A (quite random) list of things you might find interesting about Tanzanian secondary schools (as opposed to American high schools):

• The entry grade level is called Form I, not freshman year. Likewise, sophomore, junior, and senior years are referred to as Form II, Form III, and Form IV, respectively. Form IV, the eleventh year of formal education, is not the end of secondary school. At the end of Form IV, students take a nationally standardized test called the NECTA, the results of which determine who is qualified to continue upper-level studies. If a student scores highly enough on his or her Form IV NECTA exam, opportunities to finish secondary school – to continue to Form V and Form VI – become available.
• The classrooms belong to the students. Here in Tanzania, it’s not the students who leave the room when the bell rings at the end of the period. It’s the teacher. I teach three streams of Form III students. I’ll enter the Form IIIB classroom, carrying my books and my chalk, and when the period ends, I collect my books and my chalk before heading to the Form IIIA classroom, where different students are waiting for me to enter and for their math period to begin.
• The bell rings at the will of a student called The Timekeeper. This title and its accompanying responsibilities are awarded to a trustworthy student who is capable of telling time, and, at my school, who is also exceptionally short (for reasons as yet undiscovered). The bell resembles a gong, which The Timekeeper bonks three times with a stick at intervals of one hour and twenty minutes. Sometimes, The Timekeeper will make a stick-on-gong racket for several ongoing minutes. This means that all current classes and activities must immediately cease because there is an urgent assembly to which the entire school community must report. (Most often, these assemblies are arranged on a whim and involve the second headmaster hitting students with sticks.)
• Corporal punishment: As far as Tanzanians are concerned, there is no alternative. Hitting students with sticks is the only effective method of disciplining them, and, yes, of course it leads to behavior change. When my coteachers heard that corporal punishment is illegal in America, they broke into riotous laughter. Recently, though, I gave my first punishment that was considered harsher than hitting the students. I teach my Form IIIB class on Monday mornings, first period, and they are always late. The period is supposed to start at 7:40am, but normally, they don’t enter the classroom until at least 8:00am. Until they rearrange the desks and settle in, it’s 8:20am, and more than half the period is over. So, last Friday, I warned them not to be late. I used a really threatening tone, I shook my index finger, and I even told them directly that if they were late, they would be punished. Well, don’t you know they were late again? So I assigned a writing punishment: 1) To write five hundred times, “I will be in the classroom and ready to study on Monday morning.”; and 2) To write a ten-sentence letter in English, explaining why they are always late and promising not to be late ever again. I told them that if the assignment was not in my hands by 3:00 that afternoon, I would take ten points off of their final exams. My coteachers were impressed that only three of twenty-eight failed to write the sentences. One even mused, “Maybe I should try a punishment like that.”
• What’s a dining hall? Students take their meals outside, rain or shine. Currently, my school is building a sort of lean-to shelter under which the students will be able to eat.
• All secondary school students, at public or private schools, wear uniforms. Skirts for girls, slacks for boys. Collared shirts and sweaters for all.
• Cleanliness! Inspections are not just for military schools. Every Wednesday morning, the students gather for a huge assembly on the “parade grounds” (a dusty square lined by the school’s academic buildings). They sing the Tanzanian National Anthem, the School Song, and a special song to warn listeners against AIDS (this song, for reasons which are still fuzzy, instructs students not to share toothbrushes). Then, the teachers walk among the students, checking for dirt under their fingernails, untucked shirttails, unshaven heads (All students, even girls, shave their heads!), and the like. This is followed by dormitory inspection, for which teachers enter the students’ bedrooms (they sleep about fifteen to a room) to check that they’ve mopped the floors and made their beds.

And, another list of perfectly normal things I do, which get me laughed at relentlessly here in the Tanz:

• I own bug spray and use it often.
• I claim that actually teaching is more mentally challenging than grading tests.
• It takes me more than “one minute flat” to bathe myself properly and thoroughly.
• I buy toilet paper.
• I read books.
• I sometimes lose my temper when my teaching schedule is changed for the eighth (no joke) time in ten days.
• I call students to my house to kill those mammoth web-dwelling spiders that Tanzanians just leave to hang in the doorway or over the bed.
• I think I’d like to know someone well, maybe even date him for awhile, before I marry him. (Or, more accurately translated, before I am married by him. In Swahili, only men marry in the active voice. Women are married by men, in the passive voice.)
• I feel awkward when I’m asked to punish other people’s children (small children, not students). This has a lot to do with the fact that punishing them involves hitting them with sticks.
• I get lazy and don’t mop my floor for days at a time.
• I always carry a flashlight when I go out in the pitch-black night.
• I exercise.
• I claim that exercise is good for your health.
• I don’t wear a heavy winter ski coat when it drops to sixty degrees Fahrenheit.
• I sometimes nap on my couch.
• I continue to be white.

Workers' Day!

While you all were out twirling ribbons around poles this May Day, I was enjoying a different type of celebration: one to commemorate Tanzanian Workers’ Day, a national holiday akin to our own Labor Day. It was absolutely a blast from start to finish, complete with all the most potent Tanzanian foods (meaning, of course, that the seasonings were livelier than the salt and oil flavors pervading typical East African cuisine), as well as my own assigned chore of distributing sodas to students and collecting the bottles afterwards (the latter being much more complicated than the former, because apparently stolen glass soda bottles are in very high demand).

We began the day with a student talent show. For all performances such as this one, the students sit on chairs and desks arranged out in the sun, in an arc at one corner of the dusty academic square. We teachers sit on the concrete promenade that runs the length of each academic building, in the shade of the roof’s overhang. When I first arrived in Tanzania, I felt uncomfortable with this arrangement, since it essentially places the teachers in a row on a sort of stage, facing the arc of students. Performances occur at ground level, in the awkward space between the raised line of teachers and the arc of students piled in groups onto the tops of desks. By now, though, I’ve gotten used to being part of the scenery, a bright white distraction amid the backdrop for a skit or a song.
Two of my former students provided the first act: a cleverly-devised but badly-delivered rap welcoming the Form I (freshmen) students to the school. They may not have had beat or rhythm, but these kids sure had humor. Benedict and Ones, two very likeable teacher’s-pet-types who are also smart and decently popular among their peers, dispensed valuable advice to the first-years. On one topic, though, they had only to say, “Na swala la msosi, lazima uzoee,” which means, approximately, “And as for the food, you just gotta get used to it.” School food is quite the controversy here, where the daily fare consists of beans and ugali. (Want to try ugali? Ingredients: Dried horse corn, water. Directions: Grind the dried horse corn into flour. Boil water in a pot. Dump a bunch of dried horse corn flour into the boiling water. Stir. Continue to boil and stir until the mixture assumes the consistency of wet cement. Eat.) This is actually typical Tanzanian food, and it’s often all villagers can afford to eat day after day. But many of my students come from wealthier families in town who can afford to eat rice and vegetables quite often. As a result, the audience thought the reference to tasteless school food was a scream.
Another memorable act cautioned students about the dangers of falling into the patterns of corruption so common among successful Tanzanians. Through an interpretive recitation/skit, they depicted the Tanzania that would develop if they – the students of today – did not break the precedent set by the businessmen and politicians of their parents’ generation. Reminiscent of the regime ruled by Biff in Back to the Future II, the corrupt Tanzania of the future featured thieving politicians, careless doctors, and selfish teachers. But bahati nzuri, by good luck, a pure-hearted witch doctor was on hand to hypnotize those susceptible to corruption. The witch doctor, played by one of my current students, a popular girl named Eva, convinced the unscrupulous degenerates to rise above their venal ways. By the end of the skit, the characters were locked into a witch doctored trance, reciting quips such as, “I will not be corrupt,” and “I will never again accept a bribe.”
Among these clever performances were the usuals: several Christian chant-type songs, some hip-hop renditions, and at least two plays featuring a character who has sex, gets AIDS, and dies in quick succession. These standards have graced the “stage” at all four talent exhibitions I’ve witnessed here at the school Still, the messages are always good, and quite frequently the skits and songs are delivered with legitimate skill.

After the talent show, it was a regular party. We teachers had a momentary dispute about which classroom we would occupy, since it seemed that every location was somehow too near to where the students would be conducting their own festivities. Apparently, we wanted nothing to do with them. Finally, we chose a classroom and opened the buckets (literally) of food. There was pilau (spiced rice), cow meat (by no means steak), fried chicken, cooked vegetables, and even salad! The salad, called kachimbali, consists of tomatoes, green peppers, carrots, and other sundry vegetables drenched in their own juices and with some added flavors, such as lemon or salt. Asking for kachimbali is the only way to obtain raw vegetables here (unless you have a garden, which I…do not), so I go a little crazy when I have the opportunity to eat it. My plate was piled high, mainly with chicken and kachimbali.
We proceeded to have a mini-disco, during which I miraculously persuaded the teacher-DJ to play mostly American music. (I suspect that he just wanted to see me dance, and knows I have a hard time finding a hip-swayable beat in Tanzanian Gospel music.) Meanwhile, the students had their own parties: a hardcore, mostly-hiphop disco in one classroom, with a real DJ from Njombe town; Gospel music videos in another; and Gospel singing and dancing in the last. Supervision was light, to say the least, so who knows what other antics went down behind the dormitories and in the woods.

Eventually, I finished two beers without getting the slightest bit drunk (shocking the daylights out of the Tanzanians), worked with the school nurse to collect all 650 students’ soda bottles in their proper crates, and got my first legitimate Tanzanian marriage proposal (legitimate = not from a cab driver or other fleeting acquaintance). Just as the sun went down over the backs of the silhouetted mountaintops in the distance, the electricity died – in the middle of my favorite Tanzanian pop song, “Boy You’re Love is Wicked,” by Brick&Lace (Download it.).

"The generator is overworked,” the machine chief told me. “It won’t work again until tomorrow.” So the party ended abruptly, much like this blog post is ending right now.