Tragic Fire at Idodi Secondary School

We were shocked and deeply saddened at the news of a fire that killed 12 high school students in a village where we spent so much of our time with FORS and made so many good friends. Kate has written a very moving piece on the FORS blog, so please read it and give a donation if possible.

http://friendsofruaha.wildlifedirect.org/2009/08/27/fire-in-boarding-house-ends-in-tragedy-idodi-secondary-school-on-the-road-to-ruaha-national-park/

I also posted about the school on this blog last year: http://mfst.blogspot.com/2008/03/public-high-school-in-rural-tanzania.html

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.

One Last Field Trip

On Friday I took twelve of my middle school students to Ruaha National Park for the culmination of our semester-long research project on Ruaha ecosystems. As on all field trips I’ve led, I was quite nervous before and during the trip but tried my best not to show it to the kids. Not until we were a few minutes from home yesterday did I relax and think to myself, “Wow, we made it!”

On previous field trips I’ve never had to worry about my students getting eaten by lions, but nonetheless, there is always an element of anxiety when removing students from the confines of the schoolyard and becoming surrogate parent to a group of teenagers. Despite the headaches of planning and permission slips, these trips are highlights of the school year for both students and teachers. For example, all I remember about 8th grade is that we went to Williamsburg and several romances blossomed and wilted all in the same weekend. Oh, I also remember it was the year I started doing poorly in math.

As a teacher at Berkeley High, my first field trip was a short outing to see “Calivera,” an exhibition of Mexicali Day of the Dead altars. As my 6th period class descended the escalators of the Berkeley BART station to ride the train a few stops south to the Oakland Museum, I was convinced that they were going to rebel and escape to San Francisco, leaving me to call their parents and send out various search parties. To my relief, the only student who went missing showed up later with a good explanation.

On May Day 2007, a colleague and I carried out our ambitious and slightly crazy idea of taking all 60 of our freshmen to an immigrant rights rally in San Francisco. Amazingly no one got lost, and we had an incredible day that included a walking tour of the Mission District murals, which tell the story of the Latino experience from the pre-Colombian era to the present day. What my students probably remember most is chasing each other around Mission Dolores Park before the rally.

When I came to Tanzania to teach in a small international school I imagined peace and quiet - a welcome change from the craziness of American public schools. I didn’t think my field trips would be as adventurous, but it turns out that bringing 12 students 120 kilometers over a very rocky road and sleeping overnight in the bush is just as challenging as taking 60 kids to and from SF on the BART.

Food, for example, is a minor detail of American field trips because we can buy it everywhere. But in Tanzania, there’s no stopping at Subway or McDonald’s. My boss and I had to go the Iringa market to buy 5 kilos of rice, 3 kilos of peas, 3 kilos of potatoes and assorted veggies and fruit so that the students would have food on the trip. When we arrived at our campsite, I had to use my not-yet-there Swahili to arrange for a “mama” to cook our food, and of course we haggled for a quarter of an hour over the price. But these are the details and differences that make Tanzania so endearing.

With the food arranged, my mind stopped running through all the possible scenarios of what could go wrong, and as we set out on our afternoon game drive I focused in on the faces of my students as they waited for their first glimpse of Africa’s famous animals. Surprisingly, four of my students had never been to Ruaha (or any other national park) so I was excited to share in their first experience of this incredible wilderness. “Look, the giraffe is eating an acacia tree!” exclaimed one of my students. “Yes!” I thought to myself, “they’ve actually understood my lessons on species interaction and food chains.”

On our first drive we saw elephants, buffalo, impala, zebra, hippos and crocs, but the highlight was coming around a corner and meeting two huge bull giraffes standing with their bodies pressed against each other, heads side by side. I’d never seen this before, and I wondered what they were doing. All of the sudden they both stumbled and the bushes shook, and I thought they were being attacked by a pride of lions. In the next instant, one giraffe quickly swiveled his head and swung it like a hammer, smashing it into the neck of his rival.

The sound of the impact was frightful, and we all sat with our mouths open and hearts beating fast, awestruck witnesses to a rarely seen behavior. Fatigued by their efforts, the two bulls stood breathing heavily for about half a minute, and then they began again. Their necks were elastic as pulled toffee, but their skulls pounded against their bodies with thunderous force. It was a moment none of us will soon forget – we were 10 feet away.

Our only “complaint” as we went to bed was that we hadn’t seen any cats, but as luck would have it we heard that distinctive roar close to our camp as dawn broke, and sure enough we encountered a pride of 20 lions on our early morning drive. As my students can now attest, there is nothing quite like seeing your first lion.

When we pulled into the school driveway yesterday, I felt a great sense of relief. The students were exhausted from the excitement and the long, dusty ride back home, and so was I. Reflecting on all the field trips I’ve taken in the past few years, I realize that all the planning, logistics and temporary parenthood have been well worth it.

Idodi: A Village Film Show

Yesterday Anette and I squished into a cab after work with our three flatmates (all teachers at my school) to ride out to Idodi for a village film show. For several years now, Friends of Ruaha Society (FORS) has been showing environmental films in their 24 villages – at the primary schools during the day and outside for the whole village at night.

As always, we were greeted with incredible generosity and kindness – sodas to start, then a steaming pot of the Tanzanian staple ugali accompanied by perfectly done beans. Scooping out big portions onto our plates, we all dug in with our hands - some (yours truly) more messily than others - and thanked our hosts, two friends of ours who teach at the secondary school, for their hospitality.

After eating we walked through the school compound to the sports fields, which were glimmering green and gold in the late afternoon sunshine. Hundreds of students were gathered at the various pitches, running about cheering and wearing their colorful school uniforms, different colors for each class. The setting is incredible; the fields are on a plateau above the school with a panoramic view of the valley below ringed by green mountains, and Ruaha National Park just on the other side.

All week at the school they’ve been having an inter-class competition; the winning team will be presented with a cow which they will then slaughter themselves and enjoy eating. With this incentive, the teams were engaged in the most serious of friendly competitions: netball (the Tanzanian schoolgirl’s sport) volleyball, and of course, football. As the football match ended 2-2, the sun slipped behind the mountains and dusk was gathering in the long grass. We walked down from the fields to the center of the village, where the film show was just beginning under the starlit sky.

The projector, laptop and speakers were hooked up to the battery of the FORS Land Rover, and the screen was the side of a whitewashed, thatch-roofed building. Three hundred or so people encircled the screen, children sitting on the ground in front, an elderly man in a white robe and white kofia given a chair of honor at the front of the crowd, the rest standing.

Our Tanzanian colleague stood up in front of the crowd to say “karibuni,” and to explain that the film shows are a part of FORS’ environmental education program - more than just an evening of entertainment. We showed two films in Kiswahili produced by the African Environmental Film Foundation, the first about the elephants of Kenya’s Tsavo National Park and the second about the recent drying of the Great Ruaha River. For people who’ve grown up without electricity, TV and movies, it was a spellbinding two hours, and for us, it was a joy to stand there with them and share in their reactions to the films.

“EEH, EEH, EEH!” uttered the villagers each time they saw a lion, hyena, buffalo, hippo or crocodile.
“TSSSCH” a collective sucking of teeth signaled their disapproval whenever slain elephants appeared on the screen.
“EEEEEEH!” a cry of amazement upon seeing the thousands of tusks collected by park rangers.

One of our teacher friends asked me, “Is there still poaching in Ruaha National Park?” Another asked me, “Do you have elephants in America?” A little girl in front of us exclaimed, “All the fish are DEAD…no good.” A man to our left saw the river sweep away earth and grass from the banks and said, “Erosion. Hmm.”

Contagious bursts of laughter accompanied scenes of a baby elephant being covered with a blanket by its keeper, an orange-headed agama lizard hopping bravely across rocks in the river, storks and herons stealing fish from the crocodiles. In such moments, the power of these film shows was evident.

Although these people live on the border of Ruaha, many of them have never had a chance to visit the park and see these animals. Whenever the smallest children saw a lion on the screen, they grabbed each other and pointed at the screen while saying excitedly, “Simba, Simba!”

Seeing their joy and fascination during the film shows, we can imagine how happy these children will be when they see these animals in real life. This is why FORS conducts educational safaris: so the children and teachers of the primary schools in these villages can experience the spectacular wilderness and wildlife of Ruaha with their own eyes.

Last year FORS took 3,500 students and almost 200 teachers into the park, and this year we hope to take even more. Starting in September, Anette and I will be joining the schools on these safaris, and we’re looking forward to sharing an even more intimate experience of Ruaha with the people of Idodi and Pawaga.

Bagamoyo’s Artists

Each time we are in Bagamoyo we take ngoma lessons. Ngoma is a Kiswahili word that encompasses drumming, dance and traditional music. Ally Zakoo and Shabani Mbatta (whose father is a teacher at the College of Arts) know ngoma inside out – they were born in Bagamoyo and have been playing the traditional music of Tanzania their whole lives. Now in their mid-twenties, they have set up a drum and dance workshop to teach cultural history and social issues to local schoolchildren.

Ally and Shabani play with incredible skill and pure joy, and they make their own drums; we play amidst piles of coconut wood shavings in the shade of a mango tree. On our last trip to Bagamoyo, Anette and her brother André played every day and gave excellent performances at the end of each lesson. After three days with these master teachers (who don’t have teaching degrees, mind you, just an infectious passion for what they do) André went from total beginner to confident drummer.

Vitali Maembe is a different kind of ngoma artist. A unique singer-songwriter in his early thirties, he writes socially conscious songs dealing with corruption, political violence, poverty and AIDS, among many other themes. A radio station in Dar “lost” his album after the firing of President Kikwete’s cabinet, and at a recent performance attended by several government ministers the microphone was taken away from him when he began singing ‘Afrika Shilingi Tano,’ a song enumerating the reasons Africa is perpetually drenched in blood.

In one part of the song, Vitali describes a conversation between Chinua Achebe and a writer from Sierra Leone, who laments that the white man came and killed his father and raped his mother. Chinua responds: “at least you haven’t lived to see the day that your own African people do those very same things to your family.” I guess this type of honesty isn’t what government ministers want to hear.

Vitali is also a painter. He sketches his ideas whenever they come to him but only paints once a year, filling 30 or 40 canvasses during a two-week reverie. His paintings depict the same themes that are present in his songs, and they are wonderfully colorful and sensual.

Mwandale Mwanyekwa is a sculptor who studied in Bagamoyo and is currently featured with other women in an exhibition entitled “Women are Creators” at the National Musem of Culture in Dar es Salaam. It’s hard to say what was more beautiful, her style or her art. Her clothing, jewelry and sculptures are all expressions of the same spirit – the spirit of the African woman, strong and beautiful.

The exhibition was unique because only female sculptors were represented, and all the pieces focused on the world seen from a woman’s perspective: the special relationship between a mother and her child, daily tasks such as fetching water or cooking, all done with a baby wrapped to her back. One of her most striking pieces was a wooden African continent on which she carved her own profile encircled by the words “Women can create change.” As she told us, the goal of her art is to empower women by celebrating their strength, grace and wisdom, qualities that are imprinted in each of her sculptures.

Artists like these are fundamental to change in any society. Where would we be, for instance, without Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young and the countless other musicians who helped change American consciousness in the 1960s? Artists, like all people, draw inspiration from working together, and as their ideas merge and evolve, events like Woodstock are born. For this reason, Bagamoyo’s College of Arts is so important to the future of Tanzania - all the more so because there are so few schools like it in all of Africa.

Ally, Shabani, Vitali and Mwandale all studied at the College of Arts and have worked together on each other’s projects, just as Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Buñuel and Salvdaor Dali formed their artistic identities while living and working together at La Residencia at the University of Madrid in the 1920s.

Much of Garcia Lorca’s energy in his last few years was spent touring with his theater company to culturally isolated parts of rural Spain. Interestingly, graduates of the College of Arts are meant to take their art to other parts of Tanzania to give workshops and set up schools of their own. Unfortunately the government doesn’t have the money to employ many of the graduates, but judging by the enterprising nature of Ally, Shabani, Vitali and Mwandale, Bagamoyo will continue to produce amazing artists for generations to come.

Bagamoyo: The Berkelee of Tanzania

A crescent moon of sand reaches gently out into the Indian Ocean as if trying to touch Zanzibar, 20 kilometers to the east. Palm trees with gracefully arced trunks line the beach creating the perfect sunset panorama. Fishermen sit on buckets scaling their fish while women crowd around in their colorful kangas bargaining for the best price. A 15-foot hammerhead was caught today, sprawled on the beach it still seems alive with otherworldly power. A herd of insanely long-horned cattle are driven down the beach and into the surf by a couple of barefoot teenagers. Having never seen cattle on a beach, we asked the locals what was happening.

“They’re going onto the boat.”
“The boys?”
“No, the cows.”

In Norway, picturesque cows dot the mountainsides that crash down into the fjords, and you can imagine that if a Norwegian farmer ever decided to move his cattle by water, he’d have a big iron ship waiting to transport them. But this is Bagamoyo, Tanzania, East Africa, and the boats here are still made the same way they were thousands of years ago. The long wooden dhow with its single sail gave medieval Arabs supremacy over the Red Sea trading routes, and is still used daily along the Swahili coast from Somalia to Mozambique.

Historically infamous as the starting and ending point of the Arab slave route across Tanzania into Central Africa, Bagamoyo (which means “lay your heart down”) is fast becoming one of our favorite places in Tanzania. We first came here in December on the recommendation of my good friend Jake Thomsen, who found out about Bagamoyo when he came to Tanzania in 1999. Jake took six weeks of drum lessons and was told by his teacher of a music school where the students start their day by drumming on the beach at sunrise, singing into the wind, then diving into the ocean. He then called his parents and said he wouldn’t be returning to Brown for his junior year.

Fortunately for me, Jake came back and taught me how to play the djembe. After college he enrolled at the Berkelee School of Music and I was enticed to move to Boston so I too could play music 8 hours a day. Bagamoyo’s Chuo cha Sanaa (College of Arts - LINK) is Tanzania’s answer to Berkelee. Founded in 1981, it is one of very few arts colleges in all of Africa. Its teachers comprise the Bagamoyo Players, who have performed the music of Tanzania’s 125 ethnic groups at concerts all over the world. For those interested, I highly suggest that you download their 2006 release “Tramo” on iTunes.

Every year, the College of Arts hosts the Bagamoyo Music and Arts Festival (LINK), an event that draws performers from all over Africa and tourists from all over the world. It’s a week of round-the-clock performances and bonfires on the beach, and we’re determined to make it this year. It will be October 14-18, anyone want to join us?!

As if this weren’t enough to make us fall in love with Bagamoyo, it turns out that Norway has been supporting the College of Arts for about a decade now. There is an exchange program for students and teachers of the University of Stavanger to study and work in Bagamoyo, and NORAD (LINK) money helped produce the “Tramo” album. Consequently, many locals know how to say “kjempebra” and “tusen takk,” and we share many a laugh while sitting under the stars at the local café, mixing languages after a day of drumming and singing.

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.

Citizen Journalism: uandishi wa kiraia

Last Wednesday my senior classes were honored to have Maggid Mjengwa, Tanzanian journalist and blogger extraordinaire, talk to us about citizen journalism. He took this picture, and here's what he posted in Kiswahili on his blog about the visit:

Leo nilipata bahati ya kualikwa Iringa International School kuongea na wanafunzi wa sekondari juu ya dhana uandishi wa kiraia (Citizen Journalism). Natumia fursa hii kuwashukuru wanafunzi hao kwa kuniuliza maswali mengi na kushiriki kikamilifu katika mazungumzo yetu. Wengi wa vijana hao pichani wana blog zao.

Rough translation: Today I had the opportunity to visit IIS and talk to the senior students about citizen journalism. I would like to thank the students for asking many questions and participating actively in our talk. Many of these youths have their own blogs.

You can visit my students' blogs, which they created in our IT class, by going to http://globalfriendszone.blogspot.com
From this student's site, there are links to all the other students.

Bye Bye Berkeley High

Wow. One day left as a public school teacher in these Disunited States of America. Disenchanted with the system though I am, my idelaism is still intact, and more importantly, my understanding that teaching is all about the personal relationships. Case in point, two of my students gifted me with pairs of socks today - an amusing homage to my collection of crazy and colorful calcetines, which my students always love to comment on and laugh about. We ended our last class with this group photo. The picture quality isn't that great because I took it with the camera on my phone (2007 - what a trip!!) but hopefully one of my students will send pics or even videos of our lasy days together. I'm going to try to upgrade my personal use of technology with a videocamera and some type of music recorder so I can capture all the brilliance of Taznania and hopefully start sharing some of it on the blog. Gotta finish the master's this summer, first, though. I'll keep trying to write regularly, though - thanks for reading, y'all.

Adios a Berkeley

So my two years here are fast coming to a close. A week from today I'll be on a plane back to DC, and in seven weeks - God willing and the creek don't rise - Anette and I will be together in Tanzania. My CAS colleagues, who are also some of my closest friends out here, had a BBQ for me up in Tilden Park yesterday. It was perfect California day, 75 and sunny, and we had an array of platos sabrosos, including Oliver's parrilla mexicana con carne asada, cebollas y tortillas, Leah's cilantro mint cole slaw and grilled eggplant and zucchini, and Elisabeth's authentic Norwegian "kransekake." Leah also gifted me with a half a dozen water filters that proved their mettle on the CAS Tanzania trip last summer. The Halpern, Martinez and Crawford clans brought their kids, who delighted in throwing the frisbee into the poison oak again and again. Bill showed up on his bike in the late afternoon, having already ridden 100 miles up Mt. Diablo and back (he biked across the country before becoming a teacher). We lingered until the last slanting rays of sun lit up the golden hills and transformed the bark of the majestic redwoods to their true color.

Sublimity and Synchronicity

Why was today so sublime? Well, it was one of those incredibly busy days that comes along every once in a while where everything is spontaneous, creative, positive and productive. It's all about flow - like a great guitar solo, except your words are the notes and your feet are the fingers as you transition seamlessly from conversation to conversation, event to event, fret to fret. It's the feeling of being up in front of a classroom of students - your students - and knowing you're on. It's playing Hold 'em at lunch with the CAS Poker Club, founded by yours truly and some young gambling enthusiasts on the soph retreat at the Marin Headlands two months ago. It's hanging out with DeAndre after school, como siempre, and finally doing the Big Backpack Organization. We bought a dozen folders, went to an Italian deli, then sat in the sunshine and cleaned out his backpack, putting papers that had been missing for months into their newly titled homes.

Afterwards I went to my flamenco lesson, and we worked on Alegrias, and then David told me about discovering the Bay Area flamenco scene in the late 60s, which at that time had already been around for half a century at least. How did he know? One of his teachers, a Mexican musician who emigrated to SF in the 1930s, said that when he arrived during the Depression there was flamenco all over the Bay Area, and that it had been there for a long time. Increible!! What a privilege to have begun this journey in Sevilla five years ago, and to now be connected by this amazing music to such a uniquely creative and pasionate part of the world. Ole! Viva la Bahia! Viva el duende! Viva hyphy! Que vivan todas mis relaciones.

Oh yeah, and speaking of all my relations - why was today so synchronous? Olivia graduated from Columbia with a Master's in Historic Preservation!!! Wish I could have been there, but Mom, Dad, and Granny represented in NYC for me. She and I are just finishing as DeAndre is just starting to formulate his ideas about college, y todos estamos unidos. Cosmic circles. After my flamenco lesson I drove to the house of one of my freshmen to pick up a car-full of food for our daylong retreat tomorrow in Tilden Park. Memories of bulk shopping at Cosco for the soph retreat, cramming the back of the Subaru wagon, unloading it all into my fridge, then loading it all into the car again the next morning. Memories of waking up at 5:30am to transport more mountains of food last spring for our MexEx brunch fundraiser. What an unbelievable two years in Berkeley it has been!

English vs. Spanish

To my surprise and delight, The Wind in the Willows was on Masterpiece Theater tonight. The actors were quite good and the story true to the original, but the truth is that nothing can compare to the book itself. The intricacies of language and the detail of the written word are among life's greatest pleasures, which is why I'm so enamored of the blog as a vehicle of expression. I've been wondering recently why I chose not to major in English, Am Lit or Brit Lit, and then I remembered...I have never really liked school!

I love learning, but the confines of classrooms and stylistic conventions, the toils of essay-writing and my penchant for procrastination always seemed to dampen my creativity. In fact, I think the only reason I'm a halfway decent teacher is because I don't like school. Getting back to the point, though, I remember deciding against English as a major because Emerson taught me to have an original relationship with everything, and from Thoreau I learned that the best books teach me, better than to read, to put them down and commence living on their hint. I reasoned that I didn't need any one to teach me how to read, interpret, reflect on, and write about books in my own language.

And so I chose Spanish, because I had "studied" it in the classroom for eight years but had minimal comprehension and fluency with the language. Ah, public school - if only my high school Spanish teacher knew what I was doing now! Anyway, Sevilla and Anette made the language come alive for me, and the rest is history. Now it's on to Swahili, but I guess my point is that I will always derive enormous comfort from reading books in English because it feels like home; I will never know another language with the intimacy that I know English.

I've always been given to hyperbole (but it's meaningful - when I say it's the best day of my life, I mean it, and every song and every riff is the greatest ever in the moment I declare it to be!) so I'll sign off tonight with a first draft of my top nine favorite books list (in no particular order). Readers, feel free to share yours...

1. Growth of the Soil - Knut Hamsun
2. Homage to Catalunia - Orwell
3. 100 Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
4. Kavalier and Klay - Michael Chabon
5. Moby Dick - Melville
6. Sometimes A Great Notion - Kesey
7. Angry Black White Boy - Adam Mansbach
8. On The Road - Kerouac
9. Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
10. The Awakening - Kate Chopin

First verse

Alright, we'll see what corrections Pries makes, but here are my first bars in a looooong time (maybe since Meridian)

Some call me teacher of Spanish
some people think I'm outlandish
cuz they judge me by the color of my socks

I don't mess with glocks
the only weapons I brandish
is all my love
i even give you my sandwich
cuz I'd rather be empty than full

I teach public school
what you know about me?
I'm the tall white man from suburban DC

I'm your worst enemy
take your head off the desk
I don't let you sleep
so if you came to rest
then you best be steppin'
outta my class
if you ain't here to learn
get the heck outta CAS!

Blogging again?

It's been exactly two years since I wrote "skool," the second post on this blog. I haven't had the time or energy to add anything to this page in the last year and a half, but I've been reinspired by the superhuman efforts of my friend Paul, an American opera singer married to a Norwegian flautist. Their daughter was born on my birthday in 2004, when I was living in Oslo, and just three days ago, their first son was born - on my dad's 62nd birthday. Through it all, Paul has been able to blog almost daily about all the details of his life, a feat I admire and appreciate.

The truth is, though, that I haven't been totally absent from the blogosphere - last summer I led an amazing trip for thirteen of my students to Morelia, Michoacan, and we recorded our experiences on the MexEx2006 blog and in the videos they created. Hmmm...maybe Nobu can help me figure out how to get the videos onto youtube, and then we can link them to the blog...

How ironic that I aspire to live as Thoreauvian a life as possible, yet with a few clicks I can utilize of the wonders of technology to disseminate my thoughts to the world. Well, I am finishing up my Master's degree, after all, and it is 2007, not 1847, so I guess I can reconcile any disagreements Old Henry might have had with computers and bloggers.

Speaking of that degree, that's why I haven't been able to write at leisure; all my writing of the past two years has been for school - either Berkeley High or George Mason. I'm not sure when I'll write my book about the travesties and joys of public education in America (maybe this is it) but I'd like to strive for consistency from here on out. I'm supposed to be be writing a research paper right now, but this is more fun.

As reflect on the "skool" post of March 23, 2005, I'm struck by the fact that good listening remains the cornerstone of my teaching and my classroom discussions. I could write pages about each and every day and each conversation and interaction that that has transpired between then and now, but happily, for all I've grown and been challenged by my students and the reality of their lives, I'm still me. Just today I had a similarly intense discussion as that first one two years ago, but this time with a different set of students. Granted, I know these students on a much more personal level (thanks to the idea of small schools - yeah CAS!) but the ultimate lesson for me is that to be an effective teacher, I simply need to be a caring human being with good listening skills.

I hope to write soon about our recent field trip to see Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings, and the awful irony of Congress passing an emergency war spending bill authorizing another 100 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All I want to know is - where's the emergency public education bill?

SKOOL

I'm using words so the tears don't flow from my eyes...I just decided to change my lesson plan 2 minutes before class...I was going to show a video cuz it's the last day before break, but i wanted more...I told them to write silently for 10 min. on the Red Lake shootings, and the suicide in our school last week. They wrote, and what followed has my hands shaking as I write this...BREAK

In the middle of that last sentence one of my students who experienced our incredible discussion came to me, head down, unsure, seeking...and because of him I stopped writing and started listening, again...

He told me of being jumped in an alley and getting a gun pulled on him, about how his real father didn't want him and beat his mother, but how he's trying to focus now and do right so he can go to college or do something productive with his life. He wants to help people, but said sometimes he feels like he can't make it cuz he already screwed up. He echoed the stories of the many students who had the courage to share in my classroom. The first girl to break down and cry told of being raped by a family member. This was followed by another girl who had the same story, had no mother and father, had been locked up for selling crack. Then another girl, beautiful and successful to all appearances, broke down and told the same sad story. A couple of guys, the cool ones, aloof, had the courage to share aswell. One is taking care of three kids at home - no mother, no father,working to pay the rent and going to high school. And we expect him to worry about how to conjugate "ser" into the present tense? Another of my young men shared about his father and his uncle going to jail - still there - and then asked the class in the most poignant tone, " Do you think God would forgive someone for selling drugs?"

I listened and I listened, moving around the room at times to changethe energy, always trying to be attentive, thinking very much about what sticks with me most from the book "Teacher" - how well he listened. We could have gone on much longer than the bell, but I got up at the end of class and said how grateful I was to them for their courage and honesty, and how I would never forget this, never forget them, that I love each and every one of them, that I expect them all to go to college and open the doors to their own freedom, and that if they ever need to talk, they could come to me. And we all clapped for each other, and the girls stayed afterwards hugging each other and crying with the girl who had revealed her darkest secrets, her most burning pain, possibly for the first time.

So here I am writing while my 8th period class is raucous infront of me, lights out, movie on, because they couldn't sustain the same level of maturity when we tried to discuss the same issues. Such is the fleeting nature of the teenage attention span. The door to stillness and mutual respect seems magical to me - it opens sometimes by itself (I steer gently at times) but it can close without warning,leaving me powerless to open it again. And that's OK, because this is Upper Marlboro, Maryland, March 23 2005, and someone just pulled the fire alarm.