A Challenge with Education in Tanzania

When we first opened the school a year ago, I thought we were in way over our heads. The behavior of the students definitely left something to be desired, but I was much more concerned about our teachers. The students, I knew, would eventually come around. Before we opened school, we had led a 2-week staff development to try to get everyone on the same page. We covered tons of topics, from individualizing lesson plans, to group work, to overall school structure. We all left excited and I was hopeful for the weeks ahead.

Hopefulness ended day one when I realized very little of what we had covered in staff development actually sank in. All of the teachers had reverted back to their ‘stand only at the board, the student is always wrong’ mentality, having not a care in the world about the learning that needed to take place. I felt a little stupid for being so hopeful, having fully known this is how education is viewed across the country.

We took the next several months taking the approach of working with each teacher individually, giving periodical evaluations which only had one, maybe two suggestions at a time. Slowly, the feel of the classroom and the school started to change, and to date, our teachers are much more eager to experiment with different methodologies. We still have a long ways to go, but we are extremely happy with the progress thus far.

I bring all of this up not to praise ourselves for the progress we’ve had, but to try to help paint a picture of one of the main challenges facing the entire Tanzanian education system- teacher education and training. Sure, there are not enough teachers in Tanzania in general, but I believe the greater question is “are the teachers we do have good teachers?’ I think so many people, especially ones in administrative positions like myself, focus on numbers and forget some of these greater qualitative questions. We could have a 1:1 teacher-student ratio across the country and still not raise the standard of education because the teachers are not adequately trained. Don’t misunderstand me either. I do not believe there are enough teachers currently in Tanzania. I am merely talking about our focus and where it should be as we look at the bigger picture and talk about scalability, both of JBFC and on a more macro level.

You may be asking yourself- what is the answer to this complex question? What needs to be done? And, I am not going to answer that yet, as this is a solution we are still trying to work out ourselves. It is a complex issue, dealing with systematically changing a long-standing behavior structure, and it must be worked with slowly, which is exactly what we are doing in our little corner of the world.

We are the champions!

We are just back from a 5 day trip to Arusha, where we travelled to take home the gold from an international soccer tournament. We took 28 kids, with me, Rachel, and of course the coach, Ashley. The trip, I can say since we are back now, could not have gone smoother. For the first time in my African life, we did not have a car break down. Mind you, this is a little more than a minor miracle, seeing as we went through both the Serengeti and Ngorongoro National Parks.

The first night of our trip, we camped on the rim of the Ngorongoro crater. Manoj, our travel agent, let us use some of his tents, so we were set. We brought pasta and hot dogs for dinner, cooked over firewood, and watched the sun set over the crater. It was a picture perfect scene, albeit the girls thought they were going to die from the cold. It was good we only stayed one night, becuase the sniffles started the next morning, and we were out of there. We didn't want our players getting sick.

For the tournament, we stayed at an incredible boarding school, St. Jude's, which is a school devoted to alleviating poverty. They have incredible facilities, including hot water in the teachers' rooms and a grass field. They also had an incredible library which was inspiring for all of us.

The tournament started on Saturday, and we only played 2 games. One of the other teams we were slotted to play did not show up, so it was a fairly easy day. We had our challenging points in the game, including myself loosing it with the ref, but our girls were definitely the most fit and practiced team in the tournament. By the end of each game, our girls were ready to keep going, were the opponents were on their knees with exhaustion. We won both games 1-0, one game scored by Neema, and another by Tabu.

The final day, Sunday, we started, and again, the refs were favoring the other team. The team we were playing in the finals were the hosts of the entire tournament. However, after a little half-time talk with the refs and tournament officials at half-time (Ashley did the talking, while I stayed with the girls- my competitive streak came out), the playing field was a little more fair. However, our girls were so bitter after the first half that they came out with a fiery force. They played incredibly, knowing down anyone who came in their path, and we ended up winning the game 1-0, again, Neema's score leading us to victory.

After the game, there was lunch, some team building exercises with the other teams, and an awards ceremony. Our girls also took home 3 of the 4 personal awards awarded to players. Pili for best goalkeeper, Neema for best defender, and Tabu for best striker. We left the field pretty early, and headed back to St. Jude's where we rested, packed, and had dinner before an early bedtime.

Monday, we left Arusha around 4AM so as to make it back to Kitongo in one day, and we were all back on campus by 5PM. Again, no car or other issues on the road, just a long day of bumps! We weren't able to tell the people who stayed back much about the tournament, because they had been following us on the radio, and would constantly hear how the "JBFC Mwanza girls' team is fierce!" All in all, an incredible trip, and incredible confidence booster for all of our girls. It is amazing to see how the villagers keep coming up and congratulating the players, and how much pride there is in this girls' team- something extremely rare in this area. Now we are setting our sights on an international tournament with 60 teams from across Africa next August in Nairobi. We have lots to do before then, but we are hoping to be able to bring home the gold there, as well.

Finally, we would like to thank everyone who made our Arusha trip possible. Without your financial support, we would not have been able to make this happen, and all of us in the JBFC family are extremely grateful. Thank You!

Redefining our Labels

I want to take a minute to describe something very important to me and I think something central to the JBFC model and what makes it so successful. I am going to start by talking about some of our issues with the word “orphanage” and “orphan”, primarily its usage to describe our girls. I think before I dive into this, however, I want to describe a conversation I had a while back with one of our girls, so as to paint a clearer picture. It started by me asking what her definition of the word orphan was, and what her feelings were associated with that word. Her definition were pretty much the same answer any one of us would give, but the “feeling behind the word” was incredibly touching, and helped me to see that we are doing a good job raising our girls. She expressed that the word orphan represents hopelessness and a life of poverty, something she herself does not associate with. Yes, they could have been thrown into that category if it wasn’t for JBFC, but because of this family (albeit non-traditional) had given them a second shot at life, they were filled with hope and had a life full of potential ahead of them. Therefore, even though they had unfortunate, and sometimes traumatic backgrounds, they are not orphans. They are simply children.

This brings me to the second point on the word “orphanage”, and how it is so often used to describe JBFC. Because of my background, and how JBFC started, it was often associated with traditional orphanages. Despite telling even close family members countless times about my views on the words and the inaccuracy of usage in describing JBFC with that word, it is relatable, and people understand and sympathize with the word. A traditional orphanage, in my opinion, is simply a place to care for and raise children. There are many wonderful organizations that do an incredible job raising and loving children as if they were their own (much like we do), but I have a firm belief that we cannot stop there, especially when you are working in developing countries. By simply stopping at raising, and possibly educating a child, you are missing huge potential, and will ultimately set a child up for failure once they leave the “orphanage” because there is no infrastructure, market, or support within their communities. You are taking a child out of a certain environment, raising them in a wonderful home for many years, then returning them to the same environment they came with. Hopefully, they will have the skills needed to survive in that environment, but surviving is not the same as thriving. That is where we differ at JBFC. We are working to change communities in order to truly and effectively change lives. Ultimately, we hope that our girls will become empowered, educated women who are change-makers in their own society.