MamboViewPoint Blog

Teacher training

2012-02-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

By Sally Christensen’s

I came to Mambo View Point at the suggestion of my daughter, Alice, who was working with nurse training Tanzania in 2010/11. She stayed at MVP and helped compile a list and purchase some sorely needed medical equipment at Mambo Dispensary.

When I initially contacted Herman he wanted me to help out on a tree nursery project but on arrival I discovered that the land had not yet been purchased so I threw myself into other projects. We both raised funds by doing a half marathon in Baltimore, USA in October 2012.

First Impressions

Mambo is just a Shangri La. The elevation gives a gorgeous climate of hot, sunny days and cool, at this time of year, sometimes windy, evenings. MamboViewPoint stands on the edge of a cliff and some mornings the vast plain below is covered with a soft, white blanket which slowly creeps up the mountain side. Star gazing is a must at night. In the day one can explore the lush valleys where all kinds of fruit and and vegetables are grown with great success. The hills are often terraced and MVP has done some brilliant work on bringing water to the populace. I visited these bore holds and wells at the beginning of my stay and was well impressed.

Early on in my stay I visited the school down the hill, Mambo and Mambo B Primary School, I felt the most useful thing I could do would be to work with the English and Science teachers to give them ideas on teaching methods, using teaching aids, songs, games and activities: to help them assess students’ comprehension and to evaluate their lessons. To allow the children to learn through experimentation, through looking at real objects, through touching and feeling things. To learn and have some fun at the same time!

Background

There are 2000 children attending Mambo and Mambo B Schools which are located on the same property. There are about 22 teachers. Most of the classes have over 100 children and some 120. There are sometimes 4 or even 5 children on a three seater bench with one fixed desk. The floors are reddish earth, the walls are crumbling, in some classrooms the windows do not open. There is nothing on the walls just a huge blackboard at one end of the room. There is often not even a table for the teacher to use.. There is no electricity in Mambo town nor is there a generator. The teachers do have text books but the students’ text books are never given out as there are only about 10 per 100 children. The teachers do have lesson plan books some use them some do not. The children are extremely well behaved because discipline is very strict. Most teachers have a stick. One day I saw a female teacher beating a young girl’s hands very hard. The girl was crying. I asked why she was being beaten and the reply was that she was late. The head master intervened and sent the line of children waiting to be beaten to their classrooms. I heard two days later that at a teachers’ meeting the Heads told the teachers not to hit children. Let us hope that is the end of beating at Mambo.

A huge factor in the poor results of education in rural areas of Tanzania and other sub Saharan countries is the absenteeism of teachers. It runs at about 45%. http://opionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/118675 The reasons for this are many. Sickness, they have to go so far for medical treatment; deaths in the extended family. In my second week there were virtually no teachers at school for three days. There was a death in the village and every teachers were absent all day paying respects to the deceased. I took the opportunity to visit another primary and secondary school at Chambogho a very nice motor bike ride away. Another reason is very low morale, teachers are poorly paid and have to travel 4 hours to receive their pay,

On a more positive note I was welcomed into every classroom, teachers responded really well to the new ideas. 16 teachers and 2 heads came to my teacher training seminar at the end of the second weeks and the following week 2 teachers had made their own teaching aids, 2 teachers brought in seeds and flowers for a science project and 2 teachers had started assessing students understanding by asking individuals instead of the constant chanting, repetition, copying from the board. The children loved the songs and games and learned them very quickly.

Scholarship Students

Mambo View Point has been sponsoring students and I helped Herman on this by meeting with this years’ scholarship students, their families and the Heads, we had to fill out lots of forms. Most of the scholarship students come to MVP every Sunday and Marion and I would encourage them to express opinions having watched excerpts from films.

Part Time Teaching Assistants

When you have a class of 100 it is a huge benefit to have a teaching assistant. There was funding for two assistants so I helped on discussions with all parties present of how this would work, setting a timetable and finally writing a contract . I am no lawyer and the questions and problems that arose before the deed was done was quite an interesting experience and took a long time. I then tried to monitor how the assistants were being used. There is work to be done here if anyone would like to come to this paradise and help out.

Reinforcement and Monitoring of Maxine Lemay and Joelle Lepage’s 2009 project MAMBO GAMES

I read their excellent report and it sounded like such a great project that I enquired if it was still up and running. Sadly, the volunteers who had been taught all the games had left the area and not much was happening. We invited children from Mambo to come to Friday Games at the football pitch and a lot of fun was had playing things like duck, duck goose, tag, dodge ball. I decided to invite the same teachers who came to the seminar to come to the play ground.

Food Preservation

On one of my wonderful guided walks I came across an unusual fruit which looked a bit like a green tomato. It was called tomasi so with the lovely cook, Saidi, we made a chutney. It was a learning curve on the sterilization of jars and we will never know if it worked as the 6 jars of chutney were finished within two days. We even sold some. The next project was jam. Plums and cape gooseberries were in season and they set nicely and again were very popular. Today, if I can ever get this finished we are going to make plum chutney. Marion hopes to find some ladies in Mambo who can be taught how to preserve fruit and vegetables and sell them to visitors or indeed anyone who likes good preserves. Yes, another project for Mambo View which would not cost much to set up. Always looking for donors or volunteers who could come out and do something like this.

What will I take away from here?

On my daily walk to school the echoing sounds of the little children calling out Jambo Mama Sally, the cow bells and the bleating of goats, the smells of the wat tree in blossom, that African smell of dried earth and dust, the sight of the woman carrying huge loads of wood on their heads and really small kids with full buckets of water lurching along the dusty roads, the amazing views where you really can see forever, the incredible friendliness of everyone including the lovely staff at Mambo View Eco Lodge. And the chameleons who kept us amused with their daily Tai Chee exercises.

School inventory

2012-02-11T00:37:00.000-08:00

At the time of writing, we (Jan & Sylvia) have already been in Tanzania five months. We have spent a long time at Mambo in the Western Usambara Mountains. Before that we were travelling for more than six months and this place just came at the right moment. At that time, we wanted to do some creative projects and heard about some possibilities at the Mambo Primary School. Therefore, we decided to visit the Mambo & Mambo “B” Primary Schools with nearly 1,700 children. We saw some challenges, like renovating and painting some of the walls of the school and we started fund-raising for this project via our travel blog (jscanary.blogspot.com).

It was a fantastic experience to work at this school, together with local people and 'fundis' who made walls really flat before we could work on it and make our own creations. We also worked together with Moddy, a local artist. He helped us a lot. Besides painting, he helped with translating and working with the children. We made a slide show about the project which you can see the result.

We still had some money left from the fund-raising, so we spoke with Herman and Marion about what else we could do. Two days later we visited another village, Tema. The school at this village was even worse than Mambo. For example, there where a couple of classrooms without any desks. The children just sat on the floor or even outside as in the case of the kindergarten. Overall, it was very dirty, many roofs were leaking, and the walls and floors were full of holes. It was very depressing to see this environment. At that time, we concluded that just making an other wall painting should be like a 'flag on a mud barge'.

In order to help us decide which project would be most beneficial to the school, Herman asked us to make an inventory of all primary schools from the Sunga ward (a sort or region). With the results, we and other volunteers can support specific needs of the various schools.

We made a list of all the schools of the ward, arranged the MamboViewPoint car and a guide who could help us with translating and visited the schools. Some days we even had two or three schools to visit. The Sunga Ward is in the mountains and the roads are not always in very good condition due to the rain. So some school visits were real adventures through very small, difficult, rocky, and muddy roads with a lot of potholes. But we managed.

Before we started our visit we made a sort of questionnaire for the schools and a so-called “walking list”. With the walking list, we went through all classrooms to check the status of the walls, the windows, the number of desks that are in a room etc. If possible, we asked questions, such as what is the most important thing (they need) in their school.

Here, we put a list of some of the most notable things of each school together with some pictures.

Remarkable and even shocking for us was that children sat on the floor in one classroom.
Toilets in bad stage.
Not enough classrooms
Not enough teachers
Not enough school books
Leaking roofs
Not enough desks

Also we saw a surprisingly good, new school. There were even two classrooms that were finished with roofs with a ceiling. The toilet building could be an example to the rest of the schools in the ward. We even saw three water basins for cleaning and gardening. In front of the new classrooms there were a couple of buckets filled with drinking water, which is special because we had never seen this before. At the moment, this school has two teachers for four hundred children. Of course they work in shifts, but they still have one hundred children to teach. A volunteer also teaches the kindergarten.. They use one of the unfinished classrooms. We met the teachers outside as there was still no teachers office.

Here the result of our work in a classroom from Mambo primary school.

After all these visits we concluded that there is very much to do. And most of these things should be done and paid for by the village and/or the government. We think it is to simple to give, for example 100 desks to one or two schools, however it would be better to set an example and inspire them. So we decided that painting is one of the best things that we could do as an “outsider”.

Therefore, we are very happy that we have already started to make a new wall painting (done by Moddy), on one of the walls of the Chambogho school.

In the end....

During these time at Mambo, we learned so much and loved our stay. We are now going back to Holland, to visit our family and friends. But we wish everybody here all the best.

Sylvia & Jan

Making Yoghurt and fresh cheese

2012-01-19T07:14:00.000-08:00

Are we aware of what a privileged life we have? Probably not as much as we might be. But let me give you an idea. Our workshop took place in Mambo a village situated at an altitude of 1900 meters in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, where there is no electricity, the road from the nearest town takes two hours of bone jarring four wheel driving (60Km), water trickles from communal pumps, and out of a population of 5000, there are 2000 primary aged children. Just as importantly for our aims, we learnt of no one in the village with more than one cow. In short desperately poor.

After the 10 day workshop, sponsored by Mambo Viewpoint Lodge (www.MamboViewPoint.org), there were seven wonderful women working together and independently to produce 5 varieties of ricotta cheese and a wonderful yoghurt. For the first time in their lives they learnt to calculate a viable selling price for their own work, how to organise themselves into a team, how to work efficiently, and how to manage accounts for all their money movements. They were truly AMAZING. And they called me 'Baba' which I learnt to like!! It means as you can imagine a number of things, but the one I choose is 'teacher'!!!

By working for approximately 2 hours each day, they now each earn, after subtracting the costs of making their product, about 1,600 Tanzanian shillings. This will make a SIGNIFICANT difference to how they can feed and educate their children. It also, very importantly, places value on women's work. And how much is that for us Westerners? Well a daily wage for unskilled labour in the Usambaras is Ts 3000, skilled labour Ts 5000. Ts 1,600 is worth approximately ONE dollar. Just one dollar makes a Hugh difference to a family's welfare. Incredible.

My conclusion is, we all need to know that even by giving very little, we can make a Hugh difference. The need is great, the moral imperative is even greater.
Africa can be wonderful, vibrant and somehow peaceful and happy whilst suffering terribly from scourges such as AIDS, corruption, appalling health problems, and of course grinding poverty. But people are resourceful, courageous, determined - once given the opportunity. It is possible to enjoy the beauty, but equally impossible to ignore what needs to be changed, what we can give. If you get the chance, do go. You will not regret it.
PS The 'swiss cheesmaker' is meant to read swiss cheese (PAUSE) maker! Yes, I am sensitive about my origins being misrepresented and do not disavow them!! I guess Australian swiss cheese maker was just too much for Herman the Dutch writer of the web site. By the way, have a look at www.MamboViewPoint.org particularly at the PROJECTS drop down menu. You might find something you can offer. Hope all is well. Best Wishes, Julian

MamboViewPoint eco lodge, a new approach for sustainable development and tourism

2012-01-17T00:11:00.000-08:00

MamboViewPoint is owned by social entrepreneurs Marion Neidt and Herman Erdtsieck. They travelled through many continents, cooperated with various development agencies and saw very many development projects. In the end they felt unhappy with the often very poor or even counterproductive results of many aid projects and all the money that went to expensive overhead, offices and 4x4 cars.

All previous experiences resulted in a plan for a new approach. The basic idea was to create a permanent socio-economic stable base in a poor area and to start regional development from there. In our vision development is not based on unconditional aid but should be achieved by empowering people, building capacities, giving them ideas and information, knowledge, expertise and support them in obtaining tools. As our current experience learns it sometimes only needs a little push to enable people to pull themselves out of poverty. There are some important features in our concept. First, development is not a one item issue like f.e. education because in the end everything is interlinked. For example, when children are educated but there is no work in the end, it is likely to lead only to depopulation of the area but no improvement. Second, development can best be based on practical experience people already have and try to improve quality of products and give it added value instead of selling raw materials. Third, there is always a reason why projects fail or fall apart. The fact that we wanted to have permanent base and become part of the village gives the opportunity for in-depth understanding of optional failures and make together with the population the right adjustments in time.

After a fact-finding mission early 2008 MamboViewPoint eco lodge was established in the Usambara Mountains in Tanzania. It is situated on a beautiful spot near Mambo, which is an area with many opportunities but the population has an average income below the poverty line.

For the hart of the project is chosen for a lodge because in Tanzania tourism is one of the main income sources. Moreover, for the project it is very important to have an inviting place for people from abroad who can bring knowledge and assistance.

MamboViewPoint is an example for sustainable and responsible tourism. Though the owners are from abroad, there is a strong connection with the local community. Employees, building materials and food are as much as possible from local origin.

Moreover the lodge offers a meeting place for people from all over the world including the local people where they can enjoy their holiday in a family atmosphere.

What makes MamboViewPoint special is the associated foundation which is in charge of the various projects that target various development issues. Because of the stable position of the lodge and the many volunteers and guests who contribute to the project, it is possible to spend 100% of the received aid money on the projects without overhead costs. This is an essential difference compared to what we see at other places where only for example 10% of the profits are spent on community projects. With our concept we are able to do far more.

The MamboViewPoint approach

In the first place the lodge is a steady centre for all the activities. This is not for a limited amount of time but without end. The fact that the owners of the lodge are living permanently in Mambo, created a strong bond already with the local inhabitants because the lodge and its owners are facing the same problems as they do. The cooperation of the village and the lodge creates a bigger potential to solve existing and upcoming problems.

In the second place, the lodge is built with local people. Over 650 women and 350 men worked in shifts for one and a half year. This made the lodge to a kind of product of the people around and gave them the first income and skills.

In the third place the lodge is not a goal in itself but is a vehicle to create development. Experience learned that it is important that the spill of the project is a lodge. It brings many people from all over the world who can contribute with their skills, funding. knowledge and relations. They see with their own eyes existing problems discuss about optional solutions, afterwards see the result of their contribution and stay updated regarding the impact. Nevertheless to actively contribute is not an obligation, only having a nice holiday is already supporting local development because their stay brings work, sales-opportunities and money for the region.

In the fourth place the projects and professionals for the projects are only for a small part financed by the lodge. What the lodge provides is ideas, contacts, the necessary infrastructure and (most important) an eye on the projects once the volunteers who helped to achieve certain goals are gone. We can, together with the people concerned, help to make the necessary adjustments that are needed if specific problems might occur. This ensures the feasibility and effectiveness of the initiatives undertaken.

In the fifth place, the focus is to create added value to the things which are already there. Like making cheese from milk, biogas from cow dung, juice from fruits that are already growing etc. All not in big projects but by encouraging people to start their own business.

In the sixth place MamboViewPoint is an eco lodge which means that the footprint which it is leaving behind is as small as possible by using as much as possible solar power, natural building materials, local produced food and most important, being close to the local people and taking care they are benefiting and not exploited.

About the MamboViewPoint approach and the aid industry

Since Tanzania belongs to the poorest countries in the world but the political and economical climate is positive, it is a beloved target for many aid organisations. This causes a main stream from aid funds and many projects concerning public matters which actually should be done by the government. Combined with the present corruption this is resulting in a huge spill of aid money and a not optimal governmental system with, especially on individual level, other targets than the development of the country.

All this resulted in an “aid industry” where even volunteers have to pay a lot of money f.e. to work in an orphanage. MamboViewPoint does not want to be a part of this aid industry but chose for the approach like it is explained before.

This makes it worthwhile to donate to the project since none or only a little money from donated amounts is lost and the results are very visible and projects keep being monitored. Many guests of MamboViewPoint realized this and are contributing to the projects.

About MamboViewPoint and the tourist industry.

A main part of the tourist in Tanzania are heading for the well known hotels and tour operators. Often those are owned by foreign companies which supply food and other needs and staff from far and even the profits go abroad again. A well known saying is “the only thing which is left for local people is the dust from the cars if tourist come or go”

MamboViewPoint is trying to optimize the profit of tourism for local benefit by involving as much as possible the local sources. Employing local staff, purchasing local products and food and being under the national tax system.

Read the whole story at www.MamboViewPoint.org/Downloads/MamboViewPoint_A_NewApproach.pdf

For detailed information about MamboViewPoint eco lodge:

www.MamboViewPoint.org

For detailed information about MamboSteunPunt foundation: