A Full (of mud) day

Better get used to it. It's the last half of rainy season.

Getting up at 6:00am was not as hard as I expected it to be, perhaps because hadn’t slept all that well. The mosquito net was too tight to the bed and thus confining, so I will have to look for a larger one in town. Having a brief rinse-down in the bath tub freshened me up a bit and I went to have breakfast with Deo (the headmaster).

Breakfast in Tanzania is usually nothing more than tea and bread, and that’s exactly what we had this morning. The water for the tea had been boiled, so I wasn’t too worried about it, but the “Golden Pagoda mixed fruit jam,” a cheap Chinese import (like many things here) seems like nothing more than sugar and red dye food colourings that are probably banned in Canada. A little worrisome, but the alternative is just dry bread.

Our commute, I discovered, is quite an ordeal, especially if it has recently rained, which was the case this morning. We began with a walk through a few of the muddy side streets of the neighbourhood which were difficult and slippery to navigate and before long our shoes were caked with mud and our pants stained a reddish-brown. After about a kilometre we cut across a bean field, emerging on another road, where we walked a further 5 minutes to a “bus” stop.

There is no public transit here as we know it. Public transit, meaning that it’s the public that takes it, consists of privately own minibuses that ply certain regular routes. They are invariably decades old Toyota wagons with 4 rows of benches in the back, beaten to death and stripped of any interior niceties. The buses wait around at a stop until they are sufficiently packed to be profitable to the driver and his assistant. “Packed” means just that. A vehicle like this would comfortably hold perhaps 12 people in North America, but 25 is the normal sardine-like situation here. The assistant’s job is to hang his head out the sliding door’s window looking for customers, opening and closing the door, and coaxing potential customer into the vehicle. Surprisingly, there are actual bus stop areas in all this confusion, and the drivers risk fines if they pick up outside these areas, but that rarely stops them.

So we rode a packed bus for a kilometre or more on the main, paved road but because of the rains, it could not navigate the muddy offshoots and so we had to disembark and continue on foot. We walked for another kilometre or so. By this time we were well into the countryside. All around us was lush greenery, mostly banana trees and coffee plantations (some of the best coffee in the world comes from the Kilimanjaro region). At a certain point, we cut off the main road into a dirt path running through a coffee plantation. In the distance, I could see the aluminium roofs of the school but between that and us was a muddy field which we navigated carefully.

As we arrived at the school, the students were all abuzz about the new foreigner and two students came to collect the headmaster’s bag and mine and take them ahead of us to the staffroom. The entire commute had taken us just about an hour.
I’ll give a brief summary of the school day here, but the rest can be read in more detail by following the link to “Chris’ Teaching in Tanzania” on the right.

The school is called Chief Sabas Secondary School (or Mangi Sabasi in Swahili). It is just a year old and was opened last February after the government ordered all wards to build one new school to accommodate the growing number of students. Despite this fine idea, the government contributes only 50% of the construction and operating costs, the rest of which must come from the community and the school fees that the students must pay (about $60/year). This means that schools are often constructed slowly and in stages as available monies permit. This style of progress is well illustrated in Chief Sabas SS and its neighbour (literally, at about 100m away) Mawella SS.

Mawella SS was built in 2000 and, as the only secondary school in the area for 8 years, received all money from the local community to add to its government subsidy. It has also had the benefit of help from aid organizations and development projects by the Canadian and American embassies.

Contrasting with this, Chief Sabas SS has just 4 raw brick buildings, each divided in to two classrooms, where just simple desks and a chalkboard are found. The roofs are sheet aluminum and there are no lights (the school doesn’t have electricity). What will one day be the principal’s office now functions as the staffroom as the other staff building is still in the early stages of (stalled) construction (I am told that it will be completed in July/August). The teachers work at a couple of tables and the rest use student desks brought into the room. There are no shelves, drawers or anything else of the sort, and the extent of their resources are the one textbook for their subject, a pen, and some paper to write on. This is teaching at its most basic. Lessons must all be put on the board and the students must copy them into their books before doing any exercises.

The headmaster called all the students together for the morning assembly in the schoolyard between the two rows of buildings and took the opportunity to introduce me to the students. I said a few words of greeting and then the headmaster gave me a tour of the school. Afterwards, we went to visit Mawella SS and then we continued on to see the second mistress of the school, who is currently on maternity leave. She will be due back at school in 3 weeks as entitled maternity leave in Tanzania is just 84 days, after which mothers must work half-days until noon for 6 months before returning full time.

Everywhere we went we had to walk on muddy roads, which consumed incredible amounts of time. After visiting with the second mistress, we caught a bus into town. We were looking for an ATM, and finally found one that didn’t have 30 people lined up at it. It’s the end of the month and salary time, so it’s not uncommon for people to line up for hours to use the ATM to withdraw money.

I had to pick up a few other things as well, including a bigger mosquito net, a new bath towel, and some body wash. This last item I had deemed a necessity since soap residue is extremely hard and time consuming to rinse off when you don’t have a constant shower stream and one hand has to hold the bucket pouring the water. I found the body wash, at a shocking 6500sh, about $6, and as girly as it might sound, now all I need is a loofah. No such luck on today’s trip.

We finished by grabbing lunch at a local place. I ordered roast chicken, and it came on a partitioned tray complete with a kind of meat soup, baked beans (mixed with coconut milk?), vegetables, and a big dollop of ugali in the middle. Ugali is a staple of the Tanzanian diet and looks like a big plop of mashed potatoes, only it is much stiffer (cuttable with a knife) and made from maize flour. It is bland and tasteless unless dipped in a sauce or soup, which most people do. Then it’s not bad at all. “Vegetables” here, as far as I’ve seen, always consist of shredded Chinese cabbage and shredded carrots boiled together of which you usually get a decent helping. To drink, I had a passion fruit Fanta.

Despite leaving the school mid-morning, we didn’t arrive home until almost 5 pm. At six, you need to close the windows so the mosquitoes don’t come in the house. We had dinner and spent the rest of the evening at home, as the Manchester United game was on TV. More to come on the town and other stuff when I have more time, as this entry has become long enough already.