Longido Primary School - Longido

Emily Reid October 2008 - March 2009

Yesterday it rained and rained and I think it is a measure of how long I have been here that I stood on the porch in wonder and excitement, welcoming the much needed downpour. And today at school some of the teachers say to me that I must feel at home in the cold (it was slightly misty and cloudy). I concur politely, although in reality firstly, it is not very cold and secondly, I feel very at home here already. Admittedly I felt apprehensive about returning to Longido for the start of the new academic year after a fantastic six week break spent travelling. But when Philippa and I got off in Longido (very much the worse for wear as a result of dusty and lengthy journey along a diversion from the main road as a result of road widening) someone ran up to me straight away to greet me with 'Teacher, teacher' and from then onwards, as we lumber back up the very sandy, dusty hill, children call ‘Philippa’ and 'Emile' (as they can't say my name very well) and run to hold my hand. Despite the fact that Philippa has gone home now, some children are still shouting Philippa, apparently thinking it must be a generic term for a mzungu.

Now, after a couple of weeks, it feels very good to be in Longido again: I was welcomed back to school with beaming smiles from the children, along with the inevitable shouts of ‘Emile’. The new standard four burst into song as I come into the classroom with one of the songs I taught them last year and grin so hard that it looks like their faces will break. It is good to see the teachers as well and very satisfying when one of the teachers says that she is learning so much from me about helping the children to enjoy the lessons and using pictures and props, rather than making them copy from the board. It may not sound like much, but in an educational system dominated by chalk and talk, I feel this is some achievement. With seventy to eighty children in a class it is still impossible to reach all the children and some of them are drowning silently at the back; generally it seems that as long as these stragglers sit quietly, they are left to flounder. This is a particular problem in Longido because it is a Masai village with a large number of the children attempting to learn English as a third language.. In an effort to help a bit I have set up an extra class to help some of the weaker students in standard four at lunch time and although I’m not sure how much learning is going on, those children are relishing the attention, which in a class of so many, they are routinely deprived of.

Thanks to donations from Phillipa’s and my friends and family, we raised enough money towards paint for the dormitories we painted before Christmas, that we also had enough money to replace some of the urine soaked, insect infected mattresses as well. The whole story of purchasing them was a bit of an adventure as we found that the price was cheaper in Namanga (on the Kenyan border) than in Arusha. So armed with the deputy head of the school, we set out last Wednesday to Namanga, which is only about half an hour away from Longido. It was only once there that we realized that the cheapest mattresses we had been told about were over the border in Kenya and that things were not quite as simple as we had anticipated. Any driver we asked said that we needed a document to say that we had paid the correct tax and that we had acquired them legally. Anyway the deputy head went off to speak to customs (for about two hours) while we waited. (As an aside, Philippa mentioned later how impressed she was that I, Emily the rude and impatient, waited so patiently for Mr Mangara to come back. I don’t think I have ever been the most patient person but in the light of this am hopeful that I can go back home a new, patient me.) So two hours later Mr Mangara came back with bad news: He said we were not able to take anything like the number of mattresses we wanted without letters from the district education officer to declare that the mattresses were for a school and various other things we didn't have. At this stage we were very depressed and felt that we had nothing to loose by going and speaking to the customs officials ourselves.

The next hour or two was spent in customs learning about the law on importing goods between Kenya and Tanzania. The official basically said that there was nothing he could do and that we would either have to pay a huge amount of tax or get a letter from the DEO, which would then have to be sent to Dar and could take up to three months. But, just as we had given up hope, he pulled some magnanimity out from somewhere and decided there was something he could do after all: He did declare the mattresses we were bringing in but reduced their value and quantity so that the tax we had to pay was much more reasonable. And so, finally, we crossed the border again with a dala-dala (small, battered mini bus) and purchased forty mattresses (we would only have been able to buy thirty in Arusha because they were so much more expensive). Hurray! Then came the most challenging part of the day, which was squeezing 40 mattresses into a dala-dala. Eventually we managed though and I journeyed back to Longido sandwiched securely in the midst of our new, brightly coloured mattresses but feeling on top of the world. This feeling was reinforced when we arrived at school with the mattresses to a swarm of children who eagerly carried them inside with a chorus of ‘thank you, thank you’. The combination of the paint and the new mattresses has utterly transformed those dormitories; they look like normal children's rooms now and the little people do seem very happy with them, not least, I hope, because they feel valued. On behalf of all those children I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who donated the money which enabled us to achieve this.

I have only two months left in Longido now and time has started to go a little too quickly; I feel like I’m on a treadmill but not in control of the speed and going much faster than I would like to. As you can probably tell, I’m very much looking forward to the rest of me time here; it’s been great.