73 : 1 Student Teacher Ratio!?!?

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Today we drove out to Magogoni Primary School, a public school built by Asante Sana for Education in 2013. The roads were unbelievably bad. As a matter of fact , I think that it was a trail for walking and NOT a road!There are 290 students from Pre k to standard 6. There are 4 teachers for all these students. Whately Elementary School in Massachusetts, USA, where I am a special education teacher, gave desks and a roof for teacher housing. The latrines are a smelly hole in the ground leading to a septic system below the hole. These are emptied by hand with men going in there with buckets. Now the teachers want their own latrine at the teacher house.

It was really interesting to see how they handle that number of children with 4 teachers. There were 6 teachers but one left for retirement and one died this year. They rotate the kids through and the group that is without a teacher just plays outside in the yard until it is their turn. Obviously, there is no supervision of the children of all ages playing outside. At this visit, a decision was made to fund two more classrooms. The community has been collecting cinder blocks towards this goal but the final push needs to come with more donations from Asante Sana for Education. It was exciting to be on site when a decision and commitment was made for new classrooms.

We had an interesting ride back. We stopped because I wanted to take a photo of some people working outside their home to husk dried corn. The corn went on a giant pile and the husks went to another pile for the livestock to eat. The ears of corn would next be put in a burlap bag and then shaken until the kernels come off. Next they grind the kernels to make corn flour used for making ugali.

Next we stopped at a school built by a woman from New Jersey named Terry Place. She lives here now with her Tanzanian husband and 2 children. She has 10 orphans that board there in a beautiful dormitory. The classrooms looked nice and they have a beautiful garden where they grow their own vegetables and a peaceful looking playground with lots of climbing apparatus. Next to the playground they have 23 cows. Besides the usual uses of milk and meat, the cow manure is used to make biogas and is used to run the stoves and oven for the school. After this, we hurried off to our wonderful Tinga Tinga painting lessons.