Building an Education Program

Iris and I went back to Ben Bella and waited for the second half of the applications (the girls that we interviewed in the afternoon yesterday hadn’t brought their applications). The apps that were supposed to be in by 9:00 am started trickling in at 9:25. During this time we talked to Teacher Mao a lot. He told us that teachers make about 120,000 TSH a month and that training teachers make about 90,000 a month. Secretaries make about 75,000 a month. Teachers make less than $120/month. That's incredible. The last apps came in at 11:25.

We went back to FAWE to meet with Bibi Asma and she had some great ideas. We asked her how we could prepare our students better and address some of the issues that Dr. Mukangara and Dr. Mbilinyi cited. Some of her ideas were:

Tuseme – means “speak up”, has been run by other FAWE branches, focuses on leadership and public speaking skills

Field trips – 1x a year with mentors to historical sites, Jozani Forest, etc.

HIV\AIDS camps – includes housing, food, camp, facilitators and role models

Volunteer day – could be in villages or visiting a nursing home

Professional speaker – women from businesses NGO’s in the area that deal with education, women in law, etc.

Writing competition – writing topics with a prize

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION: Mr. Vuai turned out to be the secondary school program officer for Zanzibar. The ministry head had asked him to write a report about S4Si, so we talked for a while about what S4Si does. He told us that we should start going to rural schools and expand to Pemba, Zanzibar's sister island. While S4Si does not have the capacity to do that, they are certainly interesting ideas.

S4Si does the minimum by providing money to our students, but we've gotten some really great ideas from different factions about how to really create a PROGRAM.