Just a quick update on what is happening in the Pare Mountains !
Well today I just returned from the dress makers with a fantastic dress. We are off to a St. Patricks day ball on the 19th of this Month so there was a call for a new dress. Its not to often we get to dress up anymore so we are all extremely excited about our adventure to Dar es Salaam next week and to throw on the gladrags. Getting a dress in Africa is not like getting a dress in Ireland. You do go shopping but it is shopping for material. It is a long process, firstly we have to get up at 6 am to catch the only bus out of Suji to the small town Same to get the material. The bus journey is always an interesting one, anything can happen. We have had people been thrown off for refusing to pay, there is always room for one more person..... the bus can accommodate 25 but often carries nearly 100 people standing ( I may be exaggerating a little bit) , but it is always a tight squeeze ! I reckon there will be people on the roof before the year is out ! The music is another interesting part of the journey, the African music is always blaring and we wonder how the driver does not loose concentrating or how anybody has not gone deaf yet! I make sure to always have the ipod on hand , although their music always wins out in the end and I do find myself at times singing along ! So you get the material back up the mountain ( Belinda and Aisling just about got theirs up, the bus got stuck in mud half way up and had to walk the rest of the way in their bare feet) and you bring the material to the lovely dressmaker Ruth just below our house. I spent a while on the Internet picking a design out and made some attempt to draw it out.She has a measuring tape and an ancient sewing machine ( not electrical). She is a very talented young woman and 4 days later I have a gorgeous dress , which would have cost about 200-300 euro at home, I paid 12 euro for material and the dressmaking skills (that included a tip !) I will be making more trips to Same for material.
Photos to be uploaded after the event !
Teaching is coming along nicely although we are all starting to get a bit nervous about the mocks coming up in May. The students in form 4 are now coming in at 7 pm and studying until about 11. So we are always on standby and check in with them a few times every evening.I also have my form 2 students talking with my sisters friends students in a school in Dublin. Here the students are learning a little bit about Irish schooling our culture along with learning how to type and use the Internet. It gets a little crowded when there are 60 students trying to sit around a laptop though, so hopefully we will have set up some kind of a computer lab by the end of the year.
Latest football updates
Suji high school ( the private school in the village ) 7-0 Malindi ( A bit of a disaster)
Malindi 4-0 Gonjanza. A great victory and some great football.
Malindi 2-2 Tae ,(some terrible Ref decisions)
So the football team is coming along nicely and the players are great.
I even have one of them in a Mayo jersey ! One of my form 4 students goes by the name Anthony Mayo, so i thought he deserved to wear the great colours of Co.Mayo ! A Ciaron Mac Donald in the making for sure.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
A Day in the life of Teachers and Pupils in Malindi Secondary School by Jim Lovett
A Day in the life of Teachers and Pupils at Suji Malindi Secondary School
Saturday morning 6:30 and am still in bed – lying in on me new
mattress, luxury – thought I might try to describe a typical day in
the school here.
You will hear the kids start to arrive at 05:45 or so
and by 06:00 there is a general air of excitement outside the house
and around the school. Some of them will already have done 2 hours
work by this time – they will sometimes nod off as a result, or so I’m
told … i.e. it doesn’t happen in my class - . They will be given some
brooms and a general clean up goes on, then there’s assembly and
singing a few songs (1) the national anthem (2) a Pare, the local
district, song and finally the school song – will sing these ta ya
when I get home, all followed by some words of encouragement by one of
the teachers.
School proper then starts at 07:40. This has never
happened. The best you could hope for is about 08:00.
Classes are forty minutes which is not enough time as getting them
settled takes at least ten minutes when there can be up to seventy
children in a class. The ages of the kids varies greatly, the fourth
form should have kids of around 15/16 years but there will also be one
or two as old as 23 who ‘must’ have an education, and all ages in
between. The subjects are; Swahili, English, Geography, History,
Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Civics, Religion in it’s any guises here
– more later on this – and last but not least Mathematics, the
standard here is very low as there is no consistency and any half
decent teacher is ‘head hunted’ away to some private school where they
will be fairly paid. The state schools pay little or nothing; I won’t
go into it … politics. So what they really require is some stability
in their teachers to bring them from first year to fifth year in one
consistent batch.
There is a small break around 10:00 and the big break for lunch
arrives at 12:40 theoretically but this all depends on the water
situation and more but not here, o.k. so the whole school must be fed,
this for the students means maize and beans, always!! Now the beans
take about five hours to cook on an outdoor fire, logs like – the
logs/ wood are/is brought in by the students daily with a great forage
going on once every two weeks, when all head off into the local
forest for a day, more later – this cooking requires massive amounts
of water, which is scarce at the moment, and so proceedings can be
delayed for any … any … any length of time … God.
This is mostly carelessness as there is a perfectly adequate supply
for the schools needs but the relevant authorities don’t care enough,
as they have other businesses to administer. Also this is Africa .
All these disruptions make teaching difficult, but the kids themselves
are very bright, and some, like anywhere else are eager to learn.
On a lighter note, last Thursday we the Malindi teachers joined the Suji –
well paid – teachers and took on a bunch of fourth formers at soccer, promptly –
we were told, punctual is the word they used - at 15:00 hundred hours,
well you can imagine what happened next, we closed up the school a
little early, so innocent, and were on the pitch at 14:55 where we
waited for an hour and a half for the other teachers to turn up, then
another half hour for the students. I was exhausted in the little kick
about and as a result we lost – it was something more than 1-0.
A Day on the Mountains by Jim Lovett
A Day Hiking in the Mountains around Suji by Jim Lovett.
Haya is o.k. in Swahili, so haya boys and girls.
Last Saturday we all went on a twenty mile hike from our valley – Suji
- bypassing the nearest big village, Chome, and continued on to the
foothills of the highest mountain in the northern chain, it is called
Leitrim, Belinda and Aaron – Donegal an mesel comprised the Irish team
and representing Tanzania
Elihinaki, Abbas, Abihudi and Togolani try saying that with a
mouthful of rocks, in fact try sayin anything …
We set out at daybreak, six o clock, without a guide, because ‘one’ of
us had just lost all patience, we weren’t long gone when he turned up,
Remani Kiangi, and the day would not have been the same without him.
Remani is 75 years old an comes from the nearby town of Gonjanza
also in Suji, self educated, he spoke English very well and was a mine
of information. His strengths were on the German and English
occupation of the area, they started the mining operations – gold and
semi precious stones – and the various cultivations – potatoes (a
blight in 1943 nearly wiped the place out), cabbages, carrots, coffee,
cocoa, tea, pepper - and the biggest industry alive today the
cultivation of sisal, introduced in 1892 when just 62 plants were
brought over from Florida
the area. You might say money for new rope … well I might…He was also
well up on the medicinal properties of the forest flora so that such
and such was good for settling stomach ache etc, etc and he is 74 and
getting younger be the minit. At one point on the way home I thought –
out loud – that it might rain soon, we were assured that there would
be no rain for at least 3 to 4 hours. It rained 5 minutes later. The
same as if we were at home … by God. We arrived back in the valley …
slidin down on our respective a**es and drowned like rats. But a great
day had been had by all; it was a ten hour hike.
The assault on Shngena Peak
Chome. Number of monkeys seen – zero. Number of elephants seen – zero,
but then again they haven’t been around here for thirty years.
Or something like that.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
The Eastern Arc Mountain Range by Jim Lovett.
The Eastern Arc Mountains
There exists a mosaic, from the border of Kenya
of Tanzania with Mozambique which includes the islands of Zanzibar
Mafia and Pemba and embraces the so called Eastern Arc Mountains
stretching for some 700 hundred miles from the Taita Hills in Kenya
north to south some of which are: the Taita Hills, North and South
Pare, East and West Usambara, North and South Nguru , Uluguru and
Mahenge.
The highest point is in the Ulugurus and the average peak is
around 8,000 feet. Geologically the mountains are formed mainly from
Pre-Cambrian rock uplifted about 100 million years ago. Their
proximity to the Indian Ocean ensures high rainfall, and the climatic
conditions have been stable for the past 30 million years although
variation from year to year can be considerable, a result of the El
Niño effect, leading to droughts or floods. This high rainfall and
long-term climatic stability along with the isolation of the separate
mountain ranges have resulted in a flora and fauna that are both
ancient and diverse.
The original forest cover on the Eastern Arc Mountains
estimated to have fallen by about four fifths in the last 2000
thousand years to the mid-1990s when records were last taken. While no
reliable information exists for the true extent of recent forest loss
it is more likely to have deteriorated than improved.
Although the main biodiversity values are concentrated in
the forests there are a significant number of endemics (especially
plants) in non-forested habitats. While there is some debate in terms
of plant biogeography between the Eastern Arc Forest
Forest Mosaic where approximately 60% - a considerable proportion of
species – are found in both regions.
More importantly however is the fact that both of these
forest types contain a great number of species strictly endemic to
their areas.
Jim Lovett,
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Please read this post!
The people who live in Suji are lifestyle rich but cash poor. As we have said in previous posts on the blog, Suji is one of the most beautiful places one would ever wish to visit. The people have small houses on small plots on which they grow vegetables, have a banana tree and if they are lucky may have a cow but only a few families have cows. Family members who have been lucky enough to receive an education and get a job support their extended family back in Suji.
Suji is strictly a rural community and there is no industry. Some of the men find work in the tourism industry in the nearest town; Moshi which is over two hours away by mini bus. Those who work in Moshi stay there or otherwise they would leave Suji at 6a.m. and the mini bus ( the only transport out for the day) takes them on a one hour journey down the mountain on a very steep, un-surfaced road to Sammé where it is then necessary to take another bus to Moshi. Nobody owns a car in Suji and a couple of people have motor bikes.
The children in Suji Malindi Secondary School leave early on Fridays and climb further up the mountain to the forest where they cut timber, carry it back to the village and that in turn is used for cooking. We in the west frown on such a practice as we know the damage this is doing to the environment. While there is electricity in the village it can be off for days and just last week there was no electricity for five days. For those families who have electricity it is just for lighting purposes and cooking by electricity is almost non existent.
The five Irish teachers are teaching English to adults and small children from the community, teaching a variety of subjects in the school and are endeavouring to set up a library, find computers so that they can teach the use of same to the children. Due to the fact that the five Irish teachers are so committed to the community many pupils who had left the school have returned, vastly increased numbers of first years have enrolled and for the first time there is now a fourth form in the school as prior to this pupils just left education.
So we are endeavouring to do the following:
- Pay partial school fees for those pupils who can not afford same.
- Pay for 90% of school uniforms for those who can not afford same.
- Set up a loan scheme for the curriculum books in the school. We hope to purchase a complete set of books for each subject, for each form, rent them out to the pupils at a nominal fee for the year, they would return them at the end of the year and the process would be repeated.
- Set up a library with a variety of school books and novels which can be used by both the children and the community. All unused school books except Irish language, the classics and other suitable novels.
- Set up computer literacy classes.
Would you like to Help?
If you have old school books that are no longer in use we would take them and send them to Suji. We already have many books which were collected by the teachers prior to leaving for Tanzania
The transport of such items is very expensive.
Would you like to sponsor, a pupils school fees, or a uniform?
Would you like to sponsor the book lending scheme within the school?
If you would like to help in this area by either a once off contribution or a Direct Debit you can lodge to our registered charity account:
Ulster Bank,
Newcastle Road,
A/C No 10095595
Sort Code 98 57 53
Thursday, January 13, 2011
3 months in !
3 months in….. and we are still alive !
What have I signed up for? These were the thoughts that were running through my head when we turned up the road/ dirt track for Suji Village ! I had never seen anything or such isolation in my life, I thought that my home place (Tourmakeady) was isolated but it was nothing compared to what we were going to experience for the year.
The welcome we received was one that will live with me forever, I was so overwhelmed with what I was hearing and seeing ( I know now how Beyonce feels when her fans are going crazy for her ) The bus was surrounded by my students who were screaming and shouting for us ! My eyes were welling up and I didn’t know where to look to be honest ! I think a lot of us were almost afraid to get off the bus when we arrived ! We watched the students dance and sing for quite some time, there cultural dances and songs were incredible. The show they put on for us was just amazing.
After the meal ( I had no idea what I was eating for most of it, I didn’t want to ask ) we went to see what would be our home for the year. It was here I got the reality check which was coming my way ! I would be lying if I said I didn’t cry when I saw the kitchen and bathroom, because I did. The house was bare and basic . The kitchen consisted of a sink and that was it ! The house had some beds and some chairs and that was it ! The toilet facilities are not what you get at home that’s for sure ! In the background all I could hear when I was having this minor breakdown was Jim saying “ Jez I thought it was going to be a lot worse lads”. The building started the next day and we got down to work, in-between building we would give some classes to the form 2 students as they were sitting exams the following week and who were in desperate need of some help.
The building was tremendous fun and I think we all enjoyed it immensely. The skills and jokes learnt from all the boys on the team will stay with us for quite some time some jokes which caught us out were “the long stand” and “glass hammer” none of us fell for them though of course ( I wish… ).
The builders left and returned home to Ireland on the 17th November . It was a great 3 weeks with them and we were left very lonely at the airport watching them leave ( some with no shoes on and covered in muck from our eventful day at a safari park ) and wondering how we would spend our evenings, without debates, sing songs, jokes and magic tricks.
The teaching began……….
We had meetings with the headmaster and discussed what teachers would teach what subjects. At the moment I am teaching Biology, Chemistry and Geography. Belinda is also teaching the same subjects as I am. Aisling is teaching History and English and Aaron is teaching Maths and English along with managing the soccer team ( the jerseys they wear are Man Utd ones and not the school colours). The students are very keen to learn which makes it quite easy for us to teach. There is a serious lack of school books, and really anything that resembles a school classroom. The classrooms are dark, the desks are old, blackboards are in terrible condition and very difficult for the students to read off, some classrooms have windows others have broken bits of glass in them and all have steel bars. One day I was teaching a class and it started to rain really heavily, I couldn’t even hear myself because the rain was belting ferociously on the tin roof, all of a sudden all the students started to move into the middle of the class room because the rain was pouring in through the windows, all I could do was laugh .. I had about 60 students crammed into the middle of one class room trying to keep dry from the rain , something which would never happen in a school at home, thankfully it was lunchtime and the class was over. One thing which disturbed me greatly was corporal punishment and how it was still alive and kicking in Malinda Secondary school. The students get brought to the “chamber” or “chaku” if they miss behave or have done something wrong to get hit with sticks. Girls get hit across their palms and boys across their behinds. They get a hit if they don’t have the correct uniform on ( a majority don’t even have the same uniform) and also one day we had a social class were the girls in the school were performing an African dance where they have to “shake their ass” one of the male teachers hit some of the girls because they were not shaking them good enough.
School was over for the year and Christmas came, we planned to go to Zanzibar for the holidays. We had a great time, snorkling and sunbathing and to be honest it was great to live in a place with constant running water, hot showers, electricity that did not cut off in the evenings and to talk to other volunteers like ourselves. We even had a trip to an African accident and emergency to top it all off ! Belinda fell ill Christmas day and we spent the day in hospital, the doctors were very kind and nice but we should have just got to an internet café and used Google. Which was exactly what we were doing in the waiting room on Aarons iphone. They diagnosed Malaria and poor Belinda didn’t get any turkey on Christmas day , just drips and medication, we didn’t even get any turkey, the people in Zanzibar had never heard of the animal.
School has now started back and we are faced with more problems and struggles, a word which our head master like to use frequently. “ we must struggle to pay our fees, struggle to pay for uniforms and struggle to learn throughout the year” were a few of his great words of wisdom at the official opening of the school this week. Many of the students are currently finding it difficult to afford uniforms and pay for school fees ( approx 10 Euro). Hopefully we will sort something out in the next few weeks and maybe pay for some uniforms for some of the students.
Memorable moments to date:
All in all I think all of us are enjoying our time here and should be delighted to have such an opportunity. We are faced with many obstacles such as loneliness , showering in buckets of cold water, a diet of rice and beans, sitting in the dark in the evenings, rodents, ants, and lizards in the house, the isolation and lack of transport. However these have not put a damper on our adventure to-date and I expect they wont. We are looking forward to the coming year and what will unfold along the way.
- Aaron and Peadar trying to kill the rats in our house ( it took approx 3 hours to get the baby one out )
- The sound of chickens being killed outside our bedroom windows,
- The great debates about religion and dairy farming with the builders,
- Coming home from Zanzibar to find my runners half eaten and Belinda’s daily contact lenses also ripped open and destroyed.
- Noel nearly falling off the roof .
- The sing songs ( roaring ) in the pub, ( the pubs over here are slightly different to what we are used to at
- home ).
- The hike that Gerry brought us on one Saturday up the mountains, ( nearly killed me).
- The welcome we received from the village when we arrived,
- Maureens face when she returned from the meetings with the school board in the evenings !
- The bus breaking down on Safari and Jims words of wisdom “ you are a tool…. T …O …O…L “ actually priceless.
- The boys rush to the aeroplane and them covered in dirt getting onto the plane.
- The long and painful journeys up and down this mountain on the bus, especially the day we had to endure the journey up the mountain on the truck, with a goat and water tanks beside us along with 50 people and the blistering heat.
- And last but not least POLE POLE, (slowly slowly),
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