FORS Fieldwork

Dear Readers,

Apologies for the month-long silence, but we’ve been busy moving into a new house, planning our wedding, doing fieldwork with FORS, and going to Bagamoyo last week for a great music festival. Before we continue our East Africa travelogue, here’s a description of what we’re up to these days…

After traveling all of East Africa, we came back to Iringa appreciating it for what it is: a productive regional capital with four universities, plenty of government jobs and a booming central market. It was all the more shocking, therefore, when on our first trip to the field with FORS, we drove just 70 kilometers outside of Iringa town and encountered some of the most desperate living conditions we’ve seen in all of East Africa.

As we descended into the Pawaga valley everything looked like the barren deserts of the Sudan: flat plains that should have been covered in grass were a wasteland of brown earth, and all the bushes and trees were bare. We stopped to eat under the meager shade of a thorny tree, and as we sweated and swatted the flies away hoping for a breath of wind to relieve the heat, we wondered how people out here survive from day to day. The answer for many is pastoralism: tribes like the Sukuma, Gogo, Mang’ati and Maasai keep thousands of cattle, goats and sheep and graze them everywhere, but this destroys the topsoil and leaves nothing but brown dust.

Desolate as this landscape was, it couldn’t have prepared us for the sad state of the biggest of Pawaga’s 13 primary schools. It is located in a village with no water source, so donkey carts trudge four hours to the river and back every day. There are 800 students at the school, and on a good day, five teachers – you do the math. Most classrooms don’t have desks, so 70-100 students sit together on the floor, but as there are no visible routines and no educational resources, there is little reason for them to sit in class at all.

The result is that students mill about the schoolyard all day long in their ragged, dirty uniforms and teachers teach when they feel like it, which isn’t often. Pushing and hitting each other with abandon, the students ran to meet our Land Rover and crowded around to stare at the two wazungu. Our Tanzanian colleague told them to go back to class but they just stood there as if she had been speaking Norwegian.

On this round of school visits, our task was to evaluate students’ knowledge of weather.
To find out what the youngest ones (grades 1-3) knew about the weather, we planned a couple of games: one is to pinch your nose for a minute to see what happens when humans don’t have air to breathe, and the other is to release a balloon to understand that wind is air that’s on the move.

When you enter a Tanzanian primary school classroom, all the students rise together to greet you, hands to their foreheads in a show of respect, and shout “Goooood mooooooorning teeeeeacha!! Hooow aaare yoouuu?!!” If you ask them to sit down, they respond in chorus, “Weee aaare sitting doooown nooow, thaaaank youuuu.”

At first, this might seem like an impressive display of classroom management and student engagement, but it’s really just blind obedience. When it comes to creative thinking and freedom of expression, few dare to speak. This is why FORS tries to introduce interactive games and participatory learning.

When Anette and I stood together in front of this particular class of second graders, they were so excited that they couldn’t keep still or quiet. They were so eager for adult attention that they forgot their obedience. Of course, the color of our skin and the sound of our non-native Swahili spoke louder than anything we were trying to say, but it was clear that these students were not used to following rules and listening to instructions.

There was, however, a bright spot: we decided to lead the students in a rendition of the catchy chorus of the FORS film “Water is Life,” which they had seen in April of this year. With all the students clapping in unison, we sang the chorus several times and were delighted to see that the students knew all the words.

As we drove away full of conflicting emotions about our experience, we were all venting our frustration, talking loudly over each other as the Land Rover bounced along the dusty road. This is the nature of our work with FORS; the goal is to improve the quality of environmental education in these village primary schools, but school itself is an alien concept from an alien culture.

This point was illustrated for us the other day by a 75-year-old man who still remembers what his British teachers used to tell him when he was a schoolboy in colonial Tanganyika: “What an Englishman doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.” Forced on Tanzania by its colonizers then abruptly abandoned at independence, the public education system has languished like a hippo out of water ever since, growing more and more bloated as national enrollment increases while teacher training, pay and resources remain unconscionably insufficient.

If there’s anything we’ve learned from our 15 months in Tanzania, it’s that change here takes a long time, much longer than we wazungu tend to expect. So, if we measure progress by the Swahili saying “pole pole ndio mwendo,” (slowly, slowly is indeed the way) then maybe it’s safe to say that FORS is making a difference even in the most difficult of its 24 schools.