In-Service Training

So now I’m in Njombe town south of Iringa for two weeks for in-service training. Half of my training group is here (the half that lives around here in the southern highlands) plus Tanzanian counterparts we each chose from our sites to come to training with us to help us do our volunteer stuff back at site. My counterpart, a neighbor and teacher at my school who’s become kind of a friend, is really awesome, and I think he will help a lot with implementing all these ideas when we get back. Already we’re planning to make a garden behind our houses (the thought of growing my own vegetables and herbs is so exciting!), and I think we will do a lot to minimize the use of corporal punishment in school, which has been a huge problem. I hate listening to kids being beat with a stick and then crying and whimpering and pleading for it to stop. Plus, it’s so ineffective. So I think my counterpart actually agrees now and will help support me in my convictions when we get back. Hopefully we can help each other be better teachers and help the other teachers be better, too. And hopefully we can implement some outside of school programs to teach the kids life skills and keep them busy and motivated to study as well as work in the community to improve villagers’ health and behavior, especially regarding our students (girls get chased out of school if they become pregnant, usually by a villager not in school). I have so many ideas and want to do so much, it’s overwhelming! How can I possibly do everything I want to do? I guess that’s why I have a counterpart.

So anyway, training has been good. This week we’ve focused on PEPFAR and HIV/AIDS education. We learned all about HIV/AIDS, the disease progression and symptoms as well as how it works molecularly. Sort of a refresher course for me, but it reminded me just how much I love the biochemistry of disease and how it relates to the individual and personal level as well as the epidemiological level. It got me thinking about grad school in immunology or epidemiology or public health with a specialty in one of these when I get back to the US. I think I’ll be ready to go back to school by then, and I’ll be all fired up about global health, too.

This weekend, it’s back home to school for me. I think I’m more excited to be back at site now. But it has been super frustrating so far. I have at least one really terrible day per week. And it’s very discouraging to be involved in this broken school system with so many hopeless characteristics. Can I really help do anything when I’m only one of 5 teachers at a school of 720, the kids don’t have teachers in their classes most of the time, the exams are pretty damn hard, everything is taught to the exams and regular school grades don’t matter, the kids are supposed to be taught in English at secondary school but don’t have any foundation in the language from their primary school during which they sat in the classroom every day without any teachers so now they don’t know any English at all, the teachers we do have spend more of their time drinking chai and punishing students than teaching their scheduled classes, and the chalkboards are so bad that you can hardly read what’s written on them. Those are just a few of the frustrations. Seriously, this country drives me nuts sometimes.
But I just have to keep telling myself that whatever I do, however little, can have an effect. That even if the kids don’t pass on to Advanced level secondary school, they can learn valuable life lessons in school, about health and nutrition and farming and how to interact with others and how important education is, so that they can live better lives and then help give the next generation a better life, however minimal the changes are. Eventually, after several generations, education might be valued, genders might be more equal (in a family planning debate the school had a couple weeks ago, one argument against family planning given by a Form 4 boy was that if women don’t have enough children, they will have more time on their hands, and thus they will be prostitutes- Oh My God!!!), people might be healthier, agricultural practices might be more efficient, etc. It’ll just take time…

So we’ll see how the next couple months go until our school break in June, during which I plan to lead a week long girls’ conference with 3 other volunteers (we’ll each bring about 10 girls with potential to learn about reproductive health and life skills like self-confidence and communication and encourage them to show those boys that they can be just as good students and leaders and they can go somewhere in their lives) and then do some traveling around the country. It’ll be a nice break, I’m sure.

Maybe I’m just in a really weird mood because this is such a different situation- I live far away from other Americans and rarely see them, much less get to town for internet and such, so I’m really in my own little world. I’ve now been on my own longer than I was in training with these friends, so it’s kind of weird to see these friends after being away from them all for so long and we didn’t even know each other for 3 months to begin with. Plus, it’s a social explosion to go from some Tanzanian semi-friends that take such effort to communicate with and be culturally appropriate with to suddenly being around 16 other friends from training who have all had their own lives for the past 3 months (and while we text and even call each other on occasion, we really don’t know what’s going on in each others’ lives). But I can relax around them and just be myself, speak quickly and with an American slur and slang thrown in, wear pants and sit in a chair however I want and drink beer and just act like an American without worrying about what others think of me (I hate that I have to worry about that, but it’s what you gotta do in a different country like this).

And then this weekend, I’ll go back to being on my own at site, rarely seeing any of these friends, struggling to cook and clean and teach and implement all my great ideas in my community, though at least with the help of a counterpart. Crazy. But I get to see Batman! And one friend pointed out that the next 6 months will probably be way easier than the last 6 months because now we know what we’re up against, we’ve struggled through some of the initial problems, and our Swahili is improving along with our relationships at site, etc. So that’s a nice thought! J

I hope my mood stabilizes and I can just enjoy being here, living and working with the Tanzanians without too many frustrations. I’ve learned a lot to deal with the issues of teachers who beat students, students who don’t understand any English, students who won’t try and won’t study or do homework, etc. Hopefully I’m now ready to tackle and conquer these frustrations so that the joys of working with students, hanging out with the teachers, etc. can be more joyful and make life good rather than simply bearable.