Ups and Downs

July 28, 2013 There will be a couple of travel posts to follow soon that actually were in June.

I realize now that my lack of motivation to do another blog has been due to a serious slump in my life here. We have had to wait until a couple of weeks ago to have the funding for the project approved – through no fault of ours. We completed all the necessary documentation three months ago! But for whatever reason… TIA (this is Africa), though I really suspect the delay was the Swiss foundation – and they are supposed to work like clockwork, right?

Then when we first started up again I feared that we were going to have to battle against the need for fitting in with the timetable instead of doing a quality job. With great relief I can say that this is not so. Mnubi, our program manager is stellar. He not only has the skills to run the project but also people skills. He is approachable and listens and modifies to the needs of the team. My understanding goes out to him because he is caught between the funders demanding a sometimes unrealistic sticking to the time frame and the team who wants to do the best that we can. Often the timing is thrown off because of events beyond our control – such as not being able to give a workshop when it would be best for us because there is a mock exam for the standard 7 students and the teachers and Head teachers are not available.

Our funder’s representative will be here at the end of next week and I plan to talk to her about this matter. Last week I was ready to pack my bags. I had remained positive for 6 months, reveling in the thought of the work we could do then the sky fell in on me. I have long recognized that I am positive/patient/enthusiastic etc. until I’m not and then I am really not. And that is what happened.

Our six months here have been fraught. First losing Bairu, the person who instigated the project and did the background research for the proposal. Then two months when we were creating work for ourselves – work that will support us in our future endeavours. We all took holidays in June as there was nothing to do – school was out for vacation. That means teachers weren’t available.

That brings me to another frustration. In Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia and Malawi and I suspect the rest of sub-saharan Africa stands with they’re hand out. All of us have seen this – not just our team. They are so used to ‘muzungus’(westerners) paying for things that that is what they expect. There has been little need for the motivation to ask – ‘How can we do this for ourselves?’ Trillions of dollars of aid money have been poured into sub-saharan Africa with little result. Thankfully, our project is designed to address this. Only…the funding is coming from the west, the experts from the west but the teachers will not give of their own time to participate. This sticks in my craw! But I am willing to go along with it in the hopes that with success the teachers will be motivated to improve their teaching on their own time. I would have preferred that they gave something also so that they were more invested in the result.

Enough crabbing! Tomorrow we begin our first workshops to create the monitoring tools. I’ll report the results.