Volunteering
@ MamboViewPoint – 20 May 2015 – 17 June 2015
By Niko Winkel
For more information:
and https://joostvangroningen.wordpress.com/
(Dutch only)
I wake up every
morning shortly before sunrise. To the people living here, the days really last
from sunrise to sunset. This is also how they keep track of time: 7 A.M. is
called the first hour of the day: ‘saa moja kamili’. The night really falls here: within half an hour, the sky
is pitch-black (unless the moon is full, when you might even be able to read
outside!). Thousands of stars light up in an infinite black sky. When you walk
on top of the mountain, where the house for volunteers is located, it seems as
if you find yourself in a quiet and immense theater. However, there is some
noise: sounds carry far through the valley. A cow, a rooster. And on set times
you hear the muezzins, resounding through their speakers. But even more clearly
you hear the children by day. There are so many! 5000 people inhabit the
village Mambo, and 2000 of them go to primary school.
Computer lessons with Niko
Mambo is
located two kilometers lower in the valley. Pikipikis drive around. They bring
you from village to village (or from MamboViewPoint to a village) for a very
small amount (according to Western standards, that is), yet most people walk.
They walk endlessly. The students who attended my (by myself developed) Word
and Excel lessons over the past month, walked one and a half hour to
MamboViewPoint and back. Ally and Josef are MamboViewPoint’s guides. They both
live in Mtae, the village visible on the next ridge. They walk every day, even
when there is no work for them. It is at least an hour walk. But when you join
one of their beautiful hikes alongside the cliff, to the caves or through the
rainforest, it seems as if they do not encounter any resistance. Local men are
as slim as Twiggy was in her best years. Women too, by the way – even though
being slim does not give a woman status here. It is all about work, here in the
mountains. Somebody told me people work even harder than they used to do,
which, apparently, is partly because of MamboViewPoint’s efforts.
Herman and
Marion, the MamboViewPoint couple, left Lienden, The Netherlands six years ago
in order to spend the rest of their lives living from the profit of their lodge
and living for assisting the local people in building up a healthier life with
more prosperity. This is definitely possible: people here are poor, yet often
without good reason, since the land is very fertile. Would they give their cow a
bit more proper attention and medicine, they would get a lot more milk. Would
they give the women who traditionally help mothers give birth a bit more
education, they would save lives (child mortality is very high). Would they
have a heater that smokes less, they won’t sit in their clay houses breathing
smoke all day long. Babies sleep there as well: you can hear them, but the
heavy fog obstructs you from seeing them. Long diseases are the major cause of
death here.
Dinner @ home with the local computer teacher Henrish
Water facilities should be touched upon as well. MamboViewPoint organizes the
digging of wells and the building of the Blue Pumps of Fairwater. Those pumps
work for thirty years. It is not just a matter of installing them:
MamboViewPoint takes care of the pumps and ensures the fact that people cannot
use them freely, since that would miss the whole point of sustainable
development.
Since the beginning of 2015 MamboViewPoint’s community development projects are
organized from the new foundation ‘Jamiisawa’ (solidarity).
My own goal was
something entirely different. Of course, it was a participating observation. My
own project is, indeed: getting to know Tanzania from the perspective of good
development projects that employ international volunteers. I am no nurse, no
agricultural expert, no technician, no social worker. Yet, most international
volunteers are not either. Even worse: they are about twenty years old and do
not have a single expertise that ordinarily would justify the fact that you are
coming to teach the local people something (sorry, youngsters).
My productivity in four weeks: developing and shaping the library consisting
out of 250 titles. I built a computer system for it, which Hoza (Jamiisawa’s
manager) can use to keep track of the management and borrowing processes. Hoza
is very content with it.
I also made an extensive PowerPoint presentation that teaches Word and Excel to
beginners. Jamiisawa hired Henrish to teach students. Six computers are lined
up in Jamiisawa’s classroom: four are small tablets and two are big laptops
with a Spanish keyboard. I now know
the symbols you get when you press one of the keys (many actually refer to
something else). The upside-down question mark, for instance, is actually a
‘)’. Rafael, a retired Spanish teacher, visited MamboViewPoint a number of
times. He taught English to kids at the primary school, and left a couple of
old laptops. Hoza’s laptop is also Spanish, and I taught him Word and Excel
very intensively.
Hoza’s other project is copying: people often need a copy of something. An
identity document, a contract, whatever: they climb the mountain in order to use
the area’s only copy machine for 300 shilling per copy (which ends up in the
community fund, even though people do not know this). Hoza keeps track of this
in an Excel sheet. I inserted some formula and secured the sheet. The only
thing he has to do is keeping track when, for whom and how many copies he
makes. He had already made a lot of mistakes, so the money they had in stock
was not in accordance with what they thought they had.
Introducing efficient, smokeless stoves
The computers here are the only ones in the area. Two of the students that
attend our classes every afternoon, are teachers at a primary school in
Kwentiindi, a village four ridges and valleys away. They listen carefully when
I do magical things on the computer. Especially Excel is fun: I notice myself
enjoying playing with it (“look, when you enter this, and you press that key..”
and the subsequent astonishment in their eyes when all numbers change instantly).
These guys are teachers with a moderate knowledge of the English language, even
though they teach English themselves. The other students attend secondary
school and are between the ages of fifteen and nineteen (although guessing an
age is difficult: I initially thought that the two teachers were students).
Their English is even worse. They do not know how to say something like “I do
not get it yet, can you explain it again?” and only say “yes.” Do you
understand? Yes. Don’t you understand? Yes. When Henrish – I practically am the
teacher’s teacher – teaches the students, he looks over their shoulders, gazes
at the screens, and seems to be mastering the students and matter. Yet, this is
only appearance: Henrish knowledge is limited as well. Even though I explained
him time and again that creating space in a Word document should not be done by
using the ‘space’ key (“Henrish, spaces are invisible devils: they move your
text over the edge of the paper when you change something”), he continues to do
it. Repeat, repeat, repeat: Marion says. I am actually the same: she always
needs to repeat things to me. Well, Marion, I get it now. Development happens
slowly. Herman’s and Marion’s stories about their projects and developments
during the past five years are characteristic of this: sustainable development
does not happen overnight. Nevertheless, it is sustainable. It lasts. There is
a lot of development happening here.
Bringing smartboards to the primary schools
I had one other project. Using Excel, I built an administrative management
system for the Jamiisawaa foundation (which employs eleven people: some
temporarily and some permanently). This system will hopefully account for a
good start for Herman. It was secondary work: work for the foundation, without being
in direct contact with the locals. Yes: I had an office-job on top of Mambo’s
mountain. Even that is possible! It
actually seems quite surrealistic.
Everything I described so far accounted for about half of the hours I spent at
MamboViewPoint and its Jamiisawa foundation. MamboViewPoint is the organization
that funds many community projects. Jamiisawa is the foundation led by locals
and is not subjected to business taxes.
The other half of my time allows for getting to know the area better. Together
with one of MamboViewPoint’s guides, you can do fantastic hikes through the
mountains. Volunteers can do such (half- or full-day) hikes for free. I also
got Swahili lessons from Josef for three weeks (an hour every morning). There
are, moreover, colorful markets on set days in different villages. Multiple
times Hoza or someone else took me to visit a school. We, for example,
delivered instructive school plates (smart boards) at schools. Makanyaga made
those: he works as an artist for Jamiisawa and is involved in the ‘drop-in
project’ that overlooks children who dropped out of school. Makanyaga painted a
big mural on the longest wall of my room, depicting my own family (according to
photos I gave him) in a Kilimanjaro-like environment. Gijs from Alphen aan den
Rijn (The Netherlands) began a circus in which kids perform. During the
weekends, kids ride their unicycle down the mountain.
MamboViewPoint
also shows their guests opportunities to contribute. You can, for instance,
plant trees. It is useful to restore the former tree population: the Eucalyptus
trees that consume a lot of water (and other trees as well) actually need to be
replaced by local tree species. You can also sponsor a smart board. When you
become a ‘Friend of Mambo’ you will be in the system, which allows you to
sponsor many great projects. This is very rewarding, since everything will end
up at the right place.
Artist Makanyaga paining Niko's friend and children in the volunteer room
During this period I was the only volunteer at MamboViewPoint. It was a
relatively quiet time, there were not many tourists. Sometimes ‘overlanders’
who travel through Africa by jeep dropped by. When there were tourists, things
instantly became livelier. I was just here in mid-winter! In terms of the
weather this was obvious as well: I was wearing a sweater most of the time. By
night the temperature dropped to ten degrees Celsius. The Kilimanjaro, 160
kilometers away, is usually visible from the mountain’s ridge, but I had bad
luck: I did not see it once. Nevertheless, the Kilimanjaro is only the cherry
on top: I gazed at the valley every morning, seeing villages 1300 meters below
me, the Pare-mountains on the other side and the Mtae-ridge in the east. In the
west you can even see the highway from Dar to Arusha. It remains a wonderful
sight.
In July a
Polish creative agricultural expert, a couple of midwives, a teacher from The
Netherlands and a group of students from the United States will visit Mambo.
The tourist season is about to start as well. Marion and Herman suffered from
the Ebola epidemic quite heavily (which is strange, since Western-Africa is very far away), but their social
organization and community projects keep flourishing. Marion just got back from
her first visit to The Netherlands in six years. The culture shock was immense:
she is glad to be back and had difficulty comprehending how neat the country
was (“I would not be able to live there any more”).
I am grateful
for having been able to stay at MamboViewPoint for a month. That might sound quite
devotional, but I truly mean it. I perceive it as a privilege that I was able
to add a month of such wonderful experiences to my life.
I can now start to translate this story to my own project: GoTanzania (www.gotanzania.nl). That is what it was, initially, all about: spreading the word about
the real, genuine development organizations that employ volunteers in Tanzania.
This was a great start.
