Visitors

Last week was a week of visitors.

On Monday friends from Warrnambool and Ballarat came to see Steve’s workplace and mine.  Martin and Anthony were Agriculture Victoria colleagues of Steve’s.  Martin and his wife Kaz are volunteering on the Bandari Project at Mto wa Mbu (Mosquito River) west of Arusha.  Anthony is on the board of a children’s home at Moshi, east of Arusha, and is also volunteering on an AVP assignment in Kenya.   Together Steve, Martin and Anthony can boast 100 years of doing no harm to agriculture in western Victoria!

Anthony, Martin and Steve

It was a quick visit - they had dallied at Echo which was fair enough as the men were all agriculturally inclined - but we walked quickly and I talked quickly so they were able to see all of the Olkokola Vocational Training Centre and hear all about it.  There was even time for questions. (Steve and I were able to do a reciprocal visit to the Bandari Project school on Tuesday on our way back from Lake Natron - it is an excellent project.)

On Wednesday we had a visit at OVTC from four young Dutch people (including an Australian/ Dutch woman originally from Perth). Two of the young men had visited Tanzania as secondary school students and the poverty they had seen had a lasting impact, particularly the lack of underwear possessed by boys.  They started the '4allfoundation' which aims to provide undies, currently just for boys but with the prospect of undies and washable/reusable menstrual pads for girls in the future.  They were impressed with OVTC and what it provides and I did a video interview - unexpected so unprepared! - which I’m debating whether I’d really want to see!  They also are keen for our tailoring students to start producing the menstrual pads, a sewing project that would be excellent from a social, ecological and economic point of view.

On Friday the children and staff from Step by Step Learning Centre, a school for mentally handicapped children, came to visit.  They were a lot of fun!  The children enjoyed seeing our students hard at work in their class rooms and also seeing our farm animals.  The accompanying adults were very impressed with the centre and the wonderful vegetable garden.  We have made Step by Step a present of a bull calf as they are establishing their own farm.  There is also the prospect of future links with our tailoring students making the fabric bags the Step by Step children require and our carpentry students making some furniture - shelves and cupboards.  We had a reciprocal visit to Step by Step Learning Centre today.  Our students and teachers had a very enjoyable time.  It is a very impressive school, a credit to the woman who started the centre when she realised there was no learning centre in Arusha where her mentally disabled daughter could gain skills and some independence.  A fellow AVP volunteer is working there on fund raising and I wish her all the success in the world - this centre (and many more like it) is sorely needed.

On Tuesday last week I was also a visitor.  I went out to see Holy Ghost Vocational Training Centre run by the Spiritans at Tengeru, just east of Arusha.  It is part of an impressive complex that includes a boys secondary school and a deaf education unit.  The Head Teacher showed me around and answered my many questions.  I am starting to get a better understanding of the vocational training sector and ways we might add value to what we do at OVTC.  I was also able to get a look at the official Vocational Education Training Authority (VETA) syllabuses for Carpentry and for Masonry - something which up to now had eluded me.  My next step is to get copies of the syllabuses for myself.  

My maths classes are continuing.  Each student has one hour a week in a streamed class that has a maximum of 12 learners so all can get individual attention.  The lowest ability groups have only 5 students.  We are concentrating on money and measurement.  For some students the aim is for them to be able to count and to recognise the currency of Tanzania; others are working on keeping simple financial records and doing tax calculations.  My challenge is to produce appropriate resources so that students will be able to be use them in a self-teaching situation after I leave.  Below is an example of the work left for our students by the local primary school teachers - with no feedback given!

Look at Steve’s blog for the story of our trip to Ngare Sero, Lake Natron and Engaruka with pictures.  Just a couple here as incentive to go and see more!

Love from Jenny

A trip to town

The lives of students at the centre are quite sheltered and the hours of each day are fully occupied with all they have to do - lessons in their trade, lessons in maths and swahili by teachers from the local school and organised sport and exercises.  There are also lessons in health from the Medical Officer at the local dispensary clinic. The students also share responsibility for all the communal cooking and cleaning as well as their own personal washing.  They really don’t get out much!  So the excursion program is an important way of broadening their horizons. 

Day to day life - masonry students making blocks

Most of our students come from remote villages and so a trip into Arusha town is quite a novelty. Just like our Hamilton students on a trip to Melbourne, their eyes are out on stalks. 

Yesterday we went all went into central Arusha,  The 41 students and 4 of the staff were squashed into 2 daladalas (minibuses).  Two more teachers travelled in the land cruiser pickup with the wheelchairs in the back.

Some of our tailoring students

The aim of the day was to show students the sort of shops where they might buy the materials and equipment they would need for their small business.  When we arrived in town we divided into the different streams and each group went with their teacher to see shops for masons, carpenters, agrivets or tailors.  I went with the tailors to see sewing machine spare parts shops, notions shops and fabric shops. The tailoring group includes four students in wheelchairs (baiskeli in swahili), four using crutches and another 10 with mobility issues.  So getting around town with uneven footpaths and roadways and anarchic traffic around midday when a large slice of the business community were heading off to pray was somewhat problematic!  But, as always, optimism and perseverance triumphed and we managed it!  The students now have a better understanding of the business world that are training to enter.

And who was last back on the bus ( and almost got left behind ) ?  The Agrivet students of course!    

A  highlight for the students was having lunch at a cafe - roast meat with rice and a soda!  A meal they didn’t need to prepare and clean up after, plus soda - a rare treat! 

Having lunch in the cafe

An additional highlight for me was meeting Brian at Arusha’s central market. I had stopped short when I saw the Essendon Bombers t-shirt that he was wearing with pride - he clearly didn’t know about the season they’d just had.  In fact he didn’t know what an Essendon Bomber was.  He now knows they are a football team in Melbourne Australia (probably thinks soccer as Aussie Rules seemed like information overload under the circumstances) but not how poorly they played this year.  He was very happy to have his picture taken.

Brian, the happiest Bombers supporter in Tz!

More soon, love Jenny

August has vanished!

It has been a busy month at OVTC with the beginning of the new term, excursions and visitors. 

I had four nights in the ‘back blocks’, up near the Kenyan border, staying at the Parish house at Loliondo.  I was with two colleagues on a recruiting mission. We again did the ‘4 hrs 13 min’ ( in reality 8 hour! ) route through Longido, then skirting Oldoinya Lengai and Lake Natron.  It’s hard yards in the middle seat of a hard sprung Toyota Landcruiser pickup.

Again, both coming and going, we picked up hitch hikers willing to ride in the back of the pick-up to save a dusty walk.  Again we bought rock salt at Ngare Sero near Lake Natron on the return journey.  This time there was no goat and no puncture, and a return to Arusha before dark.

The parish priest at Loliondo and the catechist at Digodigo had been busy out in their respective parishes finding suitable candidates.  They travelled with us giving directions to some very remote villages along marginal ‘roads’ to do the interviews.  Most of the people we met with did fit our criteria - over 15 and living with disability but with the capacity to look after themselves, help with communal cooking and cleaning and learn a trade.  These were given enrolment forms and information brochures. Also information and advice to help them prepare for living independently. Others who came to talk with us did not fit our criteria - too young or with disabilities too severe.  My colleagues are very good at directing these families to where help is available though for families from these remote areas to have the mother away with one child getting specialist treatment while the rest of the family remains at home can be problematic.  It is a testament to the determination of mothers that many of these children survive at all.  We saw several cases of severe cerebral palsy with intellectual as well as physical disability and it must have been down to the fierceness of the mother’s will, still carrying a grown child, who cannot walk, on her back, that these children remain healthy, well fed and cared for.  

In another case a woman in her early 30s, married with two young girls, and paralysed from the waist down was being cared for by her family.  I think it was her sister-in-law who carried her and propped her up to sit so she could help with the cooking tasks.  We were able to take her into Wasso, the largest town in the area, where the hospital provided her with a wheelchair.  She has been given suggestions for exercises to increase her upper body strength.  With her family’s support to look after her children we hope to have her enrolled in next year’s cohort to learn tailoring.

On the Saturday we had a day east of Digodigo near Jema, a small and remote town.  The parish priest insisted we take a ‘picnic’ as he knew there would be no café or hotel to buy food.  We were up early putting together sandwiches of his design - peanut butter, pork, tomato, cucumber and honey - which were quite tasty!  We also had fruit, biscuits and water.  We met with people afflicted with ‘club foot’ (a congenital condition where the ankle is malformed and so walking is difficult), scoliosis (malformation of the spine) and other physical disabilities resulting from accidents but also several children with Down’s Syndrome.  People with Down’s are able to be contributing members of their society as they can walk and there are many simple tasks they can perform.

I have such admiration for everyone involved - my colleagues, the local communities who help us find candidates and the families of the people with disability who care for them, protect them and advocate for them.

If you have Google Earth you can look for the villages we visited

For my 60th birthday 2 weeks ago we had a weekend at Lake Manyara.  You can look at Steve’s blog for pictures of birds and mammals, but here is a rare one of the two of us.

More soon, love Jenny