A Flurry of Activity to End the Fiscal Year

It's not the end of the school year but it is the end of VSO's fiscal year.  Our budget has provided for transportation and food allowances for our teachers.  Our primary teachers also had incentives, in the form of study materials and school supplies, to encourage them to attend our English and teaching methodology workshops.

We bought these books and school supplies on a recent safari to Dar es Salaam 

On March 31st we no longer have money to run our programmes.  With any luck at all though big donors like the World Bank will come through and our work will continue after April 1st.

In our wrap us sessions we discussed teaching methodology, passed out many school supplies, awarded proficiency certificates, drank soda and ate cake.

 Secondary teachers enjoying some excellent cake

A Sad Day

Pascal Antony's wife died on Friday.  Pascal Antony is our night guard.  You have seen his picture in a previous post.  He arrives at dusk riding his black Phoenix bicycle and walks around our yard wrapped in his black and red plaid blanket until dawn, keeping us safe.  He does this seven days a week for 80,000 Tsh, or about fifty dollars, a month.

Pascal's wife has been sick for a few weeks.  He took her to the local hospital for treatment.  There was no diagnosis, so they sent her home.  A week later she was still sick and so he took her back to the hospital in a taxi, a major extravagance for a man like Pascal.  Something was seriously wrong.  After a blood sample was analyzed Pascal Anthony was told she needed a blood transfusion.  During the time Anthony and his friends were running all over the town looking for blood donors, she died.

She was in her middle twenties.  She was buried yesterday.

Pascal is now left with his seven year old daughter and a one and a half year old son.

We found out about Pascal's wife's death while we were in Dar es Salaam buying books and teaching materials for our primary teachers.  We were travelling back to Kibaya when she was buried so we couldn't attend the funeral.

Mr. Ndee, our Tanzanian manager and local partner, offered to take us to the wake this morning.  Without a shadow of a doubt, Mr. Ndee is one of the most supportive bosses that I have ever had and I don't say this lightly.  He told us what to expect over tea and cookies at our house and even advised Debra to wear her traditional kanga and head scarf and how much money was appropriate to give the grieving family.

We followed a maze of dirt paths to get to Pascal's house guided by Lucas, the fellow standing in for Pascal as our guard during this time.  Tanzania has thousands of miles of paths and as we were walking down them I kept thinking that they had probably been here for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Upon turning a corner, there we were.  Pascal's home is made of mud bricks.  Just outside the house there is a clearing surrounded by corn and sunflower fields.  In the clearing the family had spread out plastic tarps for the twenty or so mourners to sit on.  A wood fire was burning and pot of meat was supported over it by three stones.  In one corner there were a few stools.  We were welcomed warmly.  We shook everyone's hand and offered our sympathy.  “Pole sana” is the correct thing to say.

Pascal, wrapped in a white sheet, was sitting with his immediate family.  We sat with them and shared rich, smoke flavoured, sweet tea.

I feel so sad about this. 

At VSO they say that volunteers learn more than they teach.  I know the population figures of Tanzania and, if I choose, can spout development speak, but that's not what it's about.  It's about experiencing the lives of the people we serve, the good times as well as the bad. 

Today was the bad. 

Cook-off to Promote Gender Equality in our Secondary Schools

Six teams toiled over hot charcoal in our cook-off to promote gender equality and to win the honour of being Top Chefs.  The cooking was done exclusively by the male teachers.  The women relaxed while the men prepared their culinary delights.  This is a very unusual occurrance in Africa.  Married men seldom cook.  Anything kitchen releated is the exclusive domain of the women.  Our cook-off was the first ever in Kibaya.  Who knows, maybe in the whole of Tanzania.

Teachers plucking a chicken

Cutting the meat and chopping the vegetables

Teams working side by side

Peter and Michael working on their chili con carne

The ladies enjoy the feast

I'm not sure how much gender equality we promoted but we did have a really fun time.  There was a lot of laughter.  Who knows, maybe some of the male teachers will take up cooking on a regular basis and will have discovered a creative hobby.

At the end, all participants received a ceremonial wooden spoon and Bwakalo Secondary School won the title of Top Chefs, a certificate and 5,000 Tsh each.



Quis Costodiet ipsos Costodes? (Who Shall Guard the Guards?)

I remember the Latin quote that is the title of this post from Dr. Fletcher my ancient history professor at Acadia in 1970.  In the days before the evils of second hand smoke, he would stand at the front of the class, fire up his bent bulldog  pipe with a kitchen match and smoke Sail full aromatic tobacco while  lecturing about the wonders of Juvenal's Satires.  At times a spark would fly from the match and land dangerously close to the polyester mini skirts of the girls sitting near the front.  It was a minor miracle that combustion never occurred.

At the time I never thought that I would be employing my own guard.  But there you go.  Security is a concern here because it is widely believed  that Mzungus are fabulously wealthy and in Kibaya this is not far off the mark.  Our guard, Pascal Anthony, guards us from dusk until dawn seven nights a week.  I suspect that he has a few naps in the wee hours but he is here and that is what matters.

Debra, Peter and Pascal Antony

He sometimes works on construction projects in our back yard.  I don't really know what this structure is as my Swahili is not up to discussing the finer points of architecture and Pascal Antony’s English is pretty basic.  I will try to find out more about his project.  If you can successfully guess what it is   please enlighten us.  First prize is a one night stay in our house in Kibaya (transportation not included). Second prize is two nights.

Pascal's Construction Project

Anything can happen because TIA but the fact that we are supporting Pascal Anthony, his wife and his two kids may mean that we are less of a target.  Of course when you look at his picture you might wonder, how this little guy could guard us.  I sometimes do. 

But, he is armed with a whistle, a flashlight, a stick, a machete and get this, wait for it. . .a bow and arrow.  You just have to respect a guard who is also a skilled archer.  Lawson Hayman, Debra's father, would have called him, 'a good little fella.'

We don't go out much after dark.  Night life in Kibaya is non existent so there is not much point really.  The security issue is also a factor.  I don't want Pascal Antony re-enacting the Battle of Hastings with him playing the Normans and me unknowingly playing King Harold whilst returning from a night on the tiles.

In the evenings we watch television shows and movies on our computer.  We have an external hard drive loaded up with TV, movies and 3,000 books which can easily be transferred to our Kindles.  We are unlikely to run out of books anytime soon.  I am reading David Lodge's, Deaf Sentence.  Debra is reading Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.  Currently we are re-watching the old British TV series, Upstairs, Downstairs.

Life line to The World

 

We also employ a cleaning lady.  Since I am now the duly elected VSO gender representative for Dodoma region I guess I should call her a cleaning person.  Her name is Amina.  She has one child, a son, who is in Form Four at Kiteto Secondary School so he is in his late teens.

  Debra and Amina outside B-9 (Our house)

Amina comes in four mornings a week to clean the house, do the laundry and iron everything.  She even irons my socks.  Everything needs to be ironed as the heat from the iron kills any Tse tse fly eggs that have been laid in the damp clothing.

Once a week Debra sends her to the market where she gets the best halal beef in Kibaya.  After an earlier alarming incident involving Jik Bleach with new extra whitening power, my clothing and Amina, Debra has hidden the Jik.

In a round about way Amina also helps with security.  We are supporting her family as well as Pascal Antony's 

Gender Workshop at Kiteto Secondary School

 "...neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power."

John William Money

We held our secondary school teachers' workshop on gender equality yesterday. Michael and Mindy, the local Peace Corps volunteers and our neighbours, agreed to facilitate the discussions. There were about 36 teachers in attendance.

Micheal and Mindy are young and just recently married and I knew they would do a better job than me. I, having gained most of my knowledge about gender from reading about the World War II icon, Rosie the Riveter, am an innocent when it comes to gender.

Rosie the Riveter from a WWII Poster

Thanks to Wikipedia I did learn that gender is a term that began to be widely used in the 1970s replacing sex as the commonly used term. The term was first coined by John William Money a sexologist who was writing during the 1950s.

Without trying to offend any of our readers who are rabid chew-off-the-nearest-male's-head feminists or recent graduates with Womyn's Studies degrees, I will go out on a limb and define gender as the characteristics used to distinguish between male and female and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Gender is socially constructed and includes ideas about behaviour, actions and roles that a particular sex performs.

Teachers discussing gender issues

The workshop began with an activity in which each teacher was given a word written on a piece of paper. They were then required, without contemplation, to place the paper under either the male, female or both headings on the chalkboard. Some of the words were pregnancy, money, leadership, authority and love.

Mindy facilitating

After each teacher had stuck his word under his chosen heading there was a stimulating discussion about why we placed our words where we did and some of the papers were moved to different categories.

Mindy then wrote the following prompt on the board: “Educating the female child is the best way to empower a nation.” In the very lively discussion which followed we either disagreed or agreed with the prompt.

Kudos to Mindy and Michael for being stimulating facilitators

The session ended very enthusiastically with all of the men psyched for the Friday afternoon cooking competition. The male teachers will cook for the women. The winning team will win a fabulous prize. Here's hoping that Team Mzungu (Michael and I) will win big. Stay posted.