Welcome to Kayanga

Blue people, intro to service projects, and market day.

Thursday June 2- Saturday June 4

On Thursday we walked around Kayanga for the first time, we were running errands like going to the bank and getting cell phones. It was an weird feeling, we are only the fifth group of Amizade volunteers in the community so it was very unusual for the locals to see white people. the word in Kiswahili used to refer to Europeans and americans is Mzungo and we hear it quite often. it literally means "one who goes in circles." As we walked through town in a group of 18 everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at us. My mind kept going back to something said on the bus ride to tanzania " imagine a group of blue people walked down the street in your neighborhood." I guess that may be a bit of an exaggeration. On Friday we went to MAVUNO to pick up the Amizade coordinators who are living there. MAVUNO is one of the NGO's we will be working with during our stay. It is a co-op of local farmers, founded in 1993, which sponsors many community development projects including building an all girls boarding school which is where we will be building a 70,000 liter water tank for a water capture system. While we were at the MAVUNO headquarters they showed us many of the projects being practiced there including: raising chickens, water capture systems, and a bio-digester which was installed by Engineers Without Borders. This was installed to harness natural methane from plant decomposition to make gas for cooking. I found it interesting to hear that the local cook would not use the gas stove because it cooks unevenly and burns rice. this makes me wonder about the effectiveness of our western strategies to combat climate change if we consider only environmental sustainability instead of also questioning if something is socially and culturally sustainable. We also met with a local leader from Womeda the women's rights organization we will be working with. He gave us a brief overview of the history of the organization which offers legal counciling to women and educates the community on the legal rights of women, which exist but remain unknown to many in the community. To help this organization we will conduct interviews with people within the community about the issue of teen and early pregnancy. we will organize this information so that it can be applied to a grant proposal. Saturday was market day so we went and practiced our greetings in KiSwahili. After market we had our first class which largely focused on getting to know our classmates.

Teaching English

Monday June 6- Tuesday June 7, Thursday June 9- Friday June 10

Monday was our first day teaching English. We had a good time introducing ourselves to the students. We began by assessing their English level, which at first seemed nonexistent but once we got past the awkward shyness we realized they have a basic knowledge of vocabulary. One big struggle is trying to determine how much is memorization and how much is actual comprehension. Our main focus has been analyzing poetry and expressing oneself. I would say we are teaching ESL except for all of these kids it is a third language at least. The local tribal dialect is taught at home, then primary school is taught in Kiswahili, and finally Secondary school is taught entirely in English. In other words the system is not ideal, but I'm not here to challenge government policies (at least not this time). I'm working in form 4 which is like seniors in high school. the teaching strategy in Tanzania is lecture only so our interactive group teaching technique is being received very well by the students and teachers, but getting seniors to participate in any country is still like pulling teeth. Another issue we face here is a lack of resources we were told that all the students had read a poem but when we started to discuss it we found there were only a handful of books even available at the school. The teachers teach from a government provided syllabus with very specific instructions and at the end of the year the students are tested in a government assessment required to pass the year. I will probably talk more about the strategy and politics of teaching English in Africa in a later post.