News From Tanzania

Last night I heard from my good buddy Kajuna who's another teacher at the school where I was teaching. I heard got some very good news from him and some very bad news.

The good news was that the results for the Form IV students were out and I could look them up online. I did, and I was very pleasantly surprised. The girls did extremely well on the tests and they're the best results the school has ever had. None of them failed their exams overall, and not very many failed math. This is very exciting. Most of the girls are going to be able to continue their education in advanced level. It's great to see the vast majority of the students succeeding. I'm extremely proud of them and how hard they worked and that it all paid off for them.

A little while later, while I was still pretty euphoric from the good news, I got the bad. I've mentioned before that largely because of the school being a boarding school in an isolated area I became extremely close with a lot of the students, and many of them began to feel like kid sisters to me. There was one in particular who would always make a point to say hello and talk and joke with me and came to me almost every day with math and physics problems she had done and asked me to grade them for her. She is an extremely bright and hard-working girl. Most of all, she was really good at figuring things out, which is so, so rare in a culture that discourages asking questions and too often emphasizes rote memorization in education. She wasn't the smartest kid I taught and she goofed off a bit too much, but there were very few kids I taught who I felt had as bright a future as she did. What I found out though, is that she's pregnant. In Tanzania the law says that girls are not allowed to attend school if they are pregnant or have kids, so she's been kicked out of school. She's only 15 and now her future has been completely derailed. I'm angry because she knew better, but also I feel awful that because of this one mistake she may have ruined her chances of ever getting a good education. It doesn't completely rule it out, because she will be able to learn on her own or get a tutor and sit for the exams, but now it's going to be much, much harder for her, especially with a kid to take care of. I know her family is well-off, so hopefully something can be worked out, but it breaks my heart. And of course, in a place with the HIV rate at almost 10%, pregnancy isn't close to the biggest thing to worry about from unprotected sex. I keep thinking about how she was so upset about me leaving Tanzania. She could be very stubborn and insisted that she wouldn't like her new math teacher just because he or she wouldn't be me. She was also one of several of the girls who wrote a note for me before I left. I just hope she can learn from this and think about the consequences of what she does. I think she can be a great mom, but she's just so young.

The job search for me continues. Hopefully I'll know about grad school soon and then I'll be able to go more decisively for either a long-term or temporary job.