One of the tasks I have here, especially since I got the car, is to visit other private schools here in Tanzania. I do this for a variety of reasons. To learn how they do things, their teaching resources, how they find teachers, how they deal with problems like the bats. One thing that normally happens when I, an American, visits these type of schools is they have a laundry list of things they need money for that they hope I will help out with. But since I am there to ask questions they don’t want to answer like how much to do you pay your teachers, I listen and bring those back to the states.
Recently I visited two schools in about a week’s span and thought you might like to hear about both. The first I want to talk about is Esarunoto (solving) School near TPC Sugar Plantation. This is the one pictured above. They are in their infancy stage and it is being headed by our former Headmaster, Freddy. In fact they just have land and an old government building they are borrowing to house their one Preschool class. They do have five acres so they have plenty of land. Being on the outskirts of the sugar plantation means they have access to water but will need to install piping to the nearest tank. They also have electrical about a 1/4 mile away they should be able to have run over.
Most of the people in the area are Maasai, but many also work for the sugar plantation and therefore have income to pay tuition once the school is up and running. Unfortunately they have no real funding source to kickstart their project. I estimate just to get enough buildings to get certification as a primary school will be $59,000 (piping to access water, kitchen building, One classroom building with space for 2 classes and an office, a bathroom facility for students, a bathroom facility for teachers and associated sewage system large enough it can handle a full primary school one day. To completely build the school out will cost another $72,000.
Unfortunately, Freddy does not really understand how big of ask this is and more importantly if some group stepped up to get him started with say the latrine setup at $22,000 it would take time to raise the money, time to get it over here and time to find a contractor, bid the project out and get it built. Probably a year and a half if that all happened as quickly as possible.
Unrealistic expectations is often a problem here, especially when it comes to money from other sources like American churches. They always expect that we have money just sitting there waiting to help them out. It has been on of the hardest concepts to get Tanzanian groups to understand is that it takes us time to gather that kind of money and that their own government (just like the USA) restricts the flow of international money.
The second school I visited recently was a completed school called Mwika (Integrity) Pre and Primary School. It is located in the Kilimanjaro region and in the foothills type area near the actual Mount Kilimanjaro. Because of it’s location, it has a better climate than most of the places I get to go in Tanzania. It was cooler because of the elevation and has regular rain which leads to a excellent place to grow banana trees. It also has no bats present which I assume may be due to the elevation. In case you don’t remember, bats are a problem here and almost every building we build gets infested within a month or two.
As I mentioned before, this school was completed in 2015 and has been around since 2004 the date of their first building. They were associated with a group in the US that was funding the buildings and teacher salaries but that group has since disappeared. While I was there to learn how they do things, what is going well and what is not they of course had some projects they need help with which I will cover in a couple of paragraphs. None of their projects are huge.
I talked with teachers and students as well as their new headmaster and Pastor and his Wife. Heff, my safari guy, introduced me to the school. I was impressed with the English spoken on site and how much better it was than some of our teachers. While I found out they pay their teachers a little more than we do, they also have them come in on weekends to tutor students. Which is why their last standardized test had very good scores. The percentage of students who got an A was 28% compared with our 5.8%.
Another part of school I visited was their orphanage where they were housing 18 girls and 42 boys at the time of my visit. They have a total enrollment of 293 which is in line with where we are at now.
Two items they mentioned needing help with is water supply and playground equipment. They are currently getting their water from a neighbor who sometimes restricts their access. They pay for the water but still the neighbor has a priority for their farm. This area has something like a city water but piping it to each individual house or industry is the responsibility of the owner. The government does not do large distribution systems you tap into but instead you run the source each time. For the school to do that is expected to cost $670.
They also would like some playground equipment. They have an area on one tier and then the football field is on the lowest tier. We visited a vendor on the way back that is closer to their school than my current vendor. The cost of simple swings and slide would be $580 installed.
They also needed more chairs and desks along with another classroom building that would be a lot more. The classroom building there I would expect to cost around $22,000 because of the difficulty getting supplies up the curvy small local roads that are often muddy mush. The chairs and desks would most likely cost $1,600.
I was very impressed with Mwika’s desire to keep their school in good working order and protect things they have invested in. I am sad to say that is rare in Tanzania especially on projects that are funded by their government or outside sources. They don’t respect everything that went into getting those resources in Tanzania and how much they cost. This school even kept their textbooks in good order and stored properly which is something I argue with our site about.
If you or a group you are involved with would like to discuss funding any of these items, please contact me at steveintanzania@gmail.com and we can work something out. I know B2BU is interested in funding some of the water project at Mwika.
