Bagamoyo

Our next stop was Baobab Secondary school, which was a 6.5 hour drive from Pangani, near Bagamoyo.  Here we did a 2 day teacher workshop.  Baobab was such a lovely school, with expansive and beautiful grounds.  It is a private, all girls secondary boarding school. The school felt empty because the school was on a break, but many of the staff and teachers also live at the school, so there were people around campus.  The school also provided housing and food for us, which was very generous. 

This is the baobab tree that the school was named after.  The founders told us that the baobab tree can live for many years, and so he wanted the school to exist as long as the baobab tree stood.

During the workshop, we did a mapping exercise where the teachers drew a map of their first home that they could remember.  They then wrote a story about a specific time they remembered from their first home and took pictures to represent a moment in their story.  These stories turned out so well – everyone had such diverse and interesting stories.  On the second day, we split the teachers into groups based on the subjects they each taught and they used the concepts of LTP to discuss how they could integrate LTP into their curriculum.  They ended up producing some great visual aids for their subjects.  

This was the poster made by the history group.  This poster talks about the roles (predominantly of the men) of the Maasai in the different age groups.  I like this one because it I thought the pictures they took were good visual representations of the material they wanted to communicate.

On one of the days, we drove into the town of Bagamoyo after school, which reminded me of Stonetown in Zanzibar with its coastal feel, dhows dotting the ocean, and winding alleyways.  

On the other day, Kyle, one of the Duke students who is a soccer player, practiced with the group of teachers and children (of staff and teachers who happened to all be males) that were still around the school.  I stopped to watch for a few minutes and one of the teachers came over and asked me if I wanted to play.  After spending a week in Pangani operating under a mentality that women and men couldn’t mix in social circles, it was a liberating thought to be able to play soccer and not have to worry about what I looked like or what people thought of me.  I don’t really play soccer but desperately needed some exercise, so I rushed to change and ran out on the field.



Word of the day: picha - pictures