Last week we held a Girl's Conference in the town of Peramiho, which is about a half hour bus ride from Songea. At the conference were 5 Form 1 girls from my school, Wilima, and also girls from 5 other schools that other volunteers either teach at or live near. Only our school and one other had girls from Secondary schools; the others were primary level but all within a few years in age. The conference started on Monday and went through Thursday night, and then we all returned to our respective homes on Friday. It was held at a big conference center in Peramiho. Pretty much the entire town of Peramiho has been built by various Missions and the whole town is well kept and has very nice buildings.
There were 7 volunteers in total from the Songea region, and most brought with a counterpart to help teach lessons and give advice to the girls. I brought with me one of my neighbors, since there are no female teachers at my school. Her name is Mama Edu and she turned out to be the perfect choice for me to bring. She gave some pretty heated rants to the girls about the way women are treated in this country and how that affects her. It's not much of a secret that generally speaking, at least in the village setting, women do a highly disproportionate amount of work compared to men in Tanzania. Cooking, cleaning, farming, carrying firewood, taking care of children, and choting water are all on the job description, and then it's also customary for them to always serve men first for food. A lot of men don't work and end up just sitting around the house most of the day drinking pombe (a locally made alcoholic bamboo juice) and talking with other people. Since most students don't pass their exams or do well enough to continue on to A-Level studies, they mostly end up going back home to work on the farm with their parents, and so many girls end up living this kind of heavy work-low payoff life until they are very old. The theme of the conference was "Wasichana Wanaweza" which basically means "Girls Can."
We had a lot of different teaching sessions and activities to send different messages of empowerment to the girls and also mixed in a good amount health education. One was teaching about the food pyramid, since your typical Tanzanian diet consists often of nothing more than ugali (a corn-based staple food of white mush with little nutritional value) and beans. Tanzania is such a fertile country all over and it easy in a lot of places to grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables, so there should not be nearly as many malnourished people as there are. We also taught them about the solar disenfecting, or SODIS, method of treating water. If you fill up a water bottle and leave it out in the sun for 6 hours or more, it kills a lot of the harmful bacteria and makes the water safe to drink. It's a good alternative to boiling water, which uses a lot of wood, charcoal, or kerosene that can be expensive.
Another session was on gender roles. The girls were given cards with different words on them like "doctor" or "cooking" and then they had to make an instant reaction and either go the "Men" or "Women" side of the room based on who they associated that word with. We also had a guest speaker, a female doctor from the Peramiho hospital, come to give a talk on HIV/AIDS, and with her was a man who is living with HIV, and he also gave a talk about his experience and advice for the girls.
I had two sessions that I led. The first was a lesson on Role Models- what the term means and how to identify/choose positive role models in our lives. Of course the example I used was Michael Jordan, so I made a big poster of him (a better drawing than my old Frank Thomas posters I must add - he did not look like a thumb) and listed reasons why he is my role model. Then I gave the girls poster paper and markers and told them to draw someone who is a role model for them. I guess my initial rough Swahili explanation was somewhat confusing because the first girl I saw working on hers starting writing "Michael Jordan" at the top of her poster, and I had to explain again that they were supposed to use someone that THEY looked up to, though maybe she was just so impressed with MJ that she decided he was a worthy role model for her as well.
The other session I did was a Hands-On-Science workshop kind of thing. So many kids in general, but especially girls, come into secondary school hating math and science, usually because they never had an actual teacher in primary school. So what I wanted to do was have different science demo's that were kind of exciting and showed them that science is more than just memorizing formulas, which is all that most of them do in class. We had 4 stations that they rotated through in small groups. One was a simple circuit with a battery and a Christmas light bulb, which was left open and needed to be completed with different materials like a pen, aluminum, nail, paper, test tube, balloon, etc. and they had to predict first and then try to see if the light would turn on. Another was a lever demo, which was just a ruler balance with cups on either end to add bottle caps into to see how many it took on each side to balance. Then they had to move the ruler so one side was larger than the other and try again to see how it changed.
The next was using a water gun to shoot targets at different heights to try and get an idea about how trajectories work and how to point the water gun to get the most distance and height. And the last station was rubbing a balloon or plastic pen or ruler on your head and seeing how it attracted small pieces of paper with static electricity. Most of the girls have shaved heads, so I think they needed to borrow a head to rub from some of the volunteers. All in all I was super excited with how it went because they all seemed to enjoy the activities and looked really interested.
For the end of the conference, we had each group of girls prepare a song/dance and a skit related to the messages of the lessons. My students put on a really good play that of course I only got a limited understanding of, but based on the other Tanzanians' reactions, was downright hilarious. I was incredibly proud of all my students because they kind of took leadership roles since they were some of the oldest students at the conference. They asked a lot of good questions and seemed to really believe in the things they were being taught. I'm really excited now for the rest of the school year to have them lead sessions like the ones they saw, but use them to teach other students at my school and possibly even some of the primary schools nearby. It also made me a lot more comfortable with teaching life skills lessons and was great to get other ideas on how to teach them. I definitely think teaching life skills will become a much bigger part of my teaching at school after having done this girls conference.
We were already talking about now trying to do a Boys Conference sometime during the next school year which starts in January, possibly at the same place in Peramiho. Another idea that I have had and really want to do next year is to hold a conference like this, but instead of being a Boys or Girls Conference, have it be like a Math and Science Seminar, where the best math and science students from different schools can come and have some quality nerd-out time. It would be really cool for them to be able to see what is actually happening with science in the world today and where the real applications of what they're learning are. I can possibly even show them some footage of our robot quarterback, Sleepy Jim, that we made as a senior design project for our robot football game at Notre Dame.
Meanwhile, back at school.....
The week of the Girls Conference was also the week of National Exams for the Form IV students. They will be finishing up for a few days this coming week also, but then will be headed home. I'll continue teaching the Form II's until their exams in early November, but then will be finished with my regular teaching schedule. I plan to work more with the Form III's and giving them a head start in some math topics that they will learn next year, and also hopefully keeping up these life skills lessons on a regular basis.
The solar power project is moving along well. We had the grants coordinator from the Ambassodor's Grant Dept. come to visit our school a couple weeks back. She happens to be the wife of one of the head Peace Corps people for Tanzania. We haven't started to install anything yet, so her visit was really just to see the school and talk about whatever changes are going on in the solar project. The headmaster has now decided to do the project in 2 phases since the original cost estimate was lower than what it is now, and the school will have to wait until next year's budget to make the rest of the contributions. So first we will install lights in the classrooms, and then a few months from now will use the rest of the grant money to install a second system that will be able to power the big photocopy machine and also the laptop computers. I continue to be happy with the relatively little amount of work that I have to put into the project, which shows they are able to do it themselves, and maybe even write another grant after I leave!
Other than that, I've been dedicating the diminishing free time I have almost exclusively to puzzling. In a 6-day span I did (with some help) about 2.75 puzzles, and already have a couple more and one sent from home to work on when I get back to my house. My hope is to turn my house into a replica of the Wilks' garage, and just have the walls covered with completed puzzle posters. In unrelated news, I don't have any nerd tendencies whatsoever.
I continue to love and miss you all, and don't forget to check out all the pictures from the Girls Conference on facebook!
