Mobile Library and Banako Rural School

For over a month (it is hard to believe that I can say that now) I have been visiting a local rural school called Banako as part of the community service outreach projects that Haven of Peace Academy staff and students are participating in. On Thursday afternoons, a handful of teachers and about 40 students from grades 6-8 pile into two school buses, and we set off on the bumpiest and wildest school bus ride I have ever been on. The first time we drove out to Banako we actually lost the back fender of the bus, and the rains had washed giant holes into the dirt roads. Also, in Tanzania it is not the BACK of the bus that is the cool place to sit, but the very front, as there are backwards seats right against the windshield where you can sit and see everyone and everything (except the giant dips in the road coming up.)

The purpose of the weekly trips to Banako is to bring books to the rural school, as they do not have any books of thier own. It is like a weekly trip to the library, only the library comes to the students, but unfortunately the students are not able to keep the books at the end of the visit (and they are bashfully unloaded from desks at the end of the afternoon, sometimes 10 or 12 books hidden in one desk. It always amazes me, it must have been a jigsaw puzzle to make them all fit.) The hope is that eventually HOPAC will have enough materials to set up a permanent library at Banako, but for now it is a system on wheels. The students from HOPAC spend a few hours reading with the children, and teaching them about books (last week was about finding the title on a cover of a book, as well as the names and purpose of the author and illustrator. This may seem basic (and I believe is even in our kindergarten curriculum) but for children who have not been exposed to books as part of the learning process, or in any capacity, this is quite a challening feat.
We arrive at the 5-room school (with a student population of nearly 500 students and only 5 teachers) with arm loads of pencils and paper, a few color coded rubbermaid bins of picture books, easy readers and intermediate books, and ofcourse stickers for at the end of the lesson. I have never seen children get so excited about stickers (or even the sticky paper outline that surrounds each sticker. It makes me wish that I kept my sticker collection from my childhood to hand out. All of those stickers stored nicely in a photo album seems like such a waste compared to the creative uses and places they can find for just one sticker.

A typical 2 hour lesson looks like this: the class of 100 is divided into smaller groups of 6 or 7 students, and one HOPAC student (and or teacher) sits with each group, explaining the lesson in a mix of English and Swahili as best as possible, and then having students fill out their sheet. My favorite part is after the mini lesson. Free Read time. Students are able to pick books from the bins that are brought, and spend an hour reading, or just looking at the pictures, and learning new words in English (and me trying to learn the same words in Swahili).  All the books are donated to the mobile library project from all around the world (Netherlands, the U.S, Tanzania as well as other countries) and include many of my favorites, Little Critter series, Spot, Dick and Jane, all of the Disney classics, and even the Very Hungry Caterpillar. Part of what I am doing at HOPAC is inputting all of these books into a computer system (and color coded bin system) for the mobile library. It is encouraging as there are boxes and boxes of donated books, but the process is slow and steady to get them all sorted. I even enjoy the tedious inputting of books into the system, as Joel can probably tell you, I am a nerd when it comes to organizing and classifying things. I love order. :)

An interesting conversation arose as I was sorting and inputting books today.  I was commenting to one of the teachers that helps run the project that they must have had a huge donation of books from a little girl who LOVES bunnies. Almost every other story was about bunnies, and infact a lot of the books are about pets. Cats, Dogs, horses.. you name it. She was saying how it is interesting the conversations that can arise from those particular stories. The children cannot fathom why anyone would keep an animal as a pet. The first thought is, "is it edible, and how do I catch it?" (I happened to be holding a book of Clifford the BIG red dog at the moment, and thinking what a feast Clifford would make.) It is a challenge for most of those children to get enough food in the day, and the thought of keeping an animal around as a pet (and having to provide food, shelter and care for this pet) is absurd to them. It got me thinking about other books that we have in our Western culture, and how those would be percieved by the kids reading them at the Banako school. It is funny how something like a charitbale donation can turn into a puzzling (and possibly even sometimes offensive) gesture. I began to think of all the books I had sorted to do with Christmas, and though there were a few of the Christmas story, there were many with pictures of Santa Clause, piles of presents and stuffed stockings hanging over a lit fireplace in a plush house. Other books on Halloween can spark interesting conversation, when to us it is simply a fun holiday (with excess of candy and costumes), but in Tanzania which is a country where of whichcraft and supersticion are very real and present, books about ghosts and witches are unnerving and even taboo. I even ran into this at HOPAC during the final performance of the musical when I was helping a child put on her goat masked. I joked with her that she should keep the mask and dress as a Goat for Halloween. She turned to me with big eyes (partially hidden behind the googly goat eyes) and whispered that they don't celebrate "All Hallows Eve".

I am learning that as guests in Tanzania, and as Westerners here to provide "aid" it is so important to always be aware of the culture within which we are living. It is so easy to believe that our ways are right, our ideas are best, and that everything else is backwards. Though i cannot say that I have thought this way or arrived with this mindset, I can see how even the slightest ignorance of local customs and traditions can make it seem as if we do think this way, and instead of actually providing help, it can be easy to instead do harm. I think there is a fine balance to mission work, aid relief, or whatever it may be, but it has to look more like two people walking side by side, instead of one infront trying to lead the other. Cherie (Joel's professor) was speaking about this, saying that even in offering gifts or money it is important not to do it in a way that we are handing it down, but instead handing it across to the people (whether paying for taxi, buying something in the market or local shop). Even better would be the gesture of offering up the money to the hand recieving it.