The Night Before Christmas

Mambo?![1] So, it’s Christmas Eve as I’m writing this! We’re having a Christmas party at SAWAKA today: Elf, food, Christmas songs, decorations, socks; merry-making… We’re all really excited, but at the same time it just feels like we’re pretending it’s Christmas because it’s 30®C, we’re surrounded by banana trees instead of pine trees and there isn’t a Father Christmas in sight. I’m sure watching Elf will ignite the Christmas spirit, though.

The School In Irundu

So, seeing as all of the schools we’re working in have broken up for Christmas now, we’ve been concentrating on community members. Last week we ran a session in a village called Irundu, which is my favourite venue of them all. It’s a nursery school, which consists of one classroom on the side of a mountain. Looking out of the shuttered windows, all you can see are green slopes and the sky. It’s awesome!

 Our first session there went really well; there were lots of young people there, with a broad age range of 14 to 30, and they were really engaged and asked lots of questions. Bonnavitha, a TNZ volunteer in our team, made a good impression on the group, her number having been requested many times since. We went back yesterday for our second session on STIs and it was disappointing, unfortunately. Four community members returned, out of the previous group of about 15, and two of these didn't arrive until about 2 hours after our session was supposed to start! However, we did have a good session with them. It taught our Peer Educators a lot, as well as the community members, and we were able to hand out 20 of the 200 condoms Philly and I bagged from the hospital. Yay!

Getting community members to return is a big issue we have to address. Perhaps naively (?!) we believe everyone enjoys our sessions – ‘stay for longer!’; ‘can you come back tomorrow?’ – so we think it must be forgetfulness and people being occupied that are preventing our second  sessions from being as wicked as the first. We’ve all agreed we need to repeatedly remind the community chairmen to gather their youth for our follow-up sessions, as they’re the ones with influence and the contacts.

On Wednesday we had a surprisingly wicked day, which has become the highlight of the programme so far for Philly, Bonnavitha and me. We had session no.2 for the Nyakahanga community members and, again, the turnout was pretty disappointing (3…). BUT, one of the older community members, who’s a student at Nyakahanga hospital, taught us about Syphilis. We then taught him back, sharing all the extra detail we’d learnt in our training, resulting in a mega detailed session on Syphilis! THEN, we taught two sisters, 13 and 14, about puberty. We started, expecting them to tell us lots, but it soon transpired that they knew nothing about puberty. It’s amazing that these girls can get to this age, where puberty is usually in full swing, without knowing about the changes taking place in their bodies. It was great to see them stopping to write extra notes down on their walk home after our session. Super rewarding!

I’m going to join in the festivities at SAWAKA now. There are lots of paper chains to be made! Have a lovely Christmas everyone; I’ll write again sooooon!

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[1] N.B. - This is a difficult thing with Swahili greetings – they’re all questions, so all require a response and are all really difficult to write excitedly without coming across as really impatient/bewildered.

An awesome sunset over Omurushaka taxi rank

Teeth and Steve

Hello! So, our placements are in full swing. Most of the schools are closing this week for Christmas, which originally we saw as a hindrance, but the head teachers have kindly let us use classrooms over the next few weeks to teach both children from the school and other community members.

On Thursday we had our first session with community members – that is to say, young people from Nyakahanga who aren’t primary school children. We’d arranged the session with a Nyakahanga chairman and the head teacher of the primary school to let us use a classroom, and we arrived early to start our session at 10 am. People started to trickle in at around 10.30 so we could eventually begin at 11. Relaxed is not the word!!!

It was an especially productive session; partly due to the older ages of attendees – 13 to 20 – and partly due to the smaller group size. We could play the ‘SRH Teeth Game’, which sounds terrible, but is wicked. ‘Teeth’ is a game in which the group stands in a circle and each player assigns themselves a name – Sexual Reproductive Health – related in this case. A player starts by calling another, e.g.: ‘condom, condom is calling gonorrhoea, gonorrhoea’, then ‘gonorrhoea, gonorrhoea is calling syphilis, syphilis’, etc etc. The game is that you have to cover your teeth with your lips while playing, and if you laugh or show your teeth, you’re out. It’s a silly energiser game, which gets everyone more comfortable talking about SRH and with each other.

We used role plays and group discussion to raise the group’s awareness of the most common STIs. Interestingly, in Tanzania this includes Trichonomiasis, which none of us UK volunteers had ever heard of before. We know about it now! Next week we’ll move on to HIV and AIDS and their prevention. The best part about today’s session happened afterwards: a boy who’d been at our session asked if he could lead a part of the session on HIV next week. Awesome! This is especially great because it directly addresses one of the aims of the SAWAKA/Million Hours Fund project, which we’re working for, which is to encourage volunteering among young people in our placement communities, including encouraging them to facilitate their own sessions. Yay!

This is a short one. I’m not really sure why; there are obviously so many interesting things I could write about. But, having been in Karagwe for 3 weeks now, a lot of things that would have been remarkable 2 and a half weeks ago are now unremarkable!

We’ve all acquired a new ‘friend’, though, who we’ve named Steve. He’s a roamer, I suppose, of Kayanga. He’s always outside the building we’re in – be it SAWAKA, a bar; another meeting venue – and follows us to our next destination, asking to come with us to Dar Es Salaam, apparently! He speaks in Kinyambo, the regional dialect, doesn’t seem to understand Swahili and definitely doesn’t speak English. He’s harmless, trotting along a few feet behind us with his sack of plastic, but he’s currently the main topic of conversation among our volunteer group!


(photos not uploading - soz)

Kubawahey and Oohsaffee

So, we’ve started our placements! Nyakahanga Primary School was our first project and, inevitably, acted as our guinea pig. We’ve taught Standard 6 so far, which is one ‘year group’ including children from the ages of 11 to 14.

We arrived pretty apprehensively on Monday morning, unaware of how many pupils we’d be teaching and their ages, having learnt the previous week that this primary school has 1024 pupils! Luckily the teaching system is pretty relaxed (!) and half of the year was sent away, to return to our session the following day.

49 children crammed into the classroom to listen to us on Monday, while the number on Tuesday increased dramatically from 31 at the beginning of the session to around 50, after a Mingle[i] in the playground. The first group felt a lot smaller than 49, whereas the second group felt a lot larger than 50… It was really interesting that there could be such a difference in maturity and knowledge between the two Standard 6 forms. We left the first session full of positivity and improvements for Tuesday’s lesson, whereas Tuesday’s lesson left us pretty exhausted! The awesome thing was that despite us feeling exhausted, the pupils were really enthusiastic and keen to come back for another lesson next week, despite it being the Christmas holidays. Yes!

So what did we teach? With these being our first sessions and the school being a primary school, we started with an introduction to VSO-ICS and Sexual Reproductive Health, and focused on Puberty (Kubarehe – or ‘Kubawahey!) and Hygiene (Usafi – ‘oohsaffeeeeeee’). We’re now in possession of some hilarious/scary drawings of the changes that take place in girls and boys during puberty – the expressions and acne on the faces are particularly funny.

The biggest challenge for us UK volunteers as non-Swahili speakers is not knowing what’s being said in the lessons. As a group (two UK volunteers, our 2 Tanzanian counterparts and a Peer Educator) we devise pretty comprehensive lesson plans, but our brilliant and enthusiastic TNZ colleagues often steer away from points, which can lead to information being given too soon and our lessons overrunning. These are minor problems, but we discovered today that it can lead to incorrect information being given too. Today a child said, ‘if you’re healthy, you start puberty at 9. If you’re unhealthy and have a bad body, you might not start until 11’. Of course, this is absolutely wrong, but her answer was praised as correct in Swahili, which worried and surprised us. We were quick to explain to the class that everyone goes through puberty differently and didn’t judge her at all, but it concerned us that other incorrect things might have been said in Swahili that without us being aware.

The solutions are, of course:

1)      We learn Swahili;

2)      We thoroughly discuss and stick to lesson plans so all parties know what’s being said and when;

3)      We learn Swahili.

We won’t have become fluent in Swahili by our sessions next week, but we will definitely have made extra effort to revise and review and LEARN lesson plans as a team before we start teaching. This sounds like we don’t know what we’re doing when we walk in the classroom; we do, it’s just that our incompetence in Swahili means that we’re unaware of deviations from the plan when they do happen.

I have to stress that we are so, so happy with our counterparts and Peer Educator. Without them, we wouldn’t even have placements to go to and they’re incredibly good at teaching: the children are captivated by them and hang on to every word. Our Peer Educator, Godlove, bought a book on Human Biology before we started placement, so he is extremely knowledgeable on the subjects we were teaching. Bonnavita, one of the TNZ volunteers in our team has authority and gains instant respect from the children. During our first session a slightly disruptive crowd gathered outside the classroom window. Bonnavita simply closed her eyes, held out her hand and said a few words in Swahili and they scattered. Amazing! Jackie, my counterpart, bought sweets and is just super chilled.

On Wednesday we gained the primary school in Omurushaka as a placement; I can’t wait to start our sessions there and continue the work we’re doing!

(P.S. I know these photos are stereotypical, but they're stereotypical for a reason!)

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[i] ‘Mingle, mingle, mingle!’. Mingle’s an excellent energiser we learnt at training, which can also be a brilliant way to split people into groups. ‘Mingle, mingle, mingle!’ is sung while everyone dances around and mingles. The leader shouts, ‘threes!’, or ‘sevens!’, etc, and everyone has to form groups of threes or sevens etc. The process can be repeated as many times as you like, which is often. Fun! It proved surprisingly difficult for both groups to pick up. Everyone just danced holding hands, so we just ended up splitting groups manually and unintentionally inviting an extra 19 on-lookers from the playground into our lesson. This, of course, is great, apart from the fact that a lot of the children were meant to be in other lessons!