Pangani

Word of the day: jinsia - gender

Over the past 2 weeks, we traveled along the east coast of Tanzania (with limited internet access).  Our first stop was Pangani, a small coastal town off of the Pangani river.  We conducted a 4 day teacher workshop at a private Muslim school called Al-Hijira. 

At Al-Hijira, the classes are split between boys and girls.  Girls who have reached puberty wear full hijabs (they call them something else in Tanzania, but I can’t remember the name) that cover everything except their eyes.  Most of the teachers were very welcoming and open to learning a participatory methodology as an alternative to the typical Tanzanian rote (copy and paste) learning methods.  However, as an LTP group of mostly women (9/10 of us are women), we found ourselves confronted head-on with the Muslim culture. 

I think the best explanation I can give to succinctly sum up how we felt is that we were given different levels of respect depending on our different roles.  As women, we did not always feel respected by the male teachers, and in some cases, felt as though we were embarrassing our hosts.  For example, we tried to take care to dress conservatively (long skirts and tops that covered our shoulders) even though we did not wear head scarves or hijabs.  But, some of the men would still not walk with some of the female Duke students on the main street because they weren’t wearing full hijabs.  A couple male teachers also refused to complete an activity where we asked them to write a story in first person by taking the perspective of a person in the picture (which were coincidentally, a woman and her child). 

In our role as teachers, we felt more respected. We worked a lot on the idea of reading photographs and producing stories and writing based on pictures.  The Duke students led groups of teachers to complete an alphabet project related to the community of Pangani.  The teachers used the themes of home, environment, economy/market, and people to create amazing photos for each letter of the alphabet for each theme.  The teachers also made self-portraits with an accompanied writing, which were so cool.  Some had their families in the picture, others were in places important to them, such as the school or home, and others had objects that were important to them, such as a bicycle or a machete for harvesting their crops.

Overall, the experience there was very rewarding and I’m thankful for an experience that  allows us to better understand the different cultures and ideas that exist in Tanzania.  

I do want to point out that for all of the gender challenges we faced, the school did value educating girls.  A couple teachers mentioned that the boys typically did better on exams because the girls had so many duties at home that they had less time to study.  They tried to give the girls more time to study at school to help remedy this imbalance. 

Certainly, I can’t completely understand or explain the religious, gender, and ethnic dynamics that were in play during that week.  In Muslim and Tanzanian culture, the men and women have such different yet specific roles, and I think since the women in our group did not fit into these roles, they did not know how to incorporate us into their cultural norms.  Given all of these various challenges, I was very impressed with how open they were to the LTP methodology.

In our free time, we went to the beach every day after school, which was very relaxing.  We also got henna painted on our hands and feet :)