Thursday, December 18, 2008

 

Ngorongoro

Around two weeks ago, I finally went to Ngorongoro Crater. This after a year of seeing tourists every time I went to town, and looking at the mountain that contains Ngorongoro from my village every day.

And yes, it is truly beautiful. After hearing about it so much I was kind of skeptical--when you live next to a park for so long, it starts to seem ordinary. But Ngorongoro is amazing and looks nothing like my domesticated, farming village. To get there, you first climb up the mountain, through jungle with baboons and views of forested hills. Then you reach the top, and there's an amazing view of the crater below: long, long stretches of grass dotted with lakes and rivers. You descend into the crater and suddenly you're in the grasslands. It's not high grass, but rather a low, bright green grass, well-cropped by the local grazing animals. And on all sides of you, encircling you, are the green slopes of the crater.

There are an incredible number of animals. We saw huge herds of buffalo grazing together with zebra. We saw a male lion dragging a recently killed zebra across the road, with three female lions watching from the branches of a tree (yes lions climb trees!). We saw a cheetah stalking gazelle, and another cheetah having its kill stolen by hyenas. There was a pool full of hippos with birds perched on their backs. There were warthogs rooting in the dirt,and herds of gazelle everywhere. No elephants or giraffes--they're rarely found inside the crater--but we did see a rhinoceros in the far, far distance.

That's Ngorongoro, the bluish mountain I see everyday from my site. I look at it from farmland, from a land of cows and corn, of tractors and plows pulled by oxen. But from close up, it's clear that Ngorongoro is another world: a bit of the western idea of Africa, a bit of how much of this area looked years ago, and, very much, the world of African nature documentaries. I highly recommend a visit.

(I'll post pictures in a few weeks when I have a good internet connection).

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

 

Inch by inch, row by row

Yes, I'm back to making my garden grow. It's the short rainy season, and while it hasn't rained in a week or so, the soil is now soft enough to work without simply sending clouds of dusts at one's nostrils.

Last year,when I used a hoe to dig my garden, a crowd of neighbors formed around me. I became the neighborhood entertainment. My method of holding a hoe (or perhaps the simple fact that I was using one) was apparently highly amusing.

This year, thankfully, I'm a normal and boring part of the surroundings. Occasionally people shout "Pole na kazi!" (sorry about the work!), but they don't stand and stare, and even when I do something weird in their eyes-like wearing wool winter gloves as gardening gloves-they don't come to grab the hoe from my hands and do the job for me. Which is just as well. I'm gardening more because I enjoy the work and watching the plants grow than because of the vegetables I'll acquire; the process is as important as the product to me. So it's nice that my neighbors no longer consider me incompetent, and that I can stand and slam my hoe into the soil in peace.

Also, my two new garden-related obsessions:
1) Water. Ever since the local water supply became super unreliable in November, I've been paranoid about water. All my buckets must always be full, giving me around 150 liters in storage. Since my garden is about to grow larger, I'm even more worried about water. It's probably time to buy another 60 L bucket for the purpose of holding garden water.
2) Fences. Animals wander around the neighborhood of the school, sometimes watched by their owners, sometimes not. There are donkeys, cows, pigs, sheep, goats. My garden is surrounded by a fence with thorns threaded through it, but it's not a sturdy fence, and a section of it fell apart in November, allowing a donkey into my garden. These days, you'll see me walking along the fence in the evenings, prying for weaknesses, and fixing them rather inexpertly by using branches and planks lashed on with twine.

I've built several beds, but haven't actually planted anything yet, as I'll be traveling for the next three weeks (I did put cow manure--straight from the cow's owner!--around my fruit trees). More garden news will be coming in mid-January, when I return from my travels.

Monday, December 8, 2008

 

Upungufu wa walimu

For a short, blessed period, my school had enough teachers. There were over twenty names in the sign-in book each morning. Teaching loads were reasonable, and classes were being taught. It felt as if things were functioning well.

Then, as if the school had become a bucket with a small hole at the bottom, the number of teachers began to decrease. Six teachers left for university, bringing the number of teachers down to about 15. This was still reasonable. But there was a problem.

Every July, the Tanzanian teachers' colleges send their teachers throughout the country to do student teaching. Secondary schools around Tanzanian rejoice, as the number of teachers at their school doubles and the teaching loads finally become reasonable.

But then, every December, the student teachers leave. And the schools are again left without enough teachers.

So. We may have 15 or 16 teachers, but half of them are student teachers. When we open again in January, they'll be gone.

And in March, we receive A-level students. Not only will we need enough teachers to maintain a reasonable standard of education for our O-level students, we'll need extra, university-educated teachers for A-level.

It looks like we'll open next year with about ten teachers. This number may be a little higher, as my headmaster is quite good at finding new teachers. And we may get some extra teachers in February, when the Form 6 students finish their exams and head out in search of temporary teaching jobs. Perhaps we'll also get some more teachers from the government when the teaching college students graduate in March. This will help. But it will not fix the hole in the bucket, the basic problem in the Tanzanian school system.

Quite simply, teaching is hard. Teaching in a rural school with no electricity is especially hard. There's too much work, too many students, not enough support and not enough money. A lot of teachers aren't teaching because it's a great job, or because they love teaching. They're teaching because it's the job they can get, while they fill out applications to universities or save up money to pay tuition. Some of these people are truly great teachers, and their students love them, but the fact is that they won't be teaching for a long time. A year or two, and then they move on...and the school is again left to search for new teachers.

So. We may get more teachers, but even if we do, I'll probably be writing this entry again next year. In American schools, I grew used to stability: teachers came and went, but you could at least rely on them staying for the whole school year. Here, a single class may have four different chemistry teachers in a year. Stability is elusive and there is little the students can depend on. Sometimes, it's no wonder that the most successful students are the ones who've become so used to studying on their own that they're not sure what to do when a teacher enters the class.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

 

Of parks and animals

The other day, a Tanzanian asked why so many Americans and Europeans come here to see the parks. "Do you not have parks in America? Are there no wild animals there?"

This is a fairly common questions. Tanzanians are well-aware that tourists come here from around the world to see their parks, but that doesn't mean they know why. If you've lived in a country with elephants, lions, and giraffes all your life, and haven't traveled to another country or seen much TV, it's won't be obvious to you that not all countries have lions. Nor will you realize that these animals, which have always been in your country and have always seemed like ordinary wildlife to you, fascinate people in countries many thousands of miles away.

My favorite part of answering these questions is trying to explain American wildlife. I have yet to find a good way to explain bears. "They're like, uh, uh...well, a little like a lion but not exactly, uh...let me show you a picture in this biology book."

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