Once Upon a Time Not Long Ago, When I Had a Chinstrap (shameful) and Lived Life Slow

My roommate, Maria, left for Tanzania today to visit old friends (she too lived there in 2006). What with a couple of 30 minute incubation times, I was able to go all nostalgy over my time there looking over photos and reading a piece I worked on over the last couple of weeks of my stay. Not wanting to push a 15 page document on anybody I haven't shared it with many people. But what is the internet for if not for forcing crap you think is interesting down others' throats? So if you're so inclined, read on...

How Not to Become a Secondary School Teacher in Tanzania

I really dug the last six months of my life. If I had a time machine I would dip back in time to when I was getting scared on the plane to Nairobi via Amsterdam, thinking about copping out and staying in Amsterdam and taking refuge with my homie Eliav, and smack myself. “Ho! Don’t you know you’re about to have the craziest, fish-out-of-water-y, eye opening experience of your life???”

About midway through my junior year of high school I began to look for different ways I could spend at least a semester abroad after high school. The first route I tried to a foreign country was the Rotary Club, which many of my cousins have used, but it turned out to be too expensive. Then my mom brought the matter up to Jim Morgan, a friend of hers from Brooklyn Monthly Meeting. Jim had made a handful of trips to a small town in Tanzania called Mugumu where he had been introduced to a school by the name of Kisangura Secondary through the help of a some people living around the town including a fellow Quaker living nearby, Samuel Rachau. Over the past few years Jim has headed an organization that has helped to find funding for “Project Kisangura”, a fundraising venture aimed to help Kisangura out in various ways. From my vantage point of living in Mugumu for such a prolonged time I found that quite a few of these ways were subjected to corruption. The main disturbance, which Jim clearly saw when he last visited Mugumu in June of 2005, was that almost $10,000 of the money he had sent to build a science lab had disappeared, somewhat obviously into the pockets of the headmaster and the “Quaker” Rachau himself (side note: this dude is crazy, he uses a witchdoctor to kill people in his way, refer to my journal from the trip for more information). When Jim expressed his anger over this the school pretty much excommunicated him. Very inconveniently this all took place between the time Jim had notified the school I would be coming there to volunteer teach and when I was to come myself to begin teaching. Thus was the situation I entered when I arrived in Mugumu on January 14th and these are my thoughts about those goofy as hell six following months:

A Brief Historical Background for all you Ignant Fools

Tanzania is one of the poorer countries in the world, but it’s far from what one would picture from the television portrayal of poverty in Africa. I saw very few destitute people and only saw one instance of starvation and that was on the news. The poverty of the country is envisaged in how mostly only cheap shit is available, the quality of health care, the very low income 95% of the working people that, lastly, is influenced by quality of education available.

Tanzania, like all post-Colonial African nations, has certainly had a hard time. Without the money to build up an industrial economy the country has functioned with an agricultural one even though less than 35% of its land is cultivatable and the rains are unpredictable. For the time I have been here the region has been in a drought of a magnitude not seen since the 70’s!

After independence the first and beloved president, Julius Nyerere, took leadership of a country with only 12 doctors and 120 university graduates. Life expectancy was 35 and 85% of the adult population was illiterate. To solve these formidable problems Nyerere began a process of African socialism in which he moved the 90% of the population living in remote rural areas into about 8,000 larger communal villages. In each of these Ujamaa (Kiswahili for togetherness) villages everyone who was physically able to work were told to do and by working together Nyerere believed Tanzanians could breathe new life into the economy. This aim totally failed because much of the land the people were forced to abandon in order to resettle was very fertile and, as in the cities, a more organized place to live bred corruption. However the process did greatly increase the access to health care, clean water and education.

Flash forward to today. The socialist goals of the government have long been abandoned and industrialization is occurring in each of the three large cities. There salaries are good and jobs are plentiful. The rest of the Ujamaa villages, however, are trapped in the past and the hope of moving to the cities is one many villagers share. Realizing this dream has become a rat race where very few make it through the filter of school, transportation and housing fees. Mugumu is a shining example of a town where this rat race is taking place.

Mjini, Mugumu

Socialism still survives in places as illustrated by the material goods of 99% of the townspeople. Upon entering a typical house (a brick and concrete building with wooden rafters and a sheet metal roof) you will be escorted to the “Sebuleni” (sitting room) which will be furnished with wooden comfy chairs with designed coverings, paintings on the wall with messages of love, hope and belief in Christianity (a movie poster for Titanic is very common too for some reason). There are few doors in the house, while cloth sheets cover most entrances. The cooking equipment, lamps, flashlights, toilets, stools, wash bins, telephones, Tupperware, thermoses, bicycles, even the breed of dog are all exactly the same.

In terms of jobs the majority of the townsfolk are limited to choosing to be shopkeepers, carpenters, mechanics, shoe shiners, butchers, barbers, teachers, or restaurant/hotel owners/waitresses/waiters. Payment is very low and children, young and old, rarely have even a dollar or two to their name their parents could spare them. The most common toys I saw were old bicycle tires which the children would guide down the road while running along with a stick and a spinner made out of an appropriate sized leaf speared through the middle with a thorn from a shrub and made to spin by also running down the road. Soccer balls are also made out of plastic bags or cloth tied together with string. I can see why envy for money is a strong influence from childhood on.

By the time adulthood is reached this envy has either consumed you or humbled you and the consumed seem to gather in the official offices. I was about two weeks late in getting my passport stamped again around the second to last month of my trip and the Immigration officials in town wanted 400,000 Tsh (about 350 dollars) payoff for the stamp, otherwise they would not and I would be in serious trouble with the police for being in this country beyond the date my previous stamp allowed. Luckily the father I was living with was able to argue them down to 85,000 Tsh.

Being 18 and having lots of free time allowed me to experience the evolving youth culture of Tanzania. Kids around my age either have not yet finished their Secondary School studies or have but haven’t gotten a good enough division from their end of Secondary School national exams to get government funding for an A-level school. Consequently the town is chock full of 17-23 year olds with a lot of time on their hands and not much to do. Pretty much the thing to do is waste time in town just chilling or hanging around your house. But Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights the local disco operates.

After my first visit there I dubbed it the “House of the Secret Perversions of Mugumu.” Here boys and girls grind like hell to year old American pop or rap songs, or (and this is what I liked) African music. In everyday life you see absolutely no touching or intimacy between boys and girls, it is strictly forbidden. Boyfriends and girlfriends barely exist for it is dangerously risky and would require an unbearable amount of secrecy. If a brother or father catches a boy with his daughter or sister he can beat him and report him to his parents, who will probably also beat him.

In the disco the girls shed their traditional clothes for tight fitting jeans and shirts, behind the bar 80’s porno flicks play, and at the end of the night the lucky ones are going to a hotel with a girl who they will sleep with and pay them some money in the morning. This isn’t prostitution, at least not “true prostitution.” The girls are there at the disco to have a good time, not to look for potential sex customers. It has become an accepted part of sleeping with a girl that you give her some money afterwards, unless, and this is very rare, she likes you enough to not think of accepting money. True prostitution you find in the big cities (they line up by the street and in bars and come straight up to you and grab your dick) and at the larger, wealthier hotels in town (where the waitresses can bring you drinks, food, or themselves, all for a price). The least expensive price I heard was 1,000 Tsh (under 1 dollar) and the most, 20,000 Tsh (about 18 dollars). If you have the money you can do pretty much whatever you want with these girls. I heard a story about one boy from my town where he hired five girls and five hotel rooms. He would go to one room sleep with one girl and then continue down the row of rooms until he reached the end, at which point he would start again, until it broke morning. This was the only aspect of youth culture that really turned me off and I took pains to avoid it at all costs.

Wewe, Mzungu (Hey, White Guy)

If you have white skin you’re gonna be asked for money ridiculous amounts of times. I told my brother Kemmi if I was here for Halloween I would dress up as a big money sign. You’ll also be asked hundreds of other questions. Mostly people want to know if anything in your country is like the things, customs, etc. they have in Tanzania. They hear tons of news bits about America, but think about it, what would you picture America to be like if all you were hearing about was celebrities and the few big headlines (one day someone told me they heard Busta Rhymes died on the radio, I was heart-stricken until I found out it was only his bodyguard that got capped). Often when I told people I was from America a conversation like this would start.

Them: “Oh, America is a good country”
Me: “Well, I don’t know about good, certainly a rich one, we do some pretty horrible shit-“
Them: “No America is a good country, if god wishes I will reach there one day, do you know how I could get there?”
Me: “No, sorry, I don’t. I think you should go to the immigration office and find out how to get a visa-“
Them: “Well then, if I give you a picture of me can you use it to find me a girlfriend from America and get her to come back here to me?”
Me: “Uh, well I can try, I can’t promise anything though”

For the most part though, people will act very friendly towards you. Just don’t say anything about looking for minerals. The people are very protective of the vast untapped wealth of minerals in the surrounding areas and get really pissed off when white guys come in with the funds to mine and steal their “rightful” minerals. Supposedly one guy was killed by some villagers in 2004 for trying to mine. I heard tons of rumors about different white people around the region who were “really” here just to mine. Not only is Tanzania very rich in minerals, but the common belief is the Germans buried tons of gold, diamonds and other valuables in secret places when they were getting kicked out of the country at the end of the first World War. I heard a story that some people from a nearby village had found a box of German diamonds but it was cursed and anyone who tried to touch it either got paralyzed or straight killed. Last I heard they were looking for a witch doctor to open the box. The only other thing to be wary of is the few hundred shillings most people will tack on to the usual, local price of things. Note what things cost for everyone else and you will be able to argue the price down to that very simply and quickly.

February-April, a Tale of Neverending Bureaucratic Bullshit

In the first few days of May I finally got permission to volunteer teach at Kisangura. Why in the first few days of May? Let’s back up to the end of January. After almost two weeks of cooling out, adjusting to the culture shock and learning the basics of Kiswahili I was ready to begin teaching. Emmanuel Kagoro, my father, ran into the headmaster of Kisangura and he told him that he would not allow me to teach at his school unless I had government permission. Hearing this immediate discrimination I decided to look for another school to begin at. I wrote up and printed out a resume and first visited Serengeti Secondary School. The headmaster there seemed pleased that I wanted to come help out but said he needed to discuss the matter of bringing in a new teacher with his board. Ok, no problem I thought. When I followed up on the board’s decision I found out they too wanted me to get government permission. “Just what is government permission?” I thought. I had to wait another week and a half to find out the answer cause my father was on a trip to Musoma to look for a bicycle for me.

When he returned I found out that meant going to Dar es Salaam, the very opposite side of the country, to get a teaching license from the Ministry of Education. To do this successfully I needed to get my credentials, so I got my mother to fax my AA degree and my transcript from BHSEC. The day I went to pick it up I felt like I had the worst hangover ever, although I had only had three beers the previous evening. I went to the hospital and found out I had malaria, which landed me there for another week. When I got out I found out I also needed a letter from the school employing me asking for the Ministry to give me the license. To get that letter I needed a letter of introduction from the organization that sent me here. There really was no organization that sent me here, but I contacted Jim Morgan and he made up a letter of introduction for me, and my family faxed it. My father and I went to bring my documents to the Board Chairman of Kisangura but he was on a safari to Arusha. When he came back it took two more trips to his house before we finally caught him at home. He was also very reassuring. He said, “We need teachers! I will bring this to the Board Meeting on Monday (this was the weekend) and you should have the letter you need to travel to Dar es Salaam right away.” On Monday I was told the meeting was postponed until Tuesday cause Monday was a public holiday. I went to Kisangura on Tuesday and found out the meeting wasn’t postponed, it was cancelled and the next one wasn’t for another three weeks. Finally I couldn’t take anymore of this bureaucratic bullshit and went straight to the headmaster. I told him look, I’m only here for two and a half more months, you need more teachers, all I need to get this license you say I need is for you to write a letter telling the Ministry you want me to teach at your school. He agreed and wrote the letter. I left for Dar es Salaam shortly afterwards.

At the Ministry of Education I found out it had never been possible for me to get a teaching license because I am not from an organization the government recognizes. I had gone through so much bullshit already that I was desensitized enough to not really let this phase me, plus I was having a great time on my cross-country vacation. When I returned I went to Kisangura and explained what happened and they said, ok just get permission from the District Education Officer. I went to see him and he said he needed to see my documentation. I went and got my documentation and he agreed. Finally I was a secondary school teacher.

Maisha Kawaidia Yangu

But enough of the depressing things about this country, my everyday life was almost always one of happiness, freedom and relaxation. Until right before I began teaching my day usually went like this: I would wake up around 9:00, take a delicious breakfast of tea and kitumbua or andazi (delicious cake like things), read, do origami, teach myself Kiswahili, draw, enjoy the sun, or dick around with the kids in the house for a few hours. Then maybe I would make a visit to the library for another book, take lunch, play checkers with family members or friends, generally just continue on relaxing. At 4:30 I would get ready and go to the local soccer field to practice with a large group of local guys, ages ranging from 16 to mid 30’s with most of them in their mid 20’s. It was a good group of players and the level of play and altitude left me real tired at first but finally got me back into shape after my usual unhealthy-ingredients-taken-daily-during-a-first-semester-of-college infused life. By the time we finished the sun would be going down and I would troop back home to spend time with my family, eat dinner and pass out around 9:30 at night. If there was a good soccer match on in the evening me and my brother Kemmi and maybe a few others would roll up to the Tanzanite hotel to watch it over a few sodas or beers and return a little later, but I rarely stayed up past 11:00. On weekends the local team, Mugumu Stars, may have a match against another village and I would get to play. If the money was there the family would buy petrol for the generator and we would watch TV or their collection of movies (which consisted of B action movies or religious tapes. I found Desperado and the Kill Bill flicks in town and bought them for the family, which was a big hit). In terms of television we got something like 5 stations. Around the time of night we would watch television our choices were the news, hooooooorible dubbed Spanish soap operas, cheesy movies or music videos. A discovery I made too late was that The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air plays every Monday at 11:30 in the morning.

As soon as I got back from DES I was approached by mad amounts of people and my days got busier and even more enjoyable. It was like after I left the townsfolk were like, “damn that white guy left and I didn’t get to ask him for… Ah good he came back.” Another thing that helped was my Kiswahili was at full conversational level by this point.

The amount of people I met and started going to see for one reason or the other grew almost every time I would go to town. When I arrived home from teaching I would have at least two or three things I had promised to or could do. Some of these were drawing with this mad good artist, playing tunes on the local radio station run out of the back of these dude’s photo shop, teaching someone to use the computer, teaching random folks from the town some English, tutoring my brother in Chemistry, getting drunk and chilling with these two Canadian 20 something year olds who lived in a house nearby, or just visiting friends houses scattered across the village for a little bit (Mzima? Mzima kabisa).

The combination of finally teaching and having tons of things to do in my free time made me feel sad I had only a month or so left and I thought hard about staying on further instead of returning to college. I decided on college cause I really did miss my friends and had already signed up for my fall classes and housing, plus I want to graduate at the same time as most of my friends from college.

The Education Situation

The process of a student advancing through the education system in Tanzania is a lot like skee-ball. Anyone not retarded (fuck it, this essay lost its professional tone a long time ago and sadly there are a lot of mentally deficient children in Tanzania) can make it through the first hole, Primary School. It’s free and taught completely in Kiswahili. Unless you’re really unlucky it’s also easy to make it through that second hole, Secondary School. It’s taught mostly in Kiswahili as well but the tests and notes are in English. It costs money, but not much unless you go to a private or boarding school. 95% of the students graduate Secondary School without a good enough grade on their national exams to get government funding for the third hole, A Level. So most kids don’t get it through that hole for a little while, they gotta try a few times. The cost of your average A Level School is about 400,000 Tsh per year, which I calculate is about a third of the annual income of the average parent. So the kid has to find some other means of funding. He or she can seek the help of relatives, friends’ families, or anywhere they see an opportunity. Eventually the kid should be able to hit that hole, whether its within a half year of finishing Secondary School (this is how long it took most of the kids I knew in Tanzania) or many years of parents saving fifty, sixty, seventy thousand Tsh from their annual income. Then that last hole, well, we all know how hard it is to hit that last hole. There’s maybe 3% of the population that can pull the leaning over the railing and dropping the skee-ball right into the hole trick, i.e. those who have the 2 or 3 million Tsh to shell out each year for each kids college fees. For the other 97%, college is nigh impossible, a dream. And the end result of all this? What do you do if you hit that last hole? You take your shitload of tickets right up to the counter and get a prize. In Tanzania you take your degree to the cities and get a good paying job.

But back to Secondary School. Teaching English and Math to Secondary School kids was definitely an “Improvise until you find a formula that works” kind of gig. The day I showed my letter of approval to teach from the local DEO I was prepared to begin teaching the following day thusly: I was given the Math textbook and told to begin from the beginning. The school had only one Math teacher that came around every 3 Fridays who actually taught at another Secondary School maaad far away. I was given the English syllabus for all the forms and told to begin at the beginning with the form I’s and teach whatever I wanted to the form III’s. The English teacher had been away on maternity leave for a few months and the kids told me she taught almost only in Kiswahili. Then I was introduced to the students of the three classes I would teach, shook on the hand, and left to go figure out how I could teach as much material as well as possible in the 23 school days left before their first semester ended and I had to dip.

I tried to be the “cool” teacher. I gave the Math class a whole class to fuck around with a checkers board to solve a critical thinking problem I devised for them. I gave my form III students Hunter S. Thompson and Roald Dahl to read. And the students really were eager to learn, it’s just their previous English experience wasn’t enough to get the humor of HST being stuck on an island with an isolated tribe of South American Indian smugglers with nothing to do but drink Scotch for three days straight or the satire in Roald Dahl’s portrayal of the U.S. President and blatant, though silly and childish, racism towards Russians and Chinese in the Cold War parody chapter in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I figured that out after the first week, so I’de say full week #2 was when I was really teaching to the full benefit of the form III’s English class. I read through the stories with them and explained what was going on. The Math and the form one English was simply following the textbook or syllabus, though I threw in some extra stuff not in either.

Then we hit the third full week and it was already time for terminal exams so I wanted to spend Monday reviewing with my classes for their exams, but after period 4 the kids were called together and sent on a “field trip” to the countryside around the school to move sisal plants to more fertile planting grounds. Tuesdays I taught for two periods only and then Wednesday the tests began. My Form III’s really impressed me with their scores on my test. The Form I’s were another story, but I realize it was because in class I was translating instructions for classwork into simple Kiswahili but the test was completely in English. There were still some 70’s, 80’s and even a 90.5 though. And then that was the end of it. The school closed and was to open again after I had left the country.

I think the point is if I would have had had the 4 and a half months I should have had there I would have been able to teach the syllabus and much more to the kids, plus it was fun as hell teaching and hanging out with the students and the few chill other faculty. In addition I got to see the conditions your average Secondary School provides for its students. Other than me there were four other regular teachers, and two that taught maybe one or two classes per day, if they didn’t have other matters (they were the second Head Master and the Academic Master). Out of these teachers I could tell most wanted to get out of there and onto a better job (which requires higher education). All but one of the teachers asked me to find them sponsorship in America. At the end of each class I had to sign an attendance book showing I had taught this topic, and I never saw more than one other teacher’s signature for that form for the day. Instead of teaching, out of the few teachers available, one or two will be on “duty”. This means they look around the school for kids cutting class or doing other bad things and beat them. The Headmaster clearly loved to do this. One morning I witnessed a beat-a-thon of his, which went on for at least a half hour. The students in trouble would come one by one and get smacked hard across the hand, arm or butt four times with two sticks he wielded, one in each hand. Most of the other students gathered around laughing at the spectacle. What a waste of school time.

Are You Still Reading This Series of Rants Masquerading as an Essay?

I’ve read this over at least 10 times and I feel like it fails miserably at conveying how truly amazing this experience was. I hope at least this taught you a little bit about a country I’m sure you knew little to nothing about. There’s no way for me to put into words the chillness of the family I lived with, the experience of walking into town for one reason or another and the encounters you’ll have along the way, a bike ride down a sandy, pothole filled road through the countryside, or the hundreds of other things that showed me how beautiful Tanzania, and I can only assume most of Africa, truly is. If I combined these thoughts with those in my journal this would drag on for another 15 pages at least and I realize it would still be inadequate. I love you Mugumu and the kindness and wonders you showed to a goofy eighteen-year-old from NYC.