Library Update...the Second! October 1st

One of the huge points of Peace Corps is sustainability. This is often the point that crosses my mind the most as I do a project, as many of them would frankly just be unable to happen in my absence. With this in mind, its often hard to do a grant project, realizing that you are only reaching a select few people, who may or may not change their behaviors. Having learned this hard lesson, we none the less want to address the serious issue of teachers and learning resources at Makong’onda Day Secondary School. The children are here, they are willing to read, but where will they find the resources (especially if no-one is here to teach it to them). It is with the thoughts and goal of SUSTAINABILITY in mind that we start our new library at Makong’onda Secondary School.
After the discovery of all of the books, the building of the shelves, the screaming and complaining that accompanied the discovery of the rats, we realized that simply adding the new books into the library was not a wise decision. After all, how did the books come to be in the state they were in (the teachers placed all of the books in boxes in humid, festering, storage rooms because they didn’t want the students to steal/lose/read them), why were we missing a large number of books (the students AND the teachers stole many of the books), why hasn’t there ever been a library before now (no-one knew how to run/manage/build a library before now)? After a discussion with the student prefects and the headmaster we decided to select 3 student librarians along with several of the student prefects and do a training on how to manage/care for/ and maintain a library.
Our little seminar was attended by all of the student prefects and our three librarians on an early Saturday morning. Together we studied concepts that were easy, like “why is it necessary to have a library” and concepts that were more difficult, like alphabetization. I climbed up on my soapbox for a bit, telling each and every one of them that this library was “for the students, by the students”. We talked about ways to make the students AND teachers to care for the books, including paying a small fee (1 dollar) to use the library every year. We talked about making contracts for students to sign, saying that they would be willing to pay the price of a book should they lose it, and stating what library privileges they had. By the end of the session, I had some of the kids just and determined as me to see this library succeed, it was a promising start.
After I jumped down from the soapbox, I put them through “drills” in the library. I went in, destroyed one of the shelves (put books in backwards, upside down, in the wrong order, in the wrong subject) and then made the students put them back in the right order. I also took several of the files out of the filing cabinet and made each of them show me where to put it back (they got extra points if they could actually open the cabinet on the first try without help). By the end of the day, each of the students had gotten a grasp of book organization and had great ideas for meeting with the school administrators to ask for a little money for library books.
The entire seminar in my opinion was a great success, shown even more the next week when the three librarians punctually showed up at my house to take my keys and open the library to the students. With a small amount of guidance from me, and a lot of extra small trainings (this is why we don’t put the biology tests with the Kiswahili tests), we are starting to look like an organized outfit, and even the students are helping out, by returning their books on time and taking better care of the ones they borrow. Sustainability is what we are aiming for with the library, and I believe after 3 months of successful organization and implementation by the students, and another following 8 months of my “loose” supervision, we can realistically achieve it!

The Library Brigade! September 21st - October 2nd

The Library project is finally making big progress at the school as we finished the cleaning and sorting of the books, chased the rats out of the old book closets (the casual passerby would probably comment that the rats were chasing me….one shriek and sprint from an enclosed room and a dog-sized rodent and no-body ever lets you forget it…), we also had the carpenter outfit a small-lockable room with shelves for the books to be stored upon. After starting this project the 3 strong boys and 1 incredibly brave girl, who decided that their spring break would be best spent with their favorite teacher sorting through 3 years of disorganization and rat droppings, together we all realized that Makong’onda actually had a LOT of books. Our science subjects are the best stocked, followed closely by the number of French, Physical Education, and Home Economics (I’m not kidding, we really found these) books, and finally Finnish literature books. After we sorted through all of the books we tackled the magazines and the past exams. Each year the Form 2 and Form 4 students are required to take 2 national examinations. Our school started taking these in the year 2006, and thus we had stacks and stacks of tests that would require sorting and filing into our newly cleaned (but incredibly abused) filing cabinet. Our idea (which two of the students came up with on their own) was that all student resources, including the tests, should be kept in the library for easy access. When the filing was complete, each book was numbered and put into its correct position on the shelves, and then we did an inventory “wish list”.
We swept the library, took our final pictures, and locked the door. Andrew, one of the student helpers, followed me to our lunch and said “Mwalimu, we may not have any teachers, but we really do have the things we need to learn, for those who really work for it”.
“Andrew, you’ve always had the books, and I’m insulted that you said you don’t have any teachers”.
“You don’t count as teacher. We like you.”
“---”
Our book inventory revealed that there are no history, civics, geography, or English/African literature books in the library. This is one of the problems we are looking to remedy…stay tuned!

Bustani Bonanza...continued! September 29th

After a month of carefully watering the garden everyday, (and by carefully watering I mean scrounging to find said water, lugging it in buckets to the garden, and then carefully dumping it onto our sun baked soil with metal minnow bowls) we finally were able to start to take the fruits of our labors…or rather, vegetables of our labor. Every day since the month we planted we have been eating non-stop spinach, sweet potato leaves, and ochre. It took a lot of patience, chicken shooing, goat rock-throwing and water fetching, but everyday we have a variety of fresh foods to choose from, and that is truly wonderful. These pictures are of my house helper Joyce and Mustafa, both with things that have grown in our garden. The truly remarkable thing about our garden, is the street cred that I now have among my peers here in Makong’onda. Every day as mamas and babas are passing by on the path to go to their respective fields, they all stop and glance into my garden, “Mama Mirinda, your garden is so beautiful” or “Mama Mirinda, when are you going to give me some spinach?” or (the most popular) “Mama Mirinda, your garden is beautiful but you need to wear your khanga properly…your kneecaps are showing!”. A large number of Mamas expressed an interest in making their own garden, and so we are in the works of planning a garden-making/nutrition seminar for the Mamas of Makong’onda. Stay tuned for updates…on the seminar, and the state of my tomatoes…(THEY JUST STARTED FLOWERS!!!).

Bustani Bonanza August 2009

“Mwalimu, come back outside and help us”
“No, apparently I can’t do ANYTHING right, just DO IT YOURSELF.”
“You didn’t understand us”.
“I understand that I can’t do it right, so I might as well just sit here”.
“When we said ‘you couldn’t do anything right’ we meant it in a respectful way!”
“Ba!”

After a successful Pima day and a whirl-wind form four mock examinations week, we have finally had some time to do what we excel at doing in Makong’onda, hanging around and relaxing. In my American home and upbringing, it has always been suggested that idle hands are the devils playground. In my Tanzanian home with my new “son” and “children”, I have started to implement the same “lets always have something to do so that we never have to say the word bored” policy. Thus began, bustani bonanza.
Bustani is the Swahili word for garden, and ngumu is the Swahili word for difficult. To make anything grow in Makong’onda is NGUMU. This is mostly due to the lack of rainfall and then lack of working pump. What better way to keep us busy than to start an impossible garden that will take far more upkeep than what we will be able to grow?
The above dialogue occurred after my first hissy fit, directed at two students who wouldn’t let me dig, then made fun of the way I was watering the plants, then said I couldn’t spread manure correctly (“just go fetch water, you can do that right?”), and finally, told me I was pulling water from the well too slowly. Working with students who have much more experience working their own soil is a challenge, but I came prepared. I had read a book, sharing all the things we would ever need to know to make our soil healthy and plant our companion crops. One kid used my book as a coaster for his tea. Bummer.
After a long period of learning, listening, and 2 more hissy fits, we had a garden. We planted tomatoes, cabbage, spinach, chinease cabbage, and carrots, as well as 3 papaya trees. We haven’t yet decided if we are going to be able to eat all of the things that we planted (indeed we don’t actually know if what we planted is going to grow) but we have decided that we are going to go use this garden as a demo, and encourage the mamas of the village to grow their own as well, using the water they have available after bathing, doing the dishes, or drinking chai.
There were only 4 people who insisted I was doing a bang-up job in the garden. I decided to include these cheerleaders for your viewing pleasure. More pictures of the future garden and (hopefully) the fruits of our labor later…

NANE NANE PICTURES

Top: Laura Baker and Mirinda Gormley at the events head table

Under top: A lion preparing to pounce in an HIV/AIDS skit

Middle: Line at the door to test for AIDS

Middle bottom: SMALL CHILD ENDANGERMENT portion of the race (no children were hurt during the race...just giggle attacks)

Bottom: Sack race at the beginning of the race

NANE NANE AIDS/HIV DAY...AKA MAKONG'ONDA IDOL

The eighth of August is a special time in Tanzania. It’s a time where everyone in the community puts up their spade and farming implements and goes to the local NANE NANE (eight, eight) celebration, which in some places, consists of just looking at more farm stuff (like a county fair). In Makong’onda, we decided to celebrate NANE NANE by testing people for HIV/AIDS and having a HUGE party. The date became an excellent idea due to the amount of people who would be able to attend, and the amount of people who would give up going to the farm for the day.
As are all huge events in the village, this party was no different. By the time Thursday rolled around, I was a ball of nerves. We decided that there were 2 huge things that could go wrong:
1. The person playing the music wouldn’t show up
2. The people testing the villagers for AIDS wouldn’t show up
Musty called home on the Thursday before the event to pay the DJ for the music and called immediately after reaching Newala. I asked him what the problem was and he quickly explained that the man who was going to play the music received more money from a wedding, so he had just decided to cancel on us. As I received this news, I was handing a phone to one of my older students, my draw dropped, and I was speechless. The student, stared at me, and asked if there was anything at all he could do. I told him to get Habiba, one of my Form 3 students (and an almost constant fixture in my home) and shut the door in his face. Habiba ran into the house, and asked what was wrong. I told her what had happened, and I couldn’t help but cry when I got to the part where the guy left just because he got more money elsewhere. Habiba tsked and grabbed the edge of my T-shirt, yanking it above my skirt and drying my eyes with it. She insisted that I must stop crying, and that it would be fine. 2 hours after my fit, Musty got home, and immediately he told me that he had found another DJ. Crisis 1, averted.
The rest of the crisis were slightly more manageable. 5 students showed up to my house the night before to prepare the food and the gifts for the next day, and several boys showed up to provide firewood and game materials. By the end of the night, two peace corps volunteers had arrived to help me carry out the project (the minute they arrived, small children in the village followed them around, yelling “there are TWO Mirindas now!”). By the time the 10 of us (in my house with only 4 mattresses) laid on the floor to sleep it was after midnight. Bright and early at 5 in the morning, Habiba and Happy started to giggle, “Mirinda, are you seriously still asleep? We’re bored”. Groaning after 5 hours of sleep, I led the troops out of the bedroom and we began cooking again.
The overall day was a HUGE success. We had a relay race, we had planned to test only 150 people, but we tested over 300, and RAN OUT OF TESTS! The relay race that we planned was a huge success. The kids were told to jump in a grain sack to the end of the football field, there they had to run past the school and score a netball goal. After the netball goal they had to race around the library building to put a condom correctly on a model (Laura, who was in charge of this station, laments that many of my kids DO NOT know how to do this, I blame it on the fact they may have been in a hurry…). After they were passed they had to grab a small child and run with it around the school to Andrew, who asked everyone an AIDS question. The relay was a huge success, with tons of people crowding around each station to watch the action. By the end we realized it was a miracle that no small children were hurt as they were carried like grain sacks during the race.
Makong’onda Idol was a lot of fun, attracting many student singing groups and even singers and dancers from Mtwara. The stage was around 3 feet square as people kept pushing in to see the festivities, and the main table was constantly crowded with people. The dancing and singing was a lot of fun, and the winners each took home a coveted T-shirt.
We closed the day with a soccer game, which ended in a sudden death shootout (with Makong’onda winning), and everyone went home happy. 305 people went home knowing the status of their heath, and a little over 1000 people went home having learned life skills revolving around their health and how to prevent AIDS, (knowing the risk behaviors, how to use a condom, being faithful to one partner). The project was an overall success, and the next day the first person at my door (at 6 in the morning) was proof of this:
“Mwalimu Mirinda, when can I come to test again?”

Mama Witness August 1st 2009

On my way home from soccer game, or rather, during halftime my way home to add water to the beans I was cooking, I cut into the dispensary on the path that passes closest to my house. There, Baba Andrew, the town drunkard, and father to one of the smartest students at my school (Andrew), bounced into me, and grinned saying “it is time”. Humoring him, I smiled back and asked him what it was time for. He answered by nodding his head toward the dispensary and saying, “Miriam will soon be a mother”. Miriam, his 16 year old daughter who accidentally got pregnant by her boyfriend (who then dumped her), had been expected to give birth any day, so it was no surprise to me that her little squirt had finally decided to grace us with his/her presence.
Excited, I raced up to the stone steps of the dispensary where Miriam’s mother, suffering from a stiffness that barely allowed her to walk or turn her head, sat. I moved into her line of sight and asked how Miriam was doing. She smiled weakly and told me that she had been in labor since 7am, but all of the mamas were starting to gather, so she would soon give birth. I asked if it would be alright if I could sit with the Mamas and wait for Miriam to give birth, she smiled weakly and said that she would see me later. Torn on whether I was invited to sit or not, I raced back to the house, put water in (my now burnt) beans, and raced to the nurses house, asking her if I could sit with Miriam until she gave birth. Mama Simon (sitting on the stairs) said that I shouldn’t go, because I had not yet given birth, Mama Suzee said that I could go because nobody ever expected me to remember the “rules” anyway. When I asked them if they would go (both gave birth after all) they solemnly shook their heads, muttering that Miriam was a fornicator, and her child was sinful. I took that as the green light to definitely go.
After supper around 7pm, I grabbed my flashlight and headed to the dispensary. When I got there, three of my favorite Mama’s were there, waiting patiently with their children asleep on their laps. Mama Margaret scooted over in the dirt and made a space for me and we say quietly in the glow of the lantern, coming from the room where Miriam’s contractions were starting to come faster. Mama Omega enters the scene, and immediately expressed surprise that I was present. I replied that Miriam was my friend and I wanted to support her birth. She nodded and then apologized to me for not already having a child of my own. Mama Kihiki added on to this, stating that in America, it must be very boring with no children, and very lonely. Mama Omega added that in America, she supposed people could all go to nice dispensaries to give birth, instead of ours, which had no electricity, a dirt floor, and a (7th grade education) nurse with plastic bags on her hands and a hairnet (for sanitation purposes mind you) as an obstetrician. I explained in America many girls my age wait to have children until after they had a job. Mama Andrew immediately asked what kinds of things of things we farmed in America, and I patiently explained that many people in America worked in offices, schools, or hospitals, women were not only supposed to stay home and farm. I then added that in America many families now have a mother who goes out and works all day and a father who stays at home to tend the children. All of the mamas hooted with laughter, two called me a liar, and I’m pretty sure after they realized I was serious two of them crossed themselves. I’m sure we would continued this line of conversation, had a soft cry not sounded from the small lantern-lit room.
At this cry, all of the Mamas stood and went to the barred hole in the wall (I saw hole in the wall because window implies glass, and there is no glass in the village) and began to encourage Miriam. Push, Push, Push! Their cries were just above a whisper, and though the wind was howling, I could still hear not a peep from Miriam. I started to go to the window when Mama Margaret pulled me back to the dirt. “Later, you’re not ready to see yet”, she explained, my presence was allowed, but my sight of the birth was still not allowed. Inside I could hear Mama Scalla (the nurse) yelling at Miriam, “Why are you tired?!” “We don’t get tired, we keep pushing! God didn’t make you to be tired! Push, Push NOW!” The mamas at the hole yelled more encouragement, and then all of a sudden everything was silent. There was a 2 second pause, and then a low shrill cry, a baby girl had entered the scene.
The Mamas starting thanking god, and Mama Scalla left the room to remove her hairnet. Seeing me, she was shocked, asking why I hadn’t come into the room to see the birth. When I explained that I had not yet given birth she psh-ed and pulled me to my feet and into the room. There, lying prone on the dirt floor was Miriam, completely naked. Somewhere in a mass of dirty khangas and towels was the squirming baby, and lying on the nice bed, was the placenta. Mama Scalla stepped around Miriam and held up the placenta. “Placenta!” she cried in English. I nodded and looked at Miriam. Mama Scalla thought I had misunderstood. “Look at the Placenta” she said, saying that she herself had delivered it, and cut the cord. I asked where the baby was, Mama Scalla rolled her eyes and nodded towards the table, when I returned my glance to her she was beaming and holding the placenta inches from my face. Assuring her that I had a great look at the placenta, I turned to Miriam, and asked Mama Scalla if she was alright. Mama Scalla assured me that she was fine, and then sidestepped around her again, escorting me back outside. In that dirty little room, on the filthy floor, lay a naked 16 year old who had just given birth, her child, was lying wrapped in two old khangas, on a table, next to a kerosene lantern, where the wind and sand was flying through the open door. It was surreal.
The next day I returned to see Miriam. She smiled at me, and showed me her little bundle laying in the middle of a rope bed. I poked the little hands, which at this stage were almost as white as my own. Miriam smiled, and I asked her what she named her. Witness. Mama Witness and her daughter have a long road to hoe, its not easy being a young uneducated mother in the village, even though that is our most popular demographic . Even as I sat there Miram’s eyes never strayed from the bundle on the bed, her protective posture didn’t loosen. There is no money in Mama Witness’ mud hut, there are no beds, save the rope bed stretched under the grass porch, but as was pointed out to me by all of the Mamas at the dispensary, and then blatantly obvious by observing Mama Witness, there is family, there is love, and at the end of the day, that’s all that really matters here.