Thank you! (Asante Sana!)

(Left to Right) Katie Hyde, Alia Kamal, Kaitlin Rogers, Minette Yao, Baldeep Pabla, Michelle Fang, Elena Rue, Lindsay Kunkle, Hillary Robbins, Ami Kabadi

As the summer wraps up, we would like to thank DukeEngage, the Center for Documentary Studies, Sister Cities of Durham, and Friends of Arusha for supporting our program in Tanzania. We’d also like to thank our DukeEngage students for their impressive service work, which involved collaborating with over 600 Arusha students and 45 classroom teachers.

Our DukeEngage students did a wonderful job of gathering support from friends and family. They raised over $3000 in cash donations and supplies, including film, cameras, digital printers, notebook paper, pencils, folders and art supplies.

Some of these supplies were used in after-school art and writing projects designed and run by Duke students. The contributions also went toward making the LTP Arusha Classroom Booklet (see previous post)—a how-to guide that features examples from projects carried out by Duke students. Finally, the contributions will provide participating teachers with the necessary materials to continue using LTP in their classrooms during the next school year.

The LTP staff would like to thank the following individuals for their generous donations:

Peter Rogers and Val Crotly
Karen and John Crotly
Vera Barbara Rogers
Jennifer and John Murawski
Pam and John Preschlack
Ronald and Louise Rogers
Helen Anderson
Karen and Grant Bogle
Paula and Jim Preschlack
Lynn and Jack Preschlack
Deborah Zare

Shaiful Islam

John and Holly Robbins
Teresa and Don Cline
Kathy, Cara, and Fred Heaton
Todd Woerner
Jess Nicholson
Yongho Park
Frank and Louise Ferry
Steve Robbins Sr.
Peggy Robbins
Hank and Louise Hiner
Doug and Wendy Robbins
John and Patty Bauchman
Emily Robbins
Brandon Gaesser
Becky Veazey

Kim, Cindy, and Kyle Kunkle
Mei and J.C. Yao

LTP Arusha Booklet

LTP Arusha Booklet PDF

One of the goals of the 2008 LTP Arusha program was to create a how-to manual for Tanzanian teachers. It contains examples from all the wonderful work done by Arusha and DukeEngage students to show how it has worked in classes thus far and how it is applicable to their curriculum. Before we left Arusha we printed several copies of the booklet to give to teachers and keep in the LTP Teacher Resource Center.

celebrations at the close of LTP Arusha

photographs by Kaitlin Rogers

Favorite memories from LTP Arusha, Kaitlin Rogers

It’s weird to sit and write this blog entry from the living room of my home in a Chicago suburb. Tanzania feels (and is) a world away, but the memories of my experiences there are still freshly imprinted in my mind, and what I have found to be the hardest since my return home is how to articulate my experiences to my family and friends. It is weird that a place, culture, and group of people that became so familiar to me and that I grew to love are still so inconceivable and foreign to my closest friends and family. I find myself sprinkling my sentences with superlatives such as incredible, amazing, unbelievable, astounding, spectacular, and so on. I use them so generously that it must seem I am exaggerating, but in most cases I feel that what I said was an understatement. And so, please keep this in mind as I attempt to describe our final days in Arusha.

I would like to begin at our final reflection session. We met as a group once a week for a formal reflection session. During this time we responded to a question in a free-write, shared thoughts from our personal journals, and openly discussed, analyzed, and assessed our work with LTP and other experiences. For our final session we wrote about our favorite memory. This prompt seemed overwhelming. How could I begin to select one memory from the ocean of memories I had accumulated over my time in Arusha? I finally selected two memories and began to write.

Things took an emotional turn as we each began reading our favorite memories aloud. As someone who has never been good at keeping her emotions back, I was the first to break down as Lindsay read about her favorite memory: when we all walked back together, as a team, exhausted but so fulfilled after the success of FUN DAY!

We decided to put on a field day of sorts for all the students at Arusha School, where we devoted the majority of our time during our stay. We advertised the day as Fun Day and planned many fun games and activities for the students. The day certainly lived up to its name. The campus was filled with laughter, cheering, and shrieks of joy as kids jumped rope, played football, danced, competed in three-legged and other races, and came together for tug-of-war. They ran from one activity to the next and enjoyed freshly cut oranges and peanuts from local vendors we hired for the afternoon. We took turns manning the different stations and shared in the kids’ excitement. The positive energy was contagious and you could not help but smile.

The feeling we all shared as we left Arusha School after such a thrilling afternoon and many rounds of good-bye hugs was so special. Most of the memories were like this: a single moment or instance that may seem simple but meant so much. And as I sat there I was overcome by emotion. What a special thing to be a part of! I felt so blessed, yet also quite confused. How could I leave these kids and this place, both of which I had grown to love dearly? What did my work there mean if I just picked up and left? Would these kids view me as another fleeting pleasure in their uncertain lives? How could I take what I saw and learned in Arusha back home with me? In what ways should I change the way I live my life following this experience? How could I get people at home to understand?

One of the memories that I wrote about involved my after-school newspaper class. Lindsay and I worked with the 6C class to create a class newspaper, entitled 6C The Great (6C The Great PDF). For weeks the students worked on writing stories and eventually selected one piece to take through the writing process and ultimately publish in 6C The Great.

A reflection at the end of LTP Arusha, Alia Kamal

Class 4B with their dreams

Writing my blog entry this late into the LTP experience has been quite a struggle. It’ s the last stretch. There are so many things I could write about. So many memories keep flooding my mind that it becomes hard to extract the few that will allow the reader to link this entry to the previous one written by my fellow LTPer.

So what happened in the last week? The Duke LTP group finally embarked on its last few internships; this time at select government schools in Arusha. My After school art program continued on the lawns of Arusha Primary school and as we neared the end of this journey in Tanzania our group as a whole started on nightly reflections on different topics ranging from the hilarious to the soul-searching. 

 

GOVERNMENT SCHOOL INTERNSHIPS: 

Previously we had worked exclusively in English medium schools–Arusha Primary, Shalom and St. Joseph Secondary Schools–which are all taught in English. It was easy to communicate with these kids as they had a pretty good grasp of the language. Government schools in Arusha have a curriculum based on the National language Swahili. With English as an exception, all other courses are taught in Swahili. I was hoping that my broken Swahili would be good enough to lessen the obvious language barrier between the kids and me. 

The eight of us were split up into three different Government primary schools-Naura, Uhuru and Themi. Ami and I got to work at Naura Primary School. The school was situated near a scenic area resembling a park with a small river flowing through it. As we trekked our way up a steep road towards the school gates lugging our backpacks heavy with cameras and stationery supplies that first day, we were swarmed by navy blue uniformed children yelling out the now familiar ‘Mzungu!’ (which means ‘Foreigner!’). The school itself was pretty small compared to the likes of Arusha Primary but it definitely had its charm. The bright yellow of the tin-roofed classrooms contrasted perfectly with the green in the trees and shrubs surrounding them. Yes I know I make a lot of references to colors, I guess you the reader will just have to get used to this. After an initial meeting with the school headmistress–who was supportive and accommodating by rearranging some of the classes to allow us to work more efficiently—we met up with the English teacher (Isaria) who had worked with us at the very first LTP teacher workshop. I remembered this teacher fondly from that week. She was creative in the exercises and seemed to have a passion for learning and experimenting with different ideas. I was really excited to be able to teach with her in the classroom and watch her in action.  

Isaria, a teacher from Naura Primary, helping a group take pictures

I guess I can say that I wasn’t too disappointed that first day at Naura. Things went better than I had expected. We did a reading photographs exercise with the kids; after an initial period of shy hesitation, the students, helped along by their English teacher, all seemed to write a few lines about the photographs provided. One concern I did have was the fact that the students were less proficient in English than their counterparts in the English Medium schools. Although this was to be expected, it was disheartening that when the option of writing in Kiswahili was provided, most students took it (even though this was their English class).

Credit is due to the awesome English teacher, Isaria. After working in classes where teachers hardly participated, and sometimes left to run other errands, it was refreshing to work in a classroom where we played the roles of facilitators instead of the main educator.