Kuuliza si ujinga

A Tanzanian school is like a bucket with a hole in it. You can keep putting in more teachers, over and over, until the bucket should be overflowing. And yet somehow, at the end of the day, there are never enough teachers to fill all the classrooms.

My school briefly had enough teachers. Back around August, we had teachers come to do their student teaching. Then other teachers left to go study. And slowly, as they finished their student teaching, the student teachers left too.

Now there are about 14 of us, for 550 students, all of whom study 10 subjects. There are two chemistry teachers (I'm one), two physics teachers, one history teacher. This puts us in a good position compared to many of the schools in the area, but it certainly doesn't mean we have enough teachers. Last year, we filled all the slots on the school schedule, even if only in name (one teacher had more periods than there were in a week). This year, some slots are empty. Other slots contain teachers who have already left, or who never came back after winter break.

So much turnover. For a country where some people never go much farther than the home village, there's an amazing amount of movement in Tanzania. The educated class of teachers is constantly moving, looking for a better place to teach, looking for a place to continue their studies. It's awesome that teachers are going to university and reaching a level of education that their parents or grandparents could only have dreamed of. But what do we do about all the students who are left without teachers?