Introducing Moses

We’d like to introduce Moses, our Masai  (or ‘Maasai’) night guard (‘askari’). The VSO office in Dar es Salaam suggested we should have an ‘askari’, and our housemate, Niki (who is back in Alberta now) learned from a Ministry of Education school inspector, Ramla, that Moses was available. Ramla, along with a young Masai friend of Moses, called Losaro, who speaks English, acted as interpreters.

Moses is on the job from 6:00 pm to 6:00 am, with a day off each week.  Of course, these times are based on ‘African Time’: it might be better to say sundown to sunrise. He has never missed a day, and takes his job very seriously. He sits in a chair in the shadows, with a small pile of rocks and his ‘eremet’ – a spear/walking stick that every warrior is given at a young age---on the ground beside him. He is up at the door in the wall to check every sound. VSO is paying his salary of Tsh 80,000 (Tanzanian shillings, about $50.00 a month, which is the average monthly salary in Zanzibar), but we have padded it.

Masai villages are all on the mainland, in northern Tanzania and Kenya. Our landlord spoke to him and learned that he has no place to live or sleep.  With the landlord’s help, we bought him a bed and mattress. He now sleeps on our covered porch during the day. He has Masai friends in similar situations he meets with during the day for tea and talk. We provide water by filling large plastic containers for drinking and washing, and a bucket for washing his two clothing items and a blanket. 
  

The Masai culture makes fascinating reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people

When we go to Sri Lanka for two weeks over Christmas, Losaro will be our daytime askari. He has made it clear that he feels strongly that Moses and he should not and will not take days off while we are away. It turns out that he was right.

Added the following morning:

We came back from Stone Town about 9:00 pm, to a very agitated and excited Moses. From what we could surmise from the few words we could pick out from his long explanation, and his gestures, two boys or young men on bicycles had climbed over our wall and were very surprised to see Moses approaching them, swinging his stick and beating it on the ground. They scrambled back over the wall and rode away quickly. He ended his story with a laugh, so we think he was amused that they took him seriously. We have no concerns about our personal safety.

Work Finally Begins...

We hope that this entry will be interesting to both our
educator- and non-educator- family members and friends.

Note: *Photos: Descriptions at bottom. I haven’t figured
out how to label photos yet.



OK, time to work! An intensive secondary teacher training program is ready to go, beginning next week. Why not sooner, you may be wondering. Secondary schools have been open only infrequently since we arrived. Here's why.

This year, the period from mid-October to mid-November included:

-  the celebration of the religious holiday, Eid of Al Adha
Schools closed.  

-  exams for Form 7 (14 yrs of age, the last year of Primary school.  Q: How did that affect volunteers in secondary schools?  A:  Secondary school teachers invigilated (to ensure that the primary teachers did not influence the marks). Schools closed.

-  one week of classes. Schools open.

-  two weeks of secondary exams at the Form 2 Level (Grade 10), the last year of compulsory education in Zanzibar.  On this occasion, secondary teachers from one school invigilated at schools other than their own, to protect the integrity of the exam process. Schools closed.  

Our roles as volunteers: 

Peter will be working with Heads (Principals) of three secondary schools in the Stone
Town area to help with the development of leadership skills. Jane will be working with a few English teachers in the same secondary schools with teaching strategies other than the commonly used teacher-centred /rote learning method. They will then model some of the new teaching techniques to others and so on...(‘Cascading’) with volunteer support.

During the couple of weeks when the schools were open, Peter met with heads to introduce himself and to learn about each school and how it operated. In both cases he had a chance to read, and learn about,  the school’s annual plan in preparation for further discussions.

We have met with a couple of Ministry of Education people. We were aware that it was a small staff with a lot to do and little money to do it. They took time to meet with us and discuss, over cups of tea, our roles here. We look forward to meeting with and updating them periodically.

Jane has met with two of the lead teachers and spoken with lots of students! Most were too shy to ask questions so, aware that their written English was much stronger that their speaking and auditory skills, she talked to them about strategies for listening to and practising spoken English. Most of their questions focused on how to get funding to go to university outside of Africa. She has told them she would look into it, but really, she doesn’t know where to start. They are all so serious, so hopeful, desperate to succeed, and poor.

Critical issues related to our roles: 

(This list, abbreviated and reworded, was found in a 2007 document from the Zanzibar Ministry of Education, Education Development Program)

-        acute shortage of teaching and learning materials including textbooks, reference books, library books, computers and laboratory equipment

-        emphasis on National examinations, conducted at the end of primary, basic, lower secondary and higher secondary education, encourage rote learning-based method of teaching.  Failure rates at all levels are extremely high.

-        a great shortage of qualified secondary school teachers, particularly in science, math and English language

-        about 50% of teachers at the secondary level under -qualified or unqualified

-        low teacher morale and very low pay

-        weak leadership and management capacity,
     including centralised decision making, insufficient number of qualified managerial staff at the Ministry, Regions, Districts and in schools. Most heads of secondary
     schools have not had training on educational or
     school management

-        English language proficiency of the majority of
     students well below acceptable levels, hindering
     their ability to succeed academically and increasing
     their dropout rate

-        low level of English of most teachers

-        acute shortage of classrooms and subsequent use of double shift system, resulting in reduced instructional time

-        average of 60 students per classroom

All of these factors will make our assigned roles very challenging!

Photos notes:

Exterior wall paintings at Mtoni  by a primary school volunteer, Wendy, who devised this solution for the combined  problems of high humidity preventing anything from sticking on walls, and the lack of textbooks. ‘Parts of the microscope’ is always on the Exam, but the school has no microscopes. The other photos of students, classrooms, grounds open to the public---and to ox carts---the water pipe, and the school library where the meeting is taking place, were taken at Kiembe Samaki Sekonderi. The conditions
and facilities of a few urban schools such as these are considerably better than those of most Zanzibari schools as described in 'Critical Issues' above.

These Are Not Pets...These Are Not Pets...

It started with two. On Wednesday, we walked through our gate and into our yard, to find two tethered goats looking back at us. As we confirmed later, they had been brought in by our landlord to fatten up on our grass. Our home used to be the home of the mother, and the property is family-owned---the home base, so to speak.The festival of Eid begins this weekend, and the goats will become 'barbecue' on Sunday.

On Friday, one more goat was added.

Now we have six: one for each of the families of our landlord and his siblings.

We have been warned, (and believe this, based on past experience) that animal slaughter this weekend will be commonplace in yards, including ours, and along the streets.



Peter and have decided that it is a good time to be away, and are heading to Nungwi on the northern coast to stay for three nights. Good excuse!


Call us cold and hard-hearted, but we are looking forward to not waking up to the raucous screeching of the goats at 5:00 in the morning!


Whoops, it's down to five now.

2011 10 23 From Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar

Last Tuesday, after a debate with four porters who wanted Tsh (Tanzanian shillings) 100,000(Can $60---an outrageous sum) to take our bags from the taxi to the ferry, including an hour’s wait with us in the waiting area, Peter and they agreed on a price of Tsh15,000 (still quite high, as we learned later). The ferry was clean and comfortable, the two-hour ride was pleasant. We were met on the other side by Brian, our volunteer rep, who helped us through Immigration by convincing them, rightly so, that we were not required to pay a hefty sum in addition to the visa we already had in our passports.

We were excited to see our new accommodation which Brian and Niki, a Canadian from northern Alberta, who is here on a different, short term assignment with the Ministry of Education, had found. Niki had been staying in a hotel while checking out some pretty awful places. She was very relieved to find this large house .The agreement we made happily with VSO, was that she would stay in the house with us until she leaves in December. This arrangement suits us all---it’s great to have the company, and Niki and I enjoy going off to explore.  

 The house is very big, though the description of a five-bedroom house, each bedroom with its own bathroom, turned out to be ‘inaccurate’, shall we say. There are four usable bedrooms, and two bathrooms which are both clean and in working order---a tough order to fill! Each of the bedrooms we are using has its own bathroom.

The landlord is very ‘accommodating’(sorry!) and has already fixed or has agreed to fix/install a number of things, including screens on our leaky glass windows (mosquitoes and rain are an issue). The ‘grass’ in the yard has been cleaned up, and the lock in the door in the surrounding wall has been replaced so they we can have keys. The kitchen is big, and drawers are now in place. Other repair work will be done ‘pole pole’ (polay polay) based on TT (Tanzanian Time).

We have fruit trees: mango, papaya, lemon, lime, and banana.

VSO, (Volunteer Services Organization, the head office of CUSO, based in the UK) had given us a settling-in allowance, and yesterday we used it all up and more! We have basic food items, kitchen supplies, and bedding.

The rent, at Tsh (Tanzania shillings) 500,000, is just over Can. $310.

I should add that, as you can see, the house is red and white on the outside and very pink on the inside!

VSO suggested that we should have an ‘askari’, (night guard) which they are paying for. We have found one. That;s a story for another time.