14
June
2009
Here in Kongwa, it’s the time of the year when girls and boys are ushered into adulthood. Drums, whistles and songs can be heard at all hours as everyone practices and celebrates for the festivities to come. Despite how brown and dusty everything has gotten, everyone’s in a good mood. The rains have long finished, all the crops have been harvested and the locals have more time and money on their hands than at any other time of the year. Yesterday, led by the sounds of the music, I wandered down to the enclosure built for selling off surplus corn and found that several vendors were set up selling goat meat and alcohol made from every conceivable substrate: milk, bamboo juice and hibiscus to name a few. People were happy, friendly and pretty drunk for the mid-afternoon. I was welcomed to the community by a number of older men and women in typical fashion:
“We are your parents; this is your home.”
“Let me know when you get married so we can throw you a party.”
“You are a Tanzanian now.”
“Can I have 20 cents for some moonshine?”
For the new, youngest members of the adult community (ages 12+), this is the time of their lives when they learn about their tribal history and traditions and are physically marked out as being adults. Among the Wagogo (the dominant tribal group here) this often includes facial scarring, cirumcision for boys, and (all too often) genital mutilation for girls. I remember my first Swahili teacher, Jumapili, telling me about his own initiation ceremony and circumcision. After being cut, he and the other boys were led into lake Victoria where small fishes, drawn by the blood, came to feed on their fresh cuts. Any boys that tried to flee were driven back into the lake by the older men, armed with sticks. At least here in Kongwa town, it is typical for boys to be brought to the district hospital for circumcision. The level of hygiene in this practice obviously deteriorates as one travels further out into the villages. One of the reasons I was told this was an ideal time of the year for circumcision was that the weather has finally cooled down. However, it seems to me a slight consolation to feel a pleasant breeze as your foreskin is getting chopped off.
As for the girls, the practice of female genital mutiliation is illegal and therefore there exists a great deal of reluctance to talk about it. However, in all of Tanzania, it is most widely practiced from this area of Central Tanzania up to the north towards Arusha. Traditionally it was quite common among both the Wagogo and the Masai, still highly populated in those areas of Tanzania today. One NGO associated with battling this practice is the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) in Tanzania. Although the organization’s programs in Kongwa are quite limited, they are the only group doing anything here on this front.
In our own project on the ancillary benefits of Azithromycin, we are looking at sexually transmitted infections (STIs), among other disease categories, and are therefore asking women about pain with urination. Given not only the existence of female genital mutilation but the taboos against its open discussion, this naturally poses a research challenge. Finding out more about the prevalence of this practice and its disease consequences would be both important and logistically-challenging medical research. It is a topic long overdue for study here and one that ought to be implemented in the context of a broad-based series of preventative, educational, women’s empowerment programs.
Joshua 
Kongwa Trachoma Project, Tanzanian Society & Culture 
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13
March
2009
I met the nicest witchdoctor last week. I was spending the day in one of our study villages, supervising village health workers, biking around to points of interest and taking GPS coordinates. It started out as a joke when Steve Schachterle and I agreed to write a paper on “Distance to Witchdoctor” as part of our analysis of relevant variables correlated to different disease categories: Malaria, Acute Respiratory Infections, Diarrheal Disease and Sexually Transmitted Infections. The more I thought about it, however, the more I felt it was actually important to include witchdoctors among our identified local resources, since they justifiably serve as dispensers and repositories of traditional medical knowledge.
First, I suppose I should say something about the term “witchdoctor.” Although not the sort of thing that anyone would self-apply where I come from, Tanzanians often use the English word “witchdoctor” in a completely neutral sense. Like the word “half-caste” for people with mixed race heritage, it sounds much worse to the American ear than to the Tanzanian. As for the far more unfortunate tendency of Tanzanians to use the N-word as a label for black Americans, well, that’s painful to hear for many reasons - not the least of which being a lack of consciousness that anyone would find it offensive. In any case, for the sake of propriety, perhaps I should substitute “traditional healer” for “witchdoctor,” although I am not entirely sure whose sensibilities I would be protecting in this instance. Maybe they have decided to take back the word “witchdoctor.”
Despite the freedom available in English usage, I have found it more important to be careful with my terminology in Kiswahili. In looking around the village for traditional healers, I explicitly used the term Mganga wa Kinyeji (village doctor) or Mganga wa Asili (traditional doctor) in my search. While “witchdoctor” may be a neutral term, Mchawi (witch/wizard/sorcerer) is not. To make matters a bit complicated, Tanzanians generally consider the terms Mganga and Mchawi to be synonymous, the former a nicety disguising the underlying malevolent reality of the latter. “Is it possible to be Mganga without also being Mchawi?” I asked some Tanzanian colleagues. “If an Mganga only helps people,” I was told in the tone of voice suggesting the concession of an unlikelihood, “then he is not Mchawi.”
Medicinal elements of traditional beliefs and practices can be touchy subjects to broach, especially coming from a white American. Among the more harsh criticisms I have heard Tanzanians level at one another is the claim that some tribe/ethnic group (Kabila) is barbarous or unchristian, as evidenced by their traditional religious/magical/spiritual practices. I hear gossipy backbiting about who wears amulets, buries good luck charms, or talks to their dead ancestors along with the typical denunciation that such people are not real Christians. Of course, the longer I stay in Tanzania the more convinced I am that most people have not so much given up traditional beliefs as they have incorporated them into Christianity, Islam or modern science, as the case may be. “I don’t believe in witchcraft since as I Christian I believe all power comes from God,” a primary school teacher friend told me, “therefore God protects me from the witchcraft.” If this quote leaves you a bit confused, trust me, it’s better to just embrace the paradox.
Taking GPS coordinates at the homes of local healers, I made sure to sound a positive note about what I was doing. “I am using this computer to identify important locations in the village so we can make a map,” I explained to the kindly old man, the fourth and final of the villages’ Waganga. “We are marking the village government office, school, churches, water sources, dispensary, drug store, and the homes of the Waganga,” I continued as he looked at me somewhat worried, “places where people can get local medicine” I added in my best nonchalant tone. “We would also like to see some of your medicines,” one of the village health workers added, anticipating my interest.
The old man immediately struck a pleading if defensive note. “All of my medicines come from tree roots,” he insisted, “I am not Mchawi.” I emphasized that his work was important and that I was only interested in knowing where people could get medicine in the village. “People just pay me with food,” he continued, “I only work to help people, not to make money.” In addition to being known for their ability to get rich from their spells, Wachawi also use sinister ingredients in their medicines: blood, bones, hair, skin – often requiring a brutal collection. In my former village, a local man was found dead in the woods with much of his skin missing. Witchcraft was the universal suspect. Albinos are in particular danger on this account, as many Wachawi agree that their skin possesses magical properties. White, European skin, I was assured by everyone, has no magical benefits, though some regard European hair as potent. The old man said he used only tree roots to distance himself from such practices.
As the Mganga took me and the other village health workers to his shaded treatment area, he continued to plea his case. “If my medicine doesn’t work,” he continued, “I tell people to go to the dispensary. If that doesn’t work, then they need to go to the hospital in Kongwa or even Dodoma.” I was impressed. By the far the biggest problem with local healers is their potential opposition to western medicines. Especially given much of the widespread skepticism regarding AIDS and the western powers (“Americans put HIV into condoms,” I have heard from suspicious Tanzanians on more than one occasion), there are plenty of Waganga who implore their HIV+ patients to take traditional medicines in lieu of Antiretroviral medications. Obviously this Mganga was concerned with the health of his patients, not his medical market share.
“I only have one medicine right now to show you,” the old man apologized. I assured him I was happy to see whatever was on hand as I took the proffered gourd-bottle. “What does this medicine treat?” I asked. “It is a topical oil,” he explained, “for injuries, pain, malaria,” he gave as examples. I had to admit that I was hoping for a slightly less grandiose claim, given how circumspect he had been up until this point. Nevertheless, I understood him to be sincere and thanked him for his work. I am not inherently opposed to placebos, especially when accompanied by the appropriate referral for serious cases.
Undoubtedly much of the magical approach to illness stems from an inherent sense of powerlessness in the face of disease and uncertainty. When a patient comes to you clearly suffering, it feels like doing something, anything, has to be better than admitting defeat. There is little consolation in telling someone to just get bed rest and let nature run its course. I can relate to the witchdoctor’s woes, as I get asked for medical advice on a regular basis these days. I am not a medial doctor, nor do I have at my disposal any diagnostic tools other than a rapid malaria test kit, a thermometer, and the knowledge gained from countless, paranoid hours spent reading my Peace Corps issued copy of Where There is No Doctor, analyzing my mysterious skin inflammations and unpredictable digestive cycle.
During the course of our current study, our village health workers are dispensing Coartem and Quinine for malaria, Amoxacillin for acute respiratory, ear and some skin infections, oral rehydration salts for diarrhea, Azithromycin for chlamydia, Ciproflaxin for gonorrhea, Paracetamol for non-malaria fevers and cough syrup for coughs without rapid breathing. Naturally the villagers have come to expect us to have a medicine for every illness and have expressed feeling neglected or cheated if we cannot provide them with such. It is in fact the reason we are giving out limited amounts of cough syrup. Our initial treatment regimen called only for treating coughs accompanied by rapid breathing. Mothers were getting annoyed at reporting their child’s persistent coughs during the health workers’ twice weekly visits without getting anything for it.
As I continue to talk with villagers about their symptoms, I find it is often the case that the best treatments are simple, common and throroughly unexciting. In this arid environment with limited access to clean water, most people are not drinking enough. Even for those with better than average access to water, this still seems to be a common problem. I have had several people tell me about muscle soreness and headaches at the end of the day. These same people are reporting that they often drink less than a half liter of water per day. Additionally, the local diet is dominated by starches and other carbohydrates with limited fresh vegetables. Telling people to drink more water and get more vitamins in their diet feels a bit like a brush off – to me and to them. It would be nice if I had my own tree root oil to dispense.
The most common requests of Waganga/Wachawi in this area appear to be exorcising demons and producing rain. Being bothered by demons seems to be a common complaint and one for which the local solutions are viewed as rather reliable. The bad news for my work is that the first requirement for the demon-afflicted is cutting out all western medicines. Apparently they are contra-indicated for the local stuff. A trip out into the wilderness for up to a week commonly comes next. Finally, local medicines, prayers, drumming and dancing generally finishes things off. As for rainmaking, and I swear I’m not making this up, the local spiritual and meteorological practitioner climbs up onto the roof of a house with a mud-baked roof, takes off his clothes and moons the sky. I guess I shouldn’t knock it until I’ve tried it.
Further reading:
Newspaper article on witchcraft and the law in Tanzania
Insightful commentary on witchcraft in Tanzania by a public health worker
Joshua Kongwa Trachoma Project, Tanzanian Society & Culture 5 Comments »
14
February
2009
Although nearly ubiquitous throughout Tanzanian schools, corporal punishment is a demonstrable failure. Even if one were to discount its blows to student self-respect and human rights, corporal punishment quite simply fails even in the simple task of deterrence. Discipline problems are usually in direct proportion to the amount and quality of teacher supervision. Too often, teachers and administrators are absent, leaving students alone in classrooms for most of or all of the school day. Is it any wonder then that such students fail to arrive punctually, to stay put in the classroom all day, or to study quietly?
As a secondary school teacher at a rural Tanzanian school for two years, I often bitterly joked with my fellow teachers that if corporal punishment were so effective, it ought to be used right up the chain of command. Absent teachers ought to be flogged by the headmaster, absent headmasters to be flogged by the District Commissioner and so on, right up to the members of the National Examination Council of Tanzania (NECTA) whose examinations are filled with fractured English, poorly chosen questions and numerous outright mistakes.
To give one truly horrible example from these tests, students were asked to explain why Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation does NOT apply near the surface of the Earth. So much for UNIVERSAL gravitation. Where is the oversight of NECTA? Why are students routinely punished for their poor performance on poor-quality tests?
Now it seems that reality also has a dark sense of humor. The BBC has reported the beating of primary school teachers in the Kagera region, ordered by the District Commissioner.
The teachers who were flogged reported that they were too ashamed to continue teaching. Yet students throughout Tanzania deal with such indignities daily and teachers still argue that beatings are necessary pedagogical tools. Even worse, there are those who argue that beatings are an inherent part of African culture and the only way to make African students behave. This is not African culture. This is the culture of slavery, colonialism and humiliation. Since independence, Tanzania has been governed by the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) “Party of the Revolution.” When will the revolution throw off the shackles of corporal punishment in the educational system? The problem is not unique Kagera’s District Commissioner Albert Mnali. It is a country-wide problem that needs to be addressed now.
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26
January
2009
Dear colleagues, friends and family,
It has been over two months since completing my service with the United States Peace Corps. To those of you I got to meet and reconnect with in Baltimore, Denver and Tampa during the month of December, it was truly a pleasure, though all too short. To those of you I did not get to see, I hope to be back in the states sometime in the Fall and again for all of December. Otherwise, Karibuni Tanzania!
Jessica and I are now back in Africa and busy transitioning from the cool, rainy southern highlands to the desert foothills of Central Tanzania. We are living in Kongwa, Dodoma and spending most of each day immersed in the work of the Kongwa Trachoma Project (KTP). A registered Tanzanian NGO in partnership with researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, KTP is the principal Tanzanian partner involved in the international Partnership for the Rapid Elimination of Trachoma (PRET).
A bacterium in the Chlamydia genus, C. trachomatis is the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide and affects hundreds of millions of people. In conjunction with the World Health Organization’s goal of fully controlling trachoma worldwide by the year 2020, KTP’s activities follow the SAFE guidelines to trachoma eradication: Surgery, Antibiotics, Facial cleanliness and Environmental improvement. There are currently projects underway which screen at-risk populations for trachoma and implement mass treatment with Azithromycin for villages with 10%+ infectious rates (following international and national standards of treatment). My current project builds off of this work.
Since Azithromycin is known to be effective against a host of pathogens, the ancillary benefits of this drug against malaria, sexually-transmitted infections (STIs), acute respiratory infections (ARIs) and diarrheal diseases are being studied. My own work has involved training village health workers and their supervisors, who are conducting health-surveillance of our study population and providing community-based treatment. Now that training has finished, I am continuing to monitor the course of the data collection process and implementation of treatment regimens, both in the study villages and in the KTP offices in Kongwa.
As a historian of science and medicine, it has been a fascinating experience to be involved in a research project and to observe the factors that contribute to experimental design and implementation: scientific, historical, ethical and practical. As a former secondary school biology teacher in Tanzania, it has also been interesting to be involved in the pedagogical aspects of this work, explaining physiology and pharmacology as well as research values and methods to the village health assistants (the family, friends, neighbors and even participants in our study population) as well as to their supervisors, the direct care providers in the village setting.
On my recent visit to the US, I remember many of you expressing surprise at mine and Jessica’s intentions to remain in Tanzania for the foreseeable future. Certainly that goal is contingent on the continuing availability of challenging and meaningful work such as this. We have reason to be optimistic at our prospects, yet we are, of course, prudently planning for the next year and beyond. We are continuing to search for organizations and individuals interested in discovering Tanzania and in collaborating with Tanzanians. It is the Peace Corps’ goal to establish mutually beneficial relationships between Americans and host-country nationals. As former volunteers, both Jessica and I are committed to that goal and believe that friendship, communication and collaboration are the best forms of foreign policy. It was truly gratifying to hear from a good many of you that you followed this blog with interest. If I can ever be of assistance in connecting you with some part of this country and its truly amazing people, please do not hesitate to contact me: josh@joshualevens.com
Peace.
Joshua Kongwa Trachoma Project 1 Comment »
13
November
2008
As I sit down to write my final blog entry at UL Secondary as an education volunteer with the United States Peace Corps in Tanzania, I still have tears in my eyes. I have never felt so proud. I am sitting in my school library which, thanks to the donations of many who are hopefully reading this, has a solar power set-up for using a laptop computer. My Form II students are continuing to take their national examinations today. My Form IV students already finished two weeks ago. The remaining Form I and Form III classes are busily preparing for my annual biology examination this Friday. Over the next seven days, I will be packing up my home, giving away many of my household possessions and saying goodbye to my friends and colleagues of the past two years. Foremost in my mind this morning, however, is the news that Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States. I have never felt so proud to be an American.
When I left my country in September 2006, the world seemed a very different place. Disenfranchisement of my fellow Floridians and the murder of my fellow human beings in the name of fear had left me disillusioned and angry. Listening to family, friends and loved ones, with their calculated and strategic language, justify the dropping of bombs on cities, on hospitals, on homes, on people unlucky enough to be born in the wrong part of the world, sapped me of all hope and energy. The only “smart” bomb, after all, is the one with the good sense not to explode. I remember so many people that talked about national security and national interests as if 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians were a reasonable opportunity cost. I felt out of touch with so many of my fellow Americans. Mostly, I felt helpless to do anything that could make a difference.
My reasons for coming to Tanzania were largely selfish, as I confessed to my Peace Corps recruiter in his Washington, D.C. office. I had no delusions that I would save the world. I knew that I would get far more out of the experience than I could possibly give. I would teach math and science, important work to be sure, but I would learn another language, another culture, another corner of our planet that most of my fellow Americans would never get to see, living in the place where humanity itself first emerged during (what must be called tongue-in-cheek) the Cainozoic era. What I never expected to receive, however, was grace.
Before I left the United States, I was consumed by the daily news, with my country’s sins of commission and omission, with events in the world over which I had no power and felt I could not change. In Tanzania, I have been given the grace to simply live in peace, to think only about spending time with my students, my friends, working in my garden, and enjoying life from one sunset to the next. I cannot begin to adequately express my gratitude to my country for supporting me in my Peace Corps service, to the Tanzanian Ministry of Education for its cooperation with Peace Corps/Tanzania, to my community for treating me both as an honored guest and as simply a friend and neighbor, and finally to my family and friends for both material support of my projects and emotional support for my service and life here.
It has been fascinating to observe this election year from the vantage of a rural village in the Tanzanian southern highlands, 80 km. away from paved roads, in a community with minimal infrastructure, health care, access to running water or electricity. During the primary season, crammed in the cab of a Tea truck for the three hour trek to town, I overheard Tanzanians discussing the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary as if I were riding a bus in Baltimore. It is my sincere hope that Americans recognize the extent to which people all over the world have been watching, awaiting, and now celebrating this historic time in our country’s history.
As a teacher at my school reminded me yesterday, however, what politicians say before elections and what they do in office are often incongruous. There are examples all around us to make Tanzanians skeptical about elections. Kenya and Zimbabwe remain fresh in everyone’s minds and I have spoken to Tanzanians who secretly fear for their own upcoming election cycle in 2010. Of course Tanzania is not Kenya and it is nowhere near Zimbabwe. The United States of today is also not the United States of even two years ago. And yet, I remain cautious in my optimism. Undoubtedly there will be times of disappointment in the Obama administration, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Palestine, in the health care system, in foreign aid, and in financial regulatory agencies, to name, I am sure, but a few. Today, however, I cannot care about these things. Today, I cannot wait to be disappointed in Obama. To alter my Dad’s phraseology concerning golf and work, a bad day with Obama is better than a good day with Bush.
At present, my future plans are still only short-term. I will finish my Peace Corps service on November 20. I will fly back to the states in December and hopefully return to Tanzania in another work capacity. In the meantime I hope to reconnect with family, friends, and colleagues, in other words, all of you. For keeping up with this website, for sending me emails, letters and packages for the past two years, I thank you. Once I return to the United States and have regular computer/internet time, I will update and revise this website for whatever function it will serve in the next stage of my life and career. Thanks again to Brian Hart for designing and maintaining this page. While I do plan on writing more over the next several weeks, this seems to be as good a time as any to say again: Asanteni, kwa herini, na tutaonana siku nyingine. Thank you, all the best, and we will see each other again someday.
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13
November
2008
“Saving the world one garden at a time,” is how Peace Corps Tanzania’s permaculture guru Peter Jenson describes his environmental mission. For a busy education volunteer teaching 450 students during 28 periods per week, such a mantra can be comforting. Only one garden and I can help save the world?! After all, as a teacher, I can hardly spend all day farming, or even spend more than 10-15 minutes in the garden on most days. Between cooking, cleaning, dishes, laundry, exercise, teaching, reading, grading papers and whatever else passes for free time, the day often flies by with many of my morning’s aspirations neglected. Most evenings I end up rebuking myself for all those things left undone. I meant to go visit my friend in the village, practice yoga, play soccer, clean out the storage room, or cook something other than rice and beans. All that being said, spending time in the garden, playing in the dirt, has been one of the most relaxing and rewarding pasttimes I have taken up this past year.
My school’s garden project would never have gotten off the ground in the first place if not for the expertise and assistance of my former site mate, environmental volunteer Jason Maglaughlin, whose own 32 garden bed, model permaculture site inspired me every time I visited him. Together we planned a collaborative venture with a select group of students, many of them orphans, to teach permaculture, bio-intensive farming and composting, and to prepare a garden at the school to supplement the students’ regular nutritional intake. Although Jason had to leave Tanzania before the actual planting, his protege and good friend in the village came and helped with the teaching and the seed-bed preparation.
To emphasize why nutrition alone is a worthy venture here, let me remind you what my students are fed at school. The daily menu begins with uji (corn flour mixed to a watery consistency with sugar) for breakfast, ugali (corn flour mixed to a thick pasty consistency) with beans for lunch, and ugali with beans again for dinner. Sick students and those who pay extra will additionally get one serving of greens (overcooked with oil and salt). This is the regular menu, seven days of the week. On holidays, they may be served rice instead of ugali. For fruits and vegetables, the students are left to their own devices. Fortunately, fruit trees are quite common in the surrounding area. Nevertheless, most students do not usually get an appropriately balanced diet.
Quite selfishly, I too had grown weary of my carb-heavy diet and thought about the garden fresh salads I ate every time I visited Jason. Thus was the Lupembe Orphan’s Garden project born. After consulting with the students about a proper location for the garden, we eventually chose a site adjacent to my own backyard. This allowed us to dig a trench from the roofline to bring rainwater into the garden plot. We also dug a trench from a spot on the connecting footpath that regularly flooded. The key to any good garden, after all, is water.
Since we started this project in the dry season right before the students left for their winter (June-July) break, I often had to haul at least two buckets of water from the river each day, just to keep the seedlings from drying out, not to mention the water I still needed for washing, cooking, cleaning, and drinking. Needless to say, my neck muscles got a good workout and I’m pretty good at balancing a bucket on my head now, though I still need to use a hand for balance. It never ceases to amaze me how gracefully and seemingly effortlessly Tanzanian women balance unwieldy loads on their heads as they climb steep hills, curtsey and chat.
After about seven weeks, the results of all this hard work started to pay off. From late July until mid-September, I was harvesting about two buckets worth of various salad greens every week. I would make two large salads for the group once a week and have a small salad myself every day. Even though uncooked vegetables are anathema to Tanzanians on the first pass, I soon had students begging for salad and for seeds to plant in their gardens at home. As I write this, there are still greens to be harvested, though much less. All the broccoli, arugala and romaine has already gone to seed. However, the tomatoes are only now just ready to harvest and I have already begun planting for the next volunteer, who is due to take over my site at the end of this month.
A good friend of mine who runs a rose farm in Njombe once asked me how I could be motivated to plant seeds that I would not get to harvest. It seems to me that this is actually quite a good metaphor for the work of the education project with Peace Corps Tanzania: “Planting seeds that others will reap.” During training, we were warned against developing an “Ediface Complex” during our service, feeling as though we needed to build some structure to feel as though we had accomplished something. The work of a teacher may only be realized long after the fact. Hopefully the results will be more important and longer-lasting than so many other structures, built with good intentions, yet unused and long forgotten, strewn across this continent. In my final days here at site, I am continuing to spend time with those students who have meant so much to me over the last two years. I am also still playing in the dirt, planting seeds.
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30
June
2008
Every Friday at the end of the school day, the students of UL Secondary, bring their chairs into the Dining Hall for the week’s scheduled debate. A student committee chooses the motion to be discussed and moderates the proceedings. It is an English-only event, although the administration has decided to allow a Kiswahili debate sometime in the upcoming term. Although secondary schools are supposed to be English-only (with the exception of Kiswahili class), the weekly debate is the one-and-only time you only hear English spoken at my school. This most certainly includes English classes. It also includes all of my classes. My own proportion of Kiswahili-to-English in biology teaching goes from 90-10 (Form I), 80-20 (Form II), 75-25 (Form III) and 50-50 (Form IV) - to make up some numbers on the spot. In short, the students have a rough time with the debate.
Last year, I started attending these debates somewhat regularly out of my own curiosity. What do these young people believe? What do they consider to be a valid argument? What counts as evidence and what counts as a convincing explanation? Sometimes, the answers to these questions come out. Other times, it is work simply deciphering their attempts at complete answers to the questions at hand. When the confrontation is intense, the logic gets even more undecipherable. Having had my share of heated arguments in Kiswahili, I can sympathize. Recently, for example, I was involved in a bus-wide discussion concerning the claim that the American government infected condoms with HIV in order to kill black people. Personally, I believe there are enough real examples of bad American foreign policy decisions (including malicious ones) to mention without resorting to this kind of conspiracy-mongering.
As for the school debates, however, past motions have included:
Teachers are more important than doctors for society.
Life in the village is better than life in town.
Single-sex schools are better than co-educational schools.
Domestic work is a woman’s duty.
It is better for a country to be self-reliant than to depend on other countries.
It has truly been fascinating to see (particularly the harder-working) students out-reasoning one another on issues that range from moral to practical to political to cultural. Of course, these debates also mirror the larger problem with the country’s entire secondary school system: the central problem of English language instruction. Until this country decides to offer Kiswahili-medium secondary instruction, rural students at schools such as mine are getting cheated out of a truly higher education. Some students can excel at math and the sciences without necessarily having a gift for languages. Since English instruction really only begins at secondary school for more than 90% of my students and since this is the 3rd language (after Kibena and Kiswahili) for these students, it is safe to say that their language-skills are already being taxed far more heavily than most American (including 1st generation immigrant) students.
The government should experiment on a limited basis with Kiswahili-medium secondary schools.
I’m suggesting this for the next motion of the next debate. It would be appropriate if the students got to articulate their thoughts on this subject in at least their second language.
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26
April
2008
Tanzania is not the first place I’ve ever had to deal with the issue of students cheating. As a university professor, I have received research papers that were copied in full from articles available on the internet. The thinking must be that historians don’t know how to use search engines. As an adjunct professor, however, my protocol in such matters was rather straight-forward. I assembled the evidence, turned it in to the department chair, and recorded my grade sheet accordingly. At that point, everything was out of my hands; case closed.
The situation is a bit different in a Tanzanian secondary school. For one thing, there seems to be no standardized policy on cheating. With 60+ students crammed into a room that would accommodate 20-30 in the United States, stopping students from stealing glances at other’s test papers is difficult to enforce. Moreover the combined lack of adequate teachers along with lax invigilation of examinations only exacerbates the problem. I have for some time taken an austere view of the problem and stalked the classroom aisles, telling students to cover their papers and occasionally taking away tests from obvious cheaters. However, this only stops one classroom from cheating (or else simply makes it more difficult).
While grading weekly tests from my Form II students (about 180 in total spread out over three streams: A, B and C) I found 16 that seemed to have obviously copied from their neighbor. Wrong answers that used the same awkward phrasing and bad spelling were a fairly obvious tip. The only guideline I had observed before involved students that were caught in the act. They generally received 3 strokes with the fimbo (thin stick) and a zero on the test. Not a fan of beating (nor a believer in its effectiveness), I took an alternative approach. After writing all the correct answers on the offending students’ tests, I wrote which student/s I believed they cheated with. I then brought the test papers to morning assembly.
This period of the day before the first classes is usually reserved for cleaning up the environment, receiving announcements, short English-language speeches by the students and punishments. I decided to start with a speech of my own on honesty and the problems associated with cheating. I made a particular point about cheating on the national exams, which could cancel out a year’s worth of hard work and which are invigilated by local police and are more difficult to cheat in as well. I then explained my methodology for catching the cheaters. “Kumbe! Wamekosa kwa kamili na jirani!” (How about that? They made exactly the same mistakes as their neighbors!) I then called the students to the front and handed them their examinations. Explaining that we would have to meet together as a group to discuss this problem, I said that to remind them to show up after school, I would need to take one shoe from each student.
The students balked. Some immediately started trying to talk me out of it. Others made a break for it. I realized that this type of unorthodox punishment required some back-up from the teacher-on-duty (the teacher-of-the-week in charge of all discipline and general rule enforcement). The teacher was feeling more generous than I and he asked me to instead take a sweater or belt to ensure they would meet with me later. Getting trumped on this made me question both my choice of punishment and the seriousness with which other teachers viewed this problem. I told them they needed to come to the teacher’s lounge during tea time to apologize (or defend their case) and to retrieve their belongings.
I took my case to all the teachers. They agreed that an inquest needed to be conducted and demanded the students to remove one shoe and return to class while individuals were questioned one-by-one. Interrogations elicited confessions from everyone, though some initially denied it, until the logic behind the similarity in their answers was shown to them. All apologized and spent the remainder of the day cutting grass and cleaning up the environment. I tried to also talk to each one-by-one to stress the danger of falling into this habit.
So, instead of using corporal punishment, I tried shame. Even as I write this, I feel ambiguous about the appropriateness or effectiveness of my method. I was especially concerned that the new Form I students see what fate could await them if they didn’t stop this behavior right away. Have I dissuaded anyone from cheating? Have I simply encouraged others to use more effective cheating methods? Is shame any less distasteful in education than corporal punishment? I’m still mulling over all this. I feel like something (other than talk) was needed to address the cheating culture. We never got any good suggestions from our Peace Corps trainers on this issue. I’m playing it by ear. Any ideas? I could use the help. By the way, I don’t mind if you copy your suggestions from someone else.
Joshua Tanzanian Society & Culture 4 Comments »
20
March
2008
After a number of technical difficulties, adjustments and readjustments, I’m back. Thanks again to Brian Hart for his tireless and cost-effective (free) labors. This blog is now being brought to you by the letter S (Solar Power) and the number 2 (2 solar collector panels and 2 computers in year 2).
In conjunction with the Olive Branch for Children NGO, headed by Deborah (Mama D) McCracken (www.theolivebranchforchildren.com), *Undisclosed Location* Secondary will be entering the computer age. To all of the private donors who earmarked funds for this project, thank you. Karibu Tanzania.
I have returned from Dar-es-Salaam where I purchased 2 85 Watt Solar panels, 4 solar batteries, 35 metres of wire and a charger controller, all of which will be set-up in the next couple of weeks to provide an electricity source in the school’s library to power lights and at least 2 desktop computers. I should be able to get both the DC-AC inverter and the new computers by May at the latest. However, there should be one computer immediately available to begin staff training when the school re-opens at the beginning of next month.
We just had a visit from our member of parliament a couple of weeks back. Among other messages, he told our assembled teachers and local community leaders that a school without a computer was not a school. On the right track maybe, but counterproductive given that he knew nothing of the current project. As I told him about the project, I made sure he knew that many Tanzanian schools suffer not for lack of resources as much as for lack of utilization of existing resources.
Case in point, our school has a nice library. It could still use more books, especially textbooks and Kiswahili language materials. However, when I got to the school the main problem with the library was that the students hardly used it. It was open during school hours only, when they were supposed to be in class. It was closed at all other times. What I have done with our library over the last year and a half has been simply to make the library resources available in the evening study hours and to train students in its proper use. This cost only labor and did not need any outside grant.
Before coming to UL Secondary, I trained at a school in Morogoro that actually had a couple of computers. However, no one knew how to use them and they remained in the headmaster’s office, unplugged and taking up space. I took the time to remind our parliamentary representative as well as the assembled school and community leaders that this computer project would not be a success just because of the financial resources. We needed commitment, time and talent or it would become no better than a locked library and unplugged computers.
All that being said, I am excited and optimistic. While every teacher, staff member and student with whom I have discussed the project has assured me of community-wide interest, I personally feel confident that 3 of our teachers will take the necessary time to train according a regular schedule in order to become proficient in word-processing and spread sheet use. It also appears quite likely that after my departure in late November, the Peace Corps will replace my site with another education volunteer to continue with this work. As I said, all realistic pessimism aside, I am happy about our prospects.
As for the gardening projects, I have had a couple of small successes but have had most of my goals delayed. The orphans’ vegetable garden has been put-off by scheduling logistics. However, I plan on getting some seeds in the ground by the end of the month and having a full-training session with the students in permaculture and bio-intensive farming by the middle of next month. The rains have not been ideal up to this point anyway (sour grapes?). Heavy rains with no sunshine (lots of mold problems) have been followed by 10 days periods of drought, hardly ideal. We usually get substantial rain in my region until June. Since I’m planting vegetables that mature after 1-2 months, all is not lost. I’m still counting on eating broccoli by May.
On a personal note, I healed up quite nicely in South Africa. My collarbone (sans metal plate) is about 95% back to normal. I’m still taking a little easy when it comes to doing ju-jitsu with my students, but am otherwise back to my regular exercise routine.
As for teaching, things are hectic but well on course. As the only biology teacher available, the students are not getting as much class time as they ought. In particular, my Form III students have only one double-period, once a week. On the other end of the spectrum, my Form IV students have already finished the biology syllabus and will be reviewing the past four years of biology until they take their national exams in September. We got through quite a bit of material last year when we had two biology teachers and they are now enjoying the benefits of being ahead in their studies.
I have found that in my second year, I am much more qualified to teach the Form I students. Most of these students know absolutely no English until they reach secondary school. This means that I need to teach everything throughly in Kiswahili before I teach them in English. Last year the words for nuclear membrane (utando wa kiini cha chembechembe), catalyst (kimeng’enya) and liver (ini) hardly rolled off my tongue. I can answer most of their questions now in class rather than writing everything down and getting back to them later. Right now they are using the microscope (Thanks again to Ma and Pa Levens!) and learning about the parts of the cell. This is probably my favorite topic and the one that I use to launch into every other topic: Nutrition, Digestion, Genetics and etc. It all starts with the cells, right?
The other fun new project this year has been a peer-education project. A group of about 8 Form IV students (male and female) go with me every Monday to the local primary school to teach life skills and material about HIV/AIDS. This is my favorite project because I do none of the work. The kids prepare the lessons and do all the teaching. I go with them, watch and meet with the later to talk about what went well, what did not, and why. It has also been the first time that i have found students talking freely and bluntly about issues of sexuality. They discuss the issues with each other. I mostly listen and only occasionally interject.
Well, I’m running out of time and need to be getting back to the village. I’m not sure when I’ll be back to town next, but I promise another update before 3 more months slips by.
Peace, Josh
Joshua Uncategorized 1 Comment »
16
January
2008
Before coming to Tanzania, I never so much as tried to grow a houseplant. Although tolerant of roommates’ needs for greenery over the years, I paid these unwelcome lifeforms as much attention as I did the various vermin that managed to cohabitate with me. Oh, and by unwelcome lifeforms and vermin, I don’t mean my roommates. While nothing other than the prospect of fresh basil ever managed to peak my interest in living with plants, I was no stranger to green-thumbed enthusiasts.
Growing up, I watched my mother experiment with any number of green projects in and around the house. I have vague recollections of her tending a vegetable garden in the backyard, and even vaguer recollections of the occasional home-grown tomato and carrot accompanying a salad I would try to avoid eating anyway. A typical overweight, junk-food craving American kid, I failed to share my mother’s wonder with harvesting nature’s bounty in our own backyard. It’s not like we were raising a herd of cattle after all. My principal memories about the short-lived vegetable garden were that my mother was the only one interested in the project and that it took up valuable real estate for backyard football. “American” football, I would be forced to add here in Tanzania.
After that, I watched my mom gradually pick away at the lawn, replacing one edge with some bushes, another with flowers, leaning more and more towards bulky, tropical, indigenous varieties. Then one day, she snapped. Her benign displeasure with the typical suburban lawn broiled into an all-out holocaust. All grass in the front yard was ripped out, exposing the chemically-sauteed soil beneath. Like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, she moulded the earth into strange ridges and shapes as the neighbors struggled to find a genuine compliment. “It looks like a really big project!” The rest of the family was equally unnerved, though we knew far better than to intervene. It’s not like any of wanted to get recruited with “You think YOU can do better?!”
And so, we stayed tentatively optimistic watching as week after week went on, with bare patches of dirt gradually giving way to long ridges of dirt mounds. It was some kind of botanical scultpting project that we were better off keeping quiet about. And yet, little by little, there was progress. Surrounded by clean-cut, chemically saturated, suburban lawns of St. Augustine grass and neatly groomed hedges, our house sported a wild assortment of local vegetation, unruly to be sure and all the more pleasant for it.
Here in Tanzania, the typical yard is something else entirely: rows and rows of maize (not be confused with juicy American sweet corn), widely spaced and occasionally intercropped with beans. You can also find a number of scattered fruit trees: lemon, avocado, blood fruit. Farther away from the house, people also grow a good bit of tea, pineapples, potatoes (Irish and sweet), tomatoes, and greens (eg., spinach, cabbage, cassava greens). As I have come to learn however, the typical Tanzanian yard could use as much of an overhaul as suburban America. Ok, not really, it’s nowhere near as poisonous and wasteful as chemically-treated suburban lawns.
If the typical Tanzanian yard could use an overhaul (at least judging by those at UL Secondary), it would begin with soil improvement. In the arid badlands of Dodoma and Singida, it’s an easy case to make. There’s little rain and quite sandy soils. Down in the southern highlands it’s another story entirely. Everything grows … rapidly. Gardening seems far more about weeding than fertilizing. That being said, there’s still a number of benefits - even with such loam soils - for permaculture and bio-intensive farming.
Permaculture or Permanent Agriculture is really all about putting in perennial plants: fruit trees, fruit and vegetable vines, medicinals such as aloe, natural fencing through trees and bushes, and erosion-control grasses in a structured way so as to maximize water collection, contributing to improved soil structure and also providing fruits and other agri-goodies year in and year out.
Bio-intensive farming, on the other hand, focuses on digging deeply, amending the soil with compost and manure, spacing plants closely together and using intercropping techniques so that different species help one another. Practically speaking this means more food on less land. This is especially valuable for people living with HIV/AIDS and frankly anyone else physically unable to travel a long distance to do farming. Close plant spacing and deep (double) digging also translates into less weeding as the microclimates between plants suppress unwanted competitors. So, it’s really a great system, even if water and good land are as abundant as they are in my region. The only real hinderance is that double-digging is labor-intensive and time consuming. Although it saves a great deal of work later, it involves a substantial initial time investment. The only way to really sell the system is to use it yourself and let the results speak for themselves.
Unfortunatelty, with teaching and everything else, I’ve been able to do very little. As far as gardening goes, the only thing I have managed to do over the last year is composting, all of which became overgrown with fallen bamboo from my decaying fence and covered in vines and grasses. Turns out I couldn’t have planned it better. In preparation for the upcoming rainy season, I started cleaning up the yard and setting up new compost piles only to find that 18 discarded avocado seeds had germinated into roughly 12 inch seedlings. I have grafted high-quality branches onto this root stock. I’m now developing a new backyard gardening plan based around composting, soil improvement, mulching and natural fencing.
As my garden stands right now, I’ve got passionfruit vines, oregano, garlic chives, rosemary, carrots, tomatoes, irish potatoes, songu (a local fruit bush whose leaves make a medicine for typhoid), maboga-maboga (a form of pumkin plants with edible leaves) and ununu bushes (thorny bushes that makes good natural fencing and produce very few but very tasty blackberry-like fruits). I’ve also done some tree maintenance on the lemon and avocado trees in my yard. I think I’ve brought the lemon tree back to production, but we’ll see.
The real bright spot for the upcoming year however comes from an idea my headmaster floated at the end of the last term: a vegetable garden for the school’s roughly 30 orphans. (HIV prevalence in my region is between 13 and 20% depending on whose statistics you believe.) Using my site-mate’s farming expertise and exemplary demonstration garden, we will be training the school’s orphans in permaculture and bio-intensive farming techniques and giving them seeds to start a garden for their own nutrition as well as for sale (profits to offset their school expenses and their guardian’s living expenses). As I told the headmaster, as long as we give the students a break from the other chores of the school to work on their garden, it should be an easy sell. After all, if you have to work anyway, who wouldn’t choose to eat better and get some more money in the process?
On a personal note, I’m back in South Africa for the time being getting the metal plate removed from my collarbone. This means I’ll be online every day for at least the next week or so. So, feel free to drop me a line.
Peace, Dr. Josh
Joshua Secondary Projects 1 Comment »
