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Mtakuja revisited, and more on language and learning.
In seven days I will be in Paris, come hell or high ash, reversing the rice, beans and scrawny chicken diet of the last three months in one bold cholesterol-laden swoop. I have been looking forward to the R&R for a while now, though it is nice to be leaving at a time when I don’t feel desperate to escape. Walking around Moshi yesterday, I had the satisfying realization that I finally feel pretty comfortable here, certainly in comparison to my wide-eyed, completely freaked-out state when I first arrived. I’m gla I won’t be staying here forever but I see that it is possible for people to live happily and in relative comfort here for an extended period, and that I could do so if I had to. And now that I have had that realization, I am happy to escape for a month of traveling in Europe before returning here in June for a few weeks, followed by a long safari with my friend Dave Scott — of approximately 50 who promised to visit, he alone will actually do so — and finally home to the USA in July.
— I returned to Mtakuja this week (some photos above), the village I wrote about in an earlier post where a Dutch NGO is experimenting with a comprehensive approach to try to lift an extremely poor village of about 4,500 out of poverty. It is a small-scale version of the approach getting a great deal of (sometimes critical) attention from the Millennium Villages project. Joris, the outgoing project leader, and his wife Sarah were kind enough to let me spend some time with them and ask a lot of annoying questions.
Mtakuja is substantially greener than when I was there a few weeks ago. Last year, the rains (and harvest) failed entirely and after 22 months with almost no water the place looked terrible. But after solid rains the last few weeks it was noticeably greener. Work is proceeding in the common field the project is helping to organize and irrigate, with villagers working to clear the land. Tanesco, the power company, is slowly starting to put up electrical poles to connect the field to the grid, much to Joris’s satisfaction. That will enable pumps to run, tapping groundwater from boreholes reaching down 100 meters or so into the dry earth. We visited a local agricultural training center, where the lead farmers are receiving two weeks of training in both crop management and leadership. We sat in briefly on one of their classes, an incongruous site of about a dozen or so roughly-clad Tanzanian farmers sat around a table in what could have been an MBA classroom, with an engaging teacher working through a Powerpoint about leadership techniques.
Out back are fields where the students get hands-on agricultural lessons. Zablon, a retired Tanzanian government agriculture official who has been hired by the project to work with the farmers, told me there is a whole body of knowledge he is trying to convey to them to improve the chances of the fields in the irrigation project being productive. Some are quite simple: local farmers, he says, almost always spread their maize plants too far apart in a misguided effort to give each plant more nutrients. In fact the optimal yield comes from putting more plants closer together. That information alone, he says, could double production. Overall, he thinks the village could improve its maize yield by a factor of four, which would be an essential building block for transforming the village economy. More maize would set in motion of a virtuous cycle where there is enough cash for low-level investment and savings to protect against future shocks, and to make the irrigation project financially self-sustaining. It’s a useful reminder: someday, perhaps, industry and a service economy will help lift Tanzania into prosperity. But that will be decades away under any conceivable scenario. First it has to rise out of extreme poverty, and that will be all about agriculture (if I have learned one useful thing about poverty here, it is that there really is an important quantitative and qualitative difference between an income of $300 a year and $1200. In the former you are utterly stuck; with the latter you may well be moving in the right direction)
But there are also large obstacles, from the saltiness of the soil to the novelty of the experience for the villagers and the unforeseen, unintended consequences of changing the economic dynamics (broken as they are) of the village. Still, it is the only conceivable way forward. The village of Chakarini, next to Mtakuja (and the location of the training center) has had more advanced irrigation for about a decade, and for that reason alone is more noticeably developed, with better-quality buildings visible along its roads. Some Chakarini farmers have even bought plots in Mtakjua. And the main determinant of success, Joris, Gebert (his successor) and Zablon insist, will be involvement of the villagers themselves. Several years ago, the Japanese poured development dollars into the area to try to build up rice farming, but did it mostly on their own, and the system broke down soon after they left. A giant rice refinery they left behind now runs at about 10 percent capacity. To their credit, the three have made community involvement the cornerstone of everything they do. The interesting question to me isn’t whether money can lift a village like Mtakuja out of poverty, but whether it can be done without someone like Joris on the ground in every single village. On the one hand, it’s a little patronizing to think that’s what’s needed — a Westerner with an MBA. But it isn’t the MBA that matters: It’s that Joris speaks fluent Swahili, has gotten to know and earn the trust of all the village leaders and many of the villagers themselves. He is determined to involve them in every aspect and says it is better for the community to try something as a group and fail than for him to do it himself and make it work, because it will stop working after he leaves. His most useful tool is patience.
“When we are done with our first phase in 2013, we’ll measure,” Joris told me. “I have no doubt we’ll show significant progress. But what matters is after. If you come back in 2020 or 2025, is this place better off than surrounding villages? What is going on on the ground? Are there local coordinators in the village? Are they truly involving the community?” If not, he says, there will be no permanent good. So I’m not sure the question is whether enough money can be raised to test comprehensive development on the Sachs model. If this project costs $250,000 a year for 5,000 people, that adds up to roughly $1 billion a year for a similar level of commitment to 20 million people living in extreme poverty - a lot but not impossible. The more limiting factor seems to be the number of Jorises in the world — people who speak the local language and have the patience (which I would certainly lack, as would I think many save-the-world types of the kind who might be applying to work in Millennium villages) to make community involvement such a high priority that they would prefer to fail than to create something unsustainable. And people who do not become cynical. This seems like one of Joris’ more extraordinary accomplishments — that he has largely, if not quite entirely, avoided the deep cynicism that affects so many ex-pats here. They are probably more cynical even than me, since I started with a reservoir. They are idealists who came to solve problems and hit a wall, and their disappointment is acute. Joris, by contrast, seems endowed with extraordinary patience. Still, he leaves next month after two years, returning with his family to New York (interestingly, he will be working for Millennium Villages). His successor, Gebert, is in place, but will have to get to know everyone himself and build up the level of trust it has taken Joris a while to accumulate, as well as fully master Swahili. -
— In the afternoon, I tagged along with Joris’ lovely wife Sarah, who visits one of the local secondary schools once a week for an effort at some health education and communication-skills building. It was the latest of several glimpses I’ve gotten of secondary education in Tanzania and it wasn’t terribly encouraging. The school has a few advantages — some new buildings under construction with support from TPC (the sugar plantation) but the classrooms still have dirt floors and gaping holes in the walls instead of windows, where wind and rain and dust blow in. When it rains, Sarah says, the noise of water falling on the metal roof is so loud students can barely hear their teachers.
The school is exceptionally crowded. On paper, at least — on the scheduled posted on the wall of the office of the headmistress — it has an ambitious and disciplined daily schedule running from 7 a.m. until after 4, with work on Saturdays, too. But transportation is a huge problem. Because the cachement area is so large, many students don’t arrive until 9 or 9:30. Many walk for miles; needless to say there is no school bus system here. It’s hard to see how students who miss the first two hours of school every day could possibly stay on track. Sarah has been working with a group of high-school aged girls on health issues. Among her activities has been trying to help them identify adults they can trust and approach with problems. It’s clear, she says, they don’t trust the teachers or the school counselor (who is just a teacher with a full teaching load). Her training is to encourage and direct students toward outside resources, to push them to seek help when they need it. Here, the whole premise breaks down; there are no outside resources. They are basically on their own.
We sat under the tree with a group of strong students selected for her once-a-week class. Recently, she had them write a play about HIV and perform it for the other students in hopes of spreading some of the lessons more widely. As they worked on songs (a subsequent assignment) a group of boys passed us walking back and forth to a patch of banana trees on the school grounds. They are required to tend the banana patch, not as a pedagogical exercise, a la a Berkeley elementary school’s organic farm, but to supply the teachers with food to supplement their admittedly meager salaries. Students also handle the groudskeeping, sweeping the grass around the school buildings clear with machetes, among other tasks. I did pass the classroom of one teacher that left me encouraged, at least initially. He was a smiling and engaging young man and was teaching chemistry by bringing laughing students up to the front of room to grasp arms in different formations imitating molecules. But it was hard to hold the attention of the class because there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of students milling around loudly outside. It was hard to tell, and I didn’t want to interrupt to confirm, but the likely explanation is that this was “extra time” during the school day and he was teaching the students who pay additional fees for supplemental instruction. Outside, those who could not afford the extra fees were left to kill time. Supposedly all the “essentials” are covered tuition-free and the extra payments are for supplemental lessons. But it is widespread practice to nudge the more essential material into the extra class time to try to drum up business for the teacher.
I told Sarah that the students, at least, seemed heroically well-behaved compared to American ones, but she wasn’t able to summon much good will on that front either; a major reason, she says, is that corporal punishment and humiliation are widespread. That makes for fairly docile, well-behaved children, perhaps, but it comes with a price. None of those issues, however, were the most discouraging. They are all difficult, but potentially solvable and improvable over time.
But there is one absolutely central aspect to education in Tanzania that seems fundamentally broken, to enormous consequence: the language issue, which I have written about before. In secondary school, instruction switches to English, but neither the teachers nor the students are prepared for it. Teachers read from textbooks in English then essentially translate into Swahili (probably poorly). The students Sarah is teaching have some of the best English in the school but even theirs is mixed and they obviously are not at a level where they are prepared to fully learn in English. Sarah reports they do poorly on national exams partly because the questions are more open-ended, and the best most students can hope for is a kind of learning by rote memorization that is not, ultimately, terrible effective for exam preparation or useful in real life. Creativity is not a priority, a problem that seems to poison the workforce of the entire country. Tanzania benefited enormously from the emergence of Swahili as a national second language, which helped unite the country and spare it many of the problems of its neighbors. But, sadly, it is now paying a big price. In other places, it is easier for English to emerge as a de facto national second or even first language. Here, it seems obvious to me the country would be much better off instructing through secondary school in Swahili and complementing it with intensive English instruction. Then at least the students might master the concepts of subjects like chemistry and then, hopefully, learn enough English by studying it intensively for an hour two each day to eventually apply those concepts in English. That is how countries, such as Holland, for instance, end up with well-educated citizens who also speak good English. But Tanzania doubled down on its policy of switching instruction to English. It believes English is the language of global commercie and its route to prosperity. Perhaps. Also, there are few secondary teaching materials available in Swahili. But what else matters if the students don’t master any of the material. Students in Japan don’t learn English very well but they learn a curriculum and have a chance to study English; that seems like a much better outcome. It is very difficult to see a strong way forward for a country where, on a widespread basis, teachers and students cannot understand what it is they are supposed to be teaching and learning. —-
Finally, an update from Rwanda, and not an encouraging one:: Kagame has arrested his main rival for the presidential election (http://bit.ly/a6n6pO ). He appears to have no chance of losing the election so this does not bode well for his understanding of how important this sort of thing is. For all his virtues, he is persuaded he alone is the savior of the country and that the outside world has done so badly by Rwanda it has no moral authority to criticize him. It will be interesting to see if he is still a global media darling in five years.
