I love visiting the Voice School! Based in a small town called Usa River in Arusha district, it is an independent boarding school that was set up by Daniel Mpanduzi and has at its heart a focus of ensuring that girls have equal access to education. In Tanzania this hasn’t always been the case. Indeed Daniel, who has nine sisters and three brothers, was inspired to set up the school when he realised at a young age that none of his older sisters had gone to school because, according to his dad, ‘girls don’t do that sort of thing’. Sadly it seems that gender equality still isn’t achieved at secondary level, and so it still takes schools like the Voice to proactively enrol more girls than boys, to ensure that the balance is shifting towards gender equality.
My visit here this week has included a number of different foci. I’ve had the joy of delivering 360Life training to the teaching staff at the school, which included some interesting discussions about the mental health challenges that they are increasingly seeing amongst young people, particularly when their students return from school holidays.
I’ve also delivered training of some parts of the 360Life materials to the students, focussing on the areas that help them become better learners, and understand themselves better as unique and wonderful individuals. In true teenage style, there were a range of attitudes to being in a classroom for two x 80-minute lessons (the chunks of time that I was asked to fill), but overall the sessions went well and there were some very good questions at the end.
One of the other foci has been doing a mid-funding monitoring and evaluation session for a project that is going on here as a result of a grant obtained by CRED Foundation from the Guernsey Overseas Aid and Development Commission (credit where credit is due!). The funds are enabling the school to convert their kitchen from wood fuelled to biogas, and it was great to see just how far the project has progressed, despite El Nino rains, and carrying the work out whilst students are in school and requiring meals every day! Once the schools break in a couple of weeks, the project will pick up steam and be finished in the holidays – providing El Nino goes away.
I’ve also delivered training to staff at a community-based organisation here which provides vocational training and empowerment to young people, including single and married mums, and a range of other programmes.
And I’ve attended the form 4 leavers assembly / graduation ceremony which was a wonderful honour and experience. The whole school was cleaned from top to bottom by the students on the preceding day, the speaker’s platform (complete with canopy to keep the sun off) was built by some of the lads, and the gazebos for all the guests were beautifully decorated. Thankfully the rain stayed off, and the ceremony was a beautifully memorable occasion for the students and their parents. Such a sense of celebrating every student for who they are and what they have achieved, and there were some beautiful and tear-jerking songs by the children of the local ‘Pathfinders’ group that is run in part by F4 students from The Voice, and so this occasion was them singing goodbye to some of their friends who have risen up through the ranks. It was a privilege to be included as a speaker at the ceremony, and to be part of this special day.
Still to come is some prison chaplain training, but that’s nothing to do with The Voice, so I’ll leave that for another day. For now – big thanks to Daniel and Pendo Mpanduzi (my womdeful friends and hosts), to Joseph Mwemba (head teacher), and to all the staff and students at The Voice for giving me such a wonderful week so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment