Sleeves rolled up, pupils aid Tanzania

Kathryn Lewis

• Last Updated: July 20. 2008 11:37PM UAE / July 20. 2008 7:37PM GMT

Girls from Al-Mizhar American Academy in Dubai work alongside teachers and pupils from France and Switzerland to help build nine classrooms at the Msaranga Primary School outside of Moshi. Randi Sokoloff / The National

MOSHI, TANZANIA // The road from Kilimanjaro airport to the International School (ISM) of Moshi is bumpy. The drive is mostly quiet, save for the hum of the motor and occasional laughter from a group of Dubai schoolgirls who are in Tanzania to perform community service.

Exhausted after a day’s travel, the girls are nevertheless exuberant as the bus, an old Toyota that has seen better days, rumbles past the shacks, small shops and ramshackle bars of Moshi.

Catching sight of an illuminated shop sign, one girl cries: “Mr Price! I love Africa.”

The Al-Mizhar American Academy for Girls, an elite private school, has been sending pupils to Tanzania for community service since 2005. In the latest project, a group of 11 girls and two teachers travelled to Moshi to help to build new classrooms for the Msaranga primary school.

A collection of one-storey buildings with corrugated tin roofs set between corn fields, the school has 11 classrooms to accommodate more than 800 pupils. Large maps of the world, diagrams with measurements and the elements of speech – nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs – have been painted in bright colours on exterior walls.

The girls delivered Crocs shoes to the Upendo orphanage; from left, Sister Yacinta Diwi, the head of the orphanage, Julie Hall, a teacher at the academy, and two students, Katelyn Burns and Mariyum Iqbal. Randi Sokoloff / The National

Conditions at Msaranga are dire. Each room has 30 identical wooden desks. With so many pupils and so few classrooms, three or four children squeeze into each desk. In the coming year, nine new classrooms will be erected with assistance from the ISM.

“You never have enough money,” says Peter Paul Msaki, the head teacher at Msaranga. “We have no books for the kids. The teacher has one copy of the textbook and he writes everything out on the blackboard.”

A glance at any blackboard, jammed with information, vindicates Mr Msaki’s analysis. In one sparse room, a pile of yellowing exercise books from last term remains on the teacher’s desk. Beneath the blackboards, flakes of turquoise paint have fallen to the muddy ground.

“We are faced with a lot of problems,” says Mr Msaki, who has been a teacher since 1978 and is paid US$250 (Dh918) a month.

Last month, the water supply was shut off because the school had failed to pay its US$60 bill. “So the children beg for water from neighbours,” Mr Msaki says. “It’s dangerous, particularly for the girls. They [risk being] raped.”

Behind the school is a large field, where Msaranga grows maize, which is cooked in metal pans over an open fire in the school’s small kitchen. Pupils are charged roughly US$11 every six months for lunch, but not all can afford it. “It is very difficult for some of the parents to pay,” Mr Msaki says. “There are many orphans from Aids and malaria who live with relatives. We often end up giving them lunch for free.”

Mallak Abdulqader, 15, a pupil from Al-Mizhar, says she will never forget what she has seen. “It’s so different from Dubai,” she says. “This experience has made me so grateful for my life.”

There are two kinds of public schools in Tanzania: government schools and community schools. Community schools, where towns and villages provide buildings and the government pays for teachers and limited operational costs, were created to widen access to education.

“Community participation is important because we cannot do all the work,” says Afzal Paliwala, a co-ordinator of the visiting school programme at ISM. Mr Paliwala concedes that the projects do not always come to fruition since the community is responsible for finishing them and cannot always raise the funds.

Everyone at Al-Mizhar Academy helped to raise funds – more than Dh5,000 – towards the trip. A total of US$500 was collected to buy books for the school. Sixty pairs of shoes were donated by the shoemaker Crocs for children at an orphanage, and two cows were bought through Heifer International, a charity operating in 128 countries to combat world hunger.

Like thousands of others, Al-Mizhar pupils came to Moshi as part of a community service programme for visiting schools, which has been run by the ISM since 1969. In the past three years, 50 classrooms have been completed.

For four days, Moshi residents worked alongside teenagers from Dubai, Bern, in Switzerland, and Nice, in France. Hundreds of Msaranga pupils came to the site. Most were too young to work and sat on the sidelines chattering in broken English and begging for anything anyone could spare – shoes, sweets, work gloves. During a break, two girls from Bern taught a group of girls the Macarena. The children reciprocated with a song in KiSwahili.

“They seem happier than us and we have a million times more than they do,” says Jessica Sedwell-Coe, 15.

Including groups from the International Schools of Bern and Nice, nearly 50 people were working at the site. Another school party is about to pick up where they left off.

While some painted, others formed a long assembly line passing metal bowls filled with wet concrete to the building site. Others dug foundations for the new classrooms. “There is not much you can do with the materials on hand,” says David Ballagi, 17, from Bern. “They could use some basic things, some basic knowledge.

“If they would use oil-based paint rather than water-based paint, it would last longer. If they had a digger, this would be done in half an hour. We spent all day yesterday digging a trench.”

The consensus among the teenagers is that giving time is better than donating money.

“When you come here, you actually see the people you’re helping, rather than just making a donation and not knowing where it is going,” says David. “You’re actually doing something, as opposed to helping some old lady in Switzerland who doesn’t really need your help.”

In four days, the group dug a large trench, laid the foundations for the school buildings and painted existing classrooms.

“I think the kids are really happy that their school is getting nicer,” Jessica says. “The project here makes a big difference to the community, so it’s worth it.”

“It feels good to help people,” Mallak Abdulqader adds. “Everybody gets caught up with their high-quality lives, but it’s important to think about other people sometimes.”

During the summer months, there is a constant rotation of schools coming through Moshi. “It’s nice,” says Nia Beazer, 16, an Al-Mizhar pupil who is visiting Tanzania for the second consecutive year. “I still talk to some of the people from last year.”

During their stay, the Al-Mizhar girls had four days of community service, a trip to a nearby orphanage, a visit to a waterfall, a KiSwahili lesson and a cultural night. The trip ended with a two-day safari through the Serengeti National Park.

The pupils stay on the ISM campus in cabins used during the year by school boarders. The cabins sleep two to a room, mattress springs push against the body and, late at night, the sound of howling dogs is ever-present.

On the first day, the girls paid a visit to the Upendo orphanage, at the end of a dirt track five minutes from downtown Moshi. Nine of the 54 children are HIV-positive.

“After coming here, you’re not the person you used to be,” says Nia. “It doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, but it does make you more aware.”

“It makes you appreciate stuff more,” says Amna al Mutawaa, 16, from Dubai. “You think about what you spend your money on … the way that some people live in the UAE is a bit over-the-top compared to other countries. Being Muslim, there is an amount of charity that you have to give, which is good.”

On the final day of community service, the group finished painting walls and continued to pass bowls down the assembly line. After seven hours in the sun, everyone was caked in paint and red mud, although no one seemed to mind.

klewis@thenational.ae