Christmas Day 2010

A very different Christmas

As I sit typing this I can hear the girls at the Rugambwa Girls Secondary School, the  boarding school across the road, in their classrooms singing Christmas songs – some in english, some in kiSwahili.  It is a beautiful sound!

“But it’s Saturday” I hear you say, “and holidays, why are they in classrooms?”

Children as young as 4 are sent away to boarding school in Tanzania, often distances of several hundred kilometres from home.  They often remain at school over the long holiday period either because their parents can’t afford the bus fare to bring them home or they are sponsored orphans at the school and have no other home. 

There is quite a big group of girls in residence at the moment and as they often do, they have congregated to sing.  Sometimes the tunes are familiar to us, sometimes they are Bantu tunes with the distinctive Bantu ululation at the end.

Yesterday afternoon we came home from Dar es Salaam after the volunteers’ conference and a holiday on Zanzibar.  The house was empty of fresh food.  So we went shopping this Christmas morning.  It was business as usual in the market and all the shops though the bakery had not delivered any bread. (This is a Christmas bonus I reckon.)  Only a very few businesses have any Christmas decorations up, and those are of the tinselly bunting variety and often accompanied by tinny carols played at double time (think Nahum Tate meets the Chipmunks!)

But at 9 am, despite the shops being open, there were people everywhere on the streets, all dressed in their best clothes, heading to or from services of worship – Lutheran and SDA mostly.  The Greek Orthodox had contributed to the festivity of the day with coloured balloons along their front fence.  Last night the RC Cathedral had been full for midnight mass and this evening there were again people everywhere, families out congregating and celebrating together. And not a piece of wrapping paper in sight!

We had Christmas lunch at our friend Valerie’s house with some other ex-pats and locals.  It was a lovely, nearly traditional, Christmas meal.  Valerie had done most of the cooking but guests also contributed to the menu including (from Matt) a cake given him by a Moslem colleague to celebrate the birth of God’s prophet!

Tonight I am listening to Handel’s Messiah and thinking about an early night – we were up very early this morning to talk to family in Australia on the phone.  This morning there was no sign that Santa had visited the families of children next door.  I think he missed Bukoba!  The only evidence I have that Santa was active last night is from Matt – his niece in Wiltshire texted him, that she was delighted with her present from Santa, at 3 am UK time (6 am here).  She had been warned not to wake her parents early and thought waking an uncle thousands of kilometres away was a safer bet!

Steve and I had our Christmas present to each other early – 6 nights on Zanzibar – but he has also given me a new pair of earrings which I will treasure!  (They are Stoney tangawizi bottle caps)

I love the ingenuity of the children here!  They have so much fun with so little.

At Jambiani (Zanzibar) last night we watched children having a race along the beach pushing plastic bottles on sticks and making interwoven tracks in the sand.

Yesterday we met some children who obligingly posed with their slalom track for racing bottle caps in the sand.  It looked such fun!

Someone famous said ‘childhood is an invention of the developed world’ (or something similar).  He was right in that children here have responsibilities and know hard physical work from a very young age.  We often see children as young as four years of age minding their younger siblings, maybe taking them to get water with each child carrying a vessel the size depending on the age of the child.  

But the household tasks the children have to do doesn’t mean they don’t have time for fun!  Sometimes it is quite Victorian – children with bike tyres or other ‘hoops’ and a small stick bowling them along.  Sometimes it is far more modern – the children next door to us love to play ‘Emergency sirens and car alarms’.  They can spend up to half an hour running around imitating all the noises they have heard on the videos their dad plays in the little cinema next to our house.  They are very good mimics! 

We often see children pushing home made trundle wheels or little cars they’ve constructed from waste materials and attached to the end of sticks.

One of the joys of my job is seeing the fun the children have with the teaching aids I (and previous volunteers) am teaching their teachers to make.  To a western child it would be very ho-hum to be given a cardboard box clock to use, or a pack of cards made from a calendar page.  But here the children’s faces light up!  “What, you can have fun doing maths?”

Thank you to all of you who have contributed to the costs of printing my book so that more children will be able to have fun in maths.  I can now print plenty!

And a very merry Christmas to you all!

Love from Jenny.

Maths teachers in Bukoba are crying out for help – they want to teach maths in a way that is contemporary and relevant, they want to use teaching / learning  aids but they have no money to buy them, they want to know more about the Algebra and Geometry they have to teach.  Would you like to help them?

My new project is this – to write a book and have it printed and distributed so all the teachers in Bukoba District will know the joys of Tangrams and Bottle Caps (and know what Algebra is and what it isn’t!)  This gives teachers the power to better use what they already have and can easily get – it makes them less dependent on financial hand-outs!

The book has written itself – it is based on the collection of resource sheets used in my seminars.

The printing can be done here in Bukoba – Ebrahim Sokwala, Director of Best Deal Publishers and Book Sellers, has told me he will do it at cost !

Distribution is easily solved – teacher mentor teams will take it with them when they take the Pupil-centred Teaching message to the rest of the District.

All I need is $2000 to have it printed .

Here is the front cover.

I will send a (PDF) copy to anyone who wants to see what is inside. 

And you can have your name on the Official Sponsors page.

I hope to have it printed in January so if you could put a little something in Bukoba’s Christmas Stocking I would appreciate it.

Contact me at jenclark59@gmail.com if you would like to help and I will give you more details and tell you how to send money.  Thank you - in great anticipation.

There are 4 on the bike that is coming along the road!

 Minziro Forest Reserve

This trip has been a long time in the planning.  We couldn’t do it until the new tyres arrived.  Today Steve and I, along with Terri (USA) and Leen (Belgian) finally made it.  And it certainly was worth the effort!

Minziro is about 50 km west on a good bitumen road then another 20 km northeast on good gravel – so the driving was easy (and Steve only swore advised other drivers a couple of times).  Most of the traffic on the gravel road was bicycles, some carrying quite a load, though there were several cars and motorbikes including one carrying a dad and three little tackers – baby on his knee and two more on the pillion – all of whom waved and smiled as they went past!

The gravel road winds through the forest and up to Minziro village which is close to the Uganda border.  The forest crosses the border – it has a different name on the other side – and could have been National Park quality except that it has been exploited for rainforest timber since German days when a little rail line took the timber to Lake Victoria for export.

 The first thing we noticed about the forest was the number of butterflies.  They were of many different colours – orange, blue, chocolate, yellow, zebra striped, and more.  There were so many that sometimes we were ‘wading’ through them as we walked along the road.  The butterflies were certainly easier to ‘watch’ than the birds which were mostly skulking just out of sight.

There are many little dirt footpaths leading off the road and we wandered down about a dozen of these over the several hours we spent in the forest.  One went along a little creek where we saw beautiful ferns and fungi as well as a glimpse of a blue-breasted kingfisher.  Both Terri and Leen are quite interested in birds – Terri spotted Steve’s Shoebill several weekends ago and Leen has asked if she can have Steve’s bird list for the house as she lives near us and wants to narrow down the possibilities to look up in her bird guide for what she sees in her garden.  Terri goes home to the US on Wednesday next but Leen I think will be a fixture on Steve’s local birding expeditions when she is in Bukoba.

Steve’s bird Life List increased by 10 – I spotted the African Moustached Warbler and the Whinchat!

It was a lovely day out!

Leen & Steve studying the handbook