I have delayed finishing/posting this blog for a while,
obviously…it may be out of date but still accurate.
8/8, the eighth of August, was a national holiday for
farmers in Tanzania. Dodoma hosts the
national 8/8 festival. It was like a
county fair but African, and people came from all over to see it over the
course of a week. Each district had
displays of their best crops and various products. Chamwino district, my district, had an impressive
display with beautiful veggies, lots of honey and baobob products. Baobob oil is a popular product selling at
around $20/liter, said to help control obesity and perform numerous other
health miracles. Beside the agricultural
products, flocks of people showed up to hock crappy chinese trinkets, nice
maasai jewelry, used American clothes, and housewares. Guys rolled in with trucks full of housewares
and huge P.A. systems and they rapped rambling sales pitches to Tanzanian pop
music for their buckets, basins and bowls as they juggled a housewares acrobatics,
launching them into the air and catching them.
As impressive as the spectacle was, I wasn’t moved to buy any
buckets.
The biggest attraction was the menagerie of African
animals. They had surprisingly humane
mews displaying a leopard, hyenas, a lion, an enormous tortoise, a chimpanzee,
a python, monkeys and other animals. My
friend and I met a couple of wildlife master’s degree students who told us a
bit about some of the animals, which was a lucky encounter. The highlight for me was seeing a 10-frame
Langstroth beehive from Arusha. My
beekeeping counterpart/carpenter was in town, so I called him up and we met so
that we could look at it together and he was able to talk to a Tanzanian about
how it works. We had already looked at
pictures together and I had talked at length about the Langstroth hive, but I
was nervous about him building one with only a vague idea of what it should
look like. This was an excellent
opportunity to show him a model without having to go out and buy an example. It was also a relief for me to see that
Tanzanians are actually using this kind of hive, and it’s not just me trying to
introduce this technology that no Tanzanian is going to use.
And now more than a month has passed since 8/8. Since then, I have continued teaching, and I
was lucky enough to travel to a short training on teaching English. There is an excellent organization called
Village Schools Tanzania that builds secondary schools in villages (in Tanzania,
could you have guessed?) The villages
put forward a significant contribution of rocks, sand and bricks, and VST
provides the other materials that are difficult to access. They have a “pre-form” English curriculum,
designed so that students can learn the English they should have learned in
primary school had they been taught properly, to prepare them to start
secondary school. I am so excited to
have materials and a curriculum to help my students!
It was also fascinating to be introduced to VST. For whatever reason, I have a reflex to be skeptical
of missionary work, but this organization, although started by missionaries,
does excellent work with education and HIV/AIDS, and doesn’t seem concerned
with converting muslims or translating the bible. The missionary couple who hosted us have been
living in Tanzania for more than a decade, and their approach to development
seems a lot like life-long Peace Corps service.
They live modestly and the strength of their work is based in human
relationships. They get paid even less
than I do, and they seem to spend all of their time in the village. They built an HIV/AIDS treatment and
counseling center where people can come to get medicine and checkups. They also send patients with the skin cancer
associated with AIDS to receive radiation treatment using designated
funds. It was inspiring to see this
model of development that appears to be the most effective of anything I’ve yet
to see. If anyone were to ask for my
advice on making donations to organizations in Tanzania, I would first
recommend Village Schools Tanzania without hesitation.
More updates later, for now I’m going to throw this post up
so that my mom will stop bugging me to update my blog. Hi mom!
