More Project Stuff

Quick Aside

First, a quick aside. Corporal punishment in schools is not only legal here, but very common. From what I hear, the British brought it back when Tanzania was still a British colony. Technically speaking, there is a law that limits what you’re allowed to do by quite a bit, but culturally it’s considered okay to go much further than what the law allows, and people regularly do, and there’s pretty much no enforcement of the law.

Of course this is a very different culture than American culture, particularly on this issue; often times, when the students get hit, they’re actually totally accepting of it, feeling that they deserve it; often it’s getting hit on the hand a couple times with a very thin stick, and the students seem to have the attitude of “Okay, I broke the rules, so now I deserve to get hit on the hand a couple of times to remind me not to do that again”. My students, when they’ve been bad before, have even asked me to hit them (I refused; I’m not comfortable with hitting my students).

Anyway, I’ve talked a bit with Tanzanians at my school a bit about the issue, about how it’s illegal in the US, lots of people think it’s unethical, etc. A lot of them were surprised the first time they heard it was illegal in the US, and were curious about how disciplining works there. The Tanzanians at my school are also able to make some pretty compelling arguments in favor of corporal punishment over any punishments I can come up with (though I didn’t have much experience with punishments in American schools, so I’m actually not very good at suggesting alternatives). The main argument that I’ve not been able to overcome is that, compared with suspension, expulsion, etc, corporal punishment is very fast and doesn’t cause the student to miss any of their lessons. Additionally, the administration at my school claim to have tried a variety of other methods, and supposedly corporal punishment is the most effective at getting the students to do the right thing.

One final note while I talk about this: the “human rights” argument doesn’t work very well with them, because Tanzanian culture includes a somewhat different idea of “human rights”, particularly when it comes to students.

More Project Stuff

Alright, so where I left off before, I mentioned I was looking into two projects:
- water tank trailer, so that the school can use the tractor to fetch water on behalf of the students
- permagardening, so that my village can have a more reliable source of crop growth

I’ve been reading Peace Corps’ grant-proposal-writing handbook, and I’ve found a couple of interesting things:
1. The community (in my case, the school and/or village) must provide 25% of the cost of whatever projects I do with them. This is to guarantee that they actually care about the project. Apparently one major issue that many development projects face is that some foreign guy comes in, does some project that nobody in the community actually cares about, and then leaves, and then nobody actually uses whatever the person brought/built/etc. For an easy-to-imagine/plausible example, if someone were to bring a bunch of mosquito nets to my village, a lot of the villagers wouldn’t use them, because they’re afraid that the insecticide the nets are treated with is poisonous for humans.
2. All of the grant-writing from the Peace Corps grant process is reliant upon being done through the Peace Corps, and specifically through the Peace Corps Volunteer at the site. This means that after I leave, if I don’t get replaced by another PCV, my school will no longer have access to grant money. Now, one of Peace Corps’ big ideas/attitudes is “capacity building”, teaching people how to get what they need on their own. This seems to run completely counter to that. It’s the whole “give a man a fish vs teach him to fish” dealio, and we’re more or less giving fish instead of teaching fishing. There are non-Peace-Corps sources of funding in the world, though, so one thing I want to do before I leave is to find some of them, figure out how to use them, and teach my school’s administration about them.

Another issue: the construction of my school was a bit complicated and sloppy, basically. We are a boarding school, and our hostels have bunk beds. The upper bunks are quite high relative to the average height of our students, and the students apparently have so much trouble getting into and out of them that we do not use them; currently, students are sharing the lower bunks, two per bed, and the upper bunks are going unused.

So, my school administration suggested that in terms of projects, I should look into getting ladders for the beds, enabling easy/safe use of the upper bunks.

In order to get proper ladders, we’d have to bring a metalworker in to cut small holes in the beds’ upper rails, and then get a woodworker in to build ladders and attach them to the holes. We’d also have to locate and pay for a large source of ladder-making wood. Wood is quite expensive here, so that combined with the workers’ pay would add up.

I was talking about this issue with another PCV, and she cleverly suggested we try rope ladders instead. Apparently rope ladders were more or less totally unknown to my school’s administration, which when you really come down to it is surprising given how innovative Tanzanians have generally been when it comes to doing things cheaply or with limited materials.

Anywho, I looked up how to tie rope ladders today, and hopefully we’ll be trying them out sometime in the nearish future. If they work, they should be considerably cheaper than actual wooden ladders. I have no idea how well they’ll last though.