Monday, September 11, 2006

 

A Week in the Bush



This past week I escaped Dar’s traffic, noise, and ranks of wazungu to venture into "the bush," as colonials and their descendants refer to any non-urban patch of Africa (that is, the majority of the continent). Along with the rest of HakiElimu’s program staff (all non-administrative personnel, about 25 people), I was participating in a “learning field trip.” We fanned out across the country in groups of three or four people with three primary objectives in mind. Our collective mission, as articulated in the very official HakiElimu Program Learning Field Trip Terms of Reference was:

1. To better understand the reality on the ground regarding basic education, access to information; democracy and accountability

2. To better understand citizen agency – the extent to which ordinary people are able to be informed, take interest and act to make a different and hold government accountable; and

3. To better understand people’s perceptions of HakiElimu and its work, and to document evidence of the reach and impact of our work.

Needless to say, a rather ambitious program for a single week! In order to meet these objectives, we conducted individual interviews, held focus group discussions, visited schools and local government offices, and generally tried to take in the scene. I traveled with two coworkers to the district of Tandahimba, which is situated in the south of the country, just north of Mozambique.

(A brief aside: Mainland Tanzania is comprised of 22 or so regions, which are subdivided into about 115 districts. Each district contains a number of wards, which are made up of a handful of villages. The villages are then divided into neighborhoods, and finally “hamlets,” which are clusters of about 10 households. Leaders are elected or appointed at each level, and with the current Government program of “Decentralisation by Devolution” or “D-by-D,” more power is being granted to local leaders. The whole system is a bit confusing, to say the least, and the extent to which the decentralisation program is succeeding is the subject of hot debate. There appears to be a fair amount of political infighting, perhaps unsurprising given the number of cooks in the proverbial kitchen…)

Anyway, I’ll stop my schpiel on local government politics to say that in short, the week was really great. Given that my Swahili is still at a rather basic level, I was not leading any of the interviews or group discussions, so mainly just did a lot of listening and watching. But I did catch enough of what was going on to gain some real insight into the lives of “ordinary” Tanzanians. I have read in the papers and discussed with HakiElimu colleagues issues like the pressing teacher shortage, but it was an entirely different experience to actually speak with a young man who was on his third day as the only teacher for a secondary school with 76 students. This man was scarcely older than his students, having begun teaching after a month-long teacher training crash course, which he attended just after completing secondary school himself. (Crash courses for teachers are part of a new Government initiative to address the teacher shortage which has resulted from current efforts to expand access to secondary education. Currently less than 10 percent of primary students go on to secondary school.)

At a neighboring primary school, there were eight teachers to serve approximately 450 students. They reported that the book-to-student ratio was about 1:5 and also complained about the fact that they had to travel to a bank over 60 km away in order to pick up their salaries (which were often not deposited on time). In turn, the villagers being served by that school complained that these teachers often failed to show up for work, and that when they did, they were often drunk.

It is hard not to completely despair when faced with circumstances such as these, but the trip was not without its inspiring moments as well. For instance, the residents of Mwembe Mmoja (“One Mango Tree”) village responded to district officials’ decision to build a new school in the district seat, rather than close to the village (as initially promised), by raising the funds themselves to build a school that would be much more accessible. The rookie secondary school teacher I mentioned above seemed extremely committed despite his daunting responsibility, and when we saw him outside of school hours, he seemed relaxed and comfortable in his new surroundings.

The trip was also a great opportunity to practice my Swahili. I spoke Swahili the whole time – resorting to English only when I needed to get a point across to my travelling companions. This meant that I was not the most active participant in our conversations over meals of chapati, chicken, rice, chicken, ugali, french fries, and more chicken, but I was able to get some of the jokes, and even make a few of my own, which I regarded as a small triumph.

In some ways I found myself wishing I were doing something that would afford more time in “the bush,” and thus greater immersion into Tanzanian life and culture. I think I will look for opportunities through work to escape Dar, such as going to a zonal meeting of the Friends of Education (HakiElimu’s country-wide network of grassroots activists). That said, I could see that spending two years in a rural village could be rather lonely and/or a bit boring, once the novelty had worn off. Upon arriving back in Dar yesterday afternoon, I went on a bit of a binge of Western-style comforts and entertainment. I first spent a few hours in the air-conditioned splendor of the city’s fanciest gym, then ate an Italian meal with my dearest (ex-pat) friends, and finally ended up at Dar’s only bowling alley, drinking beer and rolling gutter-balls under black lights, as Bollywood tunes blasted from the speakers.

UPDATE: Photos just uploaded!

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