age of 12, he spent the next ten years of his life working as a gardener and caddy on a golf course in the tea-estate highlands of Mufindi. He learned so much English from the golfers that one day his boss asked him if he wouldn’t like to take a new job as a guide in Ruaha.

This was in 1984, when the first tourist lodge in the park was being built. 24 years later, his knowledge of Ruaha is unparalleled. Having learned about local flora and fauna from his uncle as a child, he studied field guides late into the night in his first years as a guide, and so learned to recognize thousands of plant and animal species, and name them in three languages: his native Hehe, Swahili and English.

We look forward to each safari with him because we learn so much and because he radiates kindness and positive energy. Now in his mid-40s, he is happily married and has four young children who want to grow up to be park guides just like their dad. His kids love watching the DVD we made after our first safari – it was the first time they had seen their dad on the job, and they constantly rewind it to see him driving the Land Rover. One of his dreams is to bring his whole family to Ruaha.

We’ll be offline for the next couple of weeks as we travel to the coast and then up north for our first look at Serengeti and Ngorongoro. World famous though they are, we’ve heard about the hordes of tourists and vehicles, and wonder how anything could possibly beat being alone with our friend in the sanctity of Ruaha.

Corporal Punishment, Cell Phones and the Student-Centered Classroom

As in most countries in the world, students and teachers in Tanzania are late to school every day. Here, however, tardiness is the surest way to receive a beating – if you are a student. Tardy teachers are rarely if ever reprimanded. This reminds me of American teachers who talk on their cell phones in class yet have no scruples about confiscating their students’ phones. Where’s the justice?

As a teacher who’s confiscated many a phone, and whose colleague once flung an old cell phone across the room so it shattered all over his dumbfounded students (who thought it belonged to a classmate) I’m not advocating for a free cell phone policy in our schools. I do, however, support equity in the application of certain rules for teachers and students. “Do as I say, not as I do,” has never worked for anyone I know.

Teachers, although underpaid and overworked, are respected role models in all human societies. Julius Nyerere, the “father” of Tanzania, is often referred to as Mwalimu (teacher) and his picture is still displayed prominently in every school and public building in this country.

I just read that some NYC schools are considering paying teachers $125,000 per year, and this I heartily applaud. Others are considering giving students financial incentives for good academic performance, and this I vehemently disagree with. In my opinion, the deepest learning comes when students are internally motivated. Motivation, like intelligence, manifests itself differently in every student, and it also changes over time.

Teachers, therefore, must be able to gauge the interests of their students and structure school-time accordingly. Administrators who have wrongly conceded to paying students who perform well are undermining the teaching profession and giving in to the material culture of America. It would be unthinkable for Tanzanian students to receive money for stellar academic performance. In fact, most Tanzanian teachers refuse to attend workshops unless they know they will get paid (this is a huge problem for NGOs trying to disseminate ideas here).

This brings me to the question of participatory learning, and ultimately, participatory living. American schools are some of the most creative in the world, and for all we do wrong, most teachers I know try their best to engage students and help them to take responsibility for their own learning. Our students rarely hesitate to question the teacher or speak their truth in the classroom, for they know the classroom is theirs.

Tanzanian students, on the other hand, rarely speak up in class. If they do, they may get beaten for giving a wrong or inappropriate answer. Tanzanian law mandates that no more than four strokes per offense be doled out to students, and only the headmaster is allowed to give beatings. Few if any schools actually adhere to this law, in fact, some have creative ways of getting around it. If a student is to be beaten, he or she will often receive two or three strokes from one teacher, then get passed on to several others.

The reason for this discipline is not just numbers. Sure, some may argue that hitting is the only way to maintain order in a class of 120. However, the passivity of so many students cannot solely be explained by fear of punishment; it lies in culture and the educational system itself, which still operates on 19th century assumptions. Add to this the appalling and inexcusable lack of resources, and you get crippled classrooms.

Anette astutely observed that the level of control exerted over students in school stands in stark contrast to the enormous responsibilities – and trust – that Tanzanian children are given every day. Where in America do you see a four-year old child shopping for the family needs at 9 o’clock at night? You don’t. We’re too paranoid and America is too dangerous - a cozy symbiotic relationship that keeps people in fear of each other and the world. In Tanzania, children are cared for by the entire community and there is very little violence on the streets.

Tanzanian children run their family’s shops, are used to hours upon hours of manual labor, and are respectful of their elders. By doing all of these things they earn the respect and trust of their communities, and are never “babied” the way so many American kids are. Why, then, don’t Tanzanian teachers entrust them with similar responsibility in the classroom? It’s a question that will take more time for us to figure out, so please stay tuned.

The Primary School Blues

My last post was about a public school in a relatively wealthy village; last weekend I had lunch with three friends working for CIDA in poorer villages in Iringa district, and they gave me an even bleaker picture of public education here.

Primary schools are the most neglected because they are free for all Tanzanians; consequently, families don’t feel that they are losing anything by keeping their children home to work on the shamba. This is of course true of many migrant and farm-working families in the US and all over the world; when the harvest needs to be brought in, all available hands must help. Indeed, our summer vacation is a holdover from a time when a majority of Americans lived on farms.

However, students aren’t the only ones who skip school to work on the shamba – teachers do it, too. On any given day several teachers may not show up for work because they have decided to stay home and do the weeding. If none of the teachers show up (and this happens all too often) the students just sit idly on the dirt floor of the classroom or run around in the schoolyard. But they do stay close the school in hopes that their teacher will show up.

At one primary school Anette visited with FORS, teachers sleep on the classroom floor at night because they don’t have money for a hut. The day she showed up school was closed because it was payday for teachers in Iringa town, but as soon as the car came within sight of the school dozens of children came running up to the car, waving their reused notebooks in the hopes that they would have school after all.

Again, cultural relativism is necessary in thinking about this situation: primary schools average 100 – 120 students per class and teachers are barely paid enough to stay alive. So if you were faced with the choice of going to work to teach 120 students with no books and no blackboard, or weeding and watering your shamba to make sure you’ll have enough food to survive the hungry season, what would you do?

Tanzania’s current primary enrollment is between 80-90%, but the secondary enrollment is a mere 25% (http://www.tanzaniaembassy-us.org/government/). Of these 25% most are boys; because of traditional gender roles, girls are expected to the bulk of the work at home. Some families want to send all their kids to school, but simply cannot afford it and thus prioritize the boys.

The good news is that those who do study at the secondary level benefit from smaller (70) classes, more resources and more teachers. Most teenagers in Iringa town go to secondary school, and many of our friends here are studying at one of Iringa’s five universities. Two college students in Dar started a website called JamiiForums, a free speech free-for-all whose discussion board debates about corruption led to the recent firing of many top government officials.

Contrast this with the fact that after independence most African countries had so few highly educated citizens that important jobs in business and government were often filled by people with a primary school education. Zambia had about 1,000 high school graduates in 1961 – imagine running a country with that talent pool. Uganda’s Idi Amin completed 7 years of education and later joined the army – a deadly combination.

With the Kenyan political crisis now diffused, thanks in large part to two highly educated Africans - Kofi Annan and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete - East Africa can continue the vital work of addressing the challenges, like high quality education for all, that all societies struggle with.

A Public High School in Rural Tanzania

Idodi Secondary School serves 800 students from several villages on the outskirts of Ruaha National Park. 500 of these students are boarders, and their colorful school uniforms are eternally strewn over every bush and branch near the dorms, hanging out to dry after a thorough hand-washing. The boarding students receive three square meals a day, lining up by the hundreds (see pic) at a long tin-roofed shack under which ugali is cooked on small charcoal-fired stoves. On a good day the school has 15 teachers, so average class size is about 70. On pay days the school shuts down because the teachers have to take the long bus ride to Iringa (read my last post) to get their money.

At Idodi Secondary as at every other African public school, teachers beat their students. Our host, a 26 year-old social studies teacher, seemed young and progressive enough to understand our opinion that beatings are old-fashioned and harmful to the kids. No way. When you’ve got a class of seventy students and four books to share among the lot of them, beating is the tried and true way to maintain order. Besides, he said, he never feared the beatings his teachers administered to him when he was young - in fact, it made him study harder.

Perhaps that is why, as evening fell and the generator switched on, hundreds of students gathered in the dimly lit classrooms to continue studying well into the night. Or maybe it was that those students didn’t get a chance to look at the books during class time.

For me, cultural relativism is vital to thinking about this situation. I come from a country where a teacher would quickly be jailed for striking a student. I also come from a country with a stranglehold on the world’s resources, whose privileged students are coddled from birth to ensure they make it into $40,000 a year schools, and whose minority students are devalued at every level of the educational system. With so much, we achieve so little. Classrooms are filled with the latest technology, yet few students can be convinced that school is a place they might enjoy, let alone a place where they might choose to spend hours studying every evening.

Maybe it’s just human nature – the more you have, the lazier you get; the less you have, the harder you work. The sad thing is that even for those Africans who graduate from university, paid work in their field is often impossible to come by. I’m reminded of the Zambian trucker who gave us a hitch back to the TZ border. A trained social worker, he was forced to start his own trucking business because of lack of work. Not that there’s not a need for social workers in Africa, there’s just no one to employ them. So now this well-educated man drives his dangerously old truck 1800km twice a week from Tanzania across northern Zambia to the DRC and back, peddling dried fish, soap and candles to a people whose government can’t meet their basic needs for safety and sustenance.