The Artist, The President and The Football Team
Trip Start
Jan 10, 2008
1
12
Trip End
Oct 2008
Iringa, Tanzania
Thursday, August 21, 2008
After returning to village from our holidays, Jacob and I had the task of carrying on with all of our usual work (teaching, running our information resource centres and giving advice), as well as planning and conducting a local sports league, arts competitions and festivals. It was good to get back though, the holidays, top-up training, then an extended stay due to illness made the break seem very long, so once I'd recovered it felt great to get stuck into the massive workload we had. Ukumbi looked a different place to the one we'd left though, the once green maize plants had now dried up completely and were ready for harvest, there was dust everywhere as the dirt paths had all hardened and dried too, the cold season had arrived, and strangely, so had hundreds of butterflies around the village!
First up was an arts competition in our primary school to find winners to go to a ward festival in a nearby village (3 hours by foot!). It's so difficult judging the primary school students, especially when three year groups are combined together and there can only be one winner each for drawing, singing, rap and traditional dance. We were supposed to go to the festival with twenty students, but ended up taking thirty-five because we couldn't bring ourselves to exclude the younger students!
So off we went one Wednesday, walking three hours over hills and through rivers to reach the village of Winome for our ward festival, where our students would compete with those from two other schools. It was a fantastic day, all our students did us proud, and we picked up the first prize in the drawing contest. This meant that our little artist, Faton Mlangwa would be going to Iringa town for the first time he could remember (he last went when he was a very small child) to compete against the winners from 12 other wards. On many occasions that day I felt myself go a little glassy-eyed as the kids showed their talents.
At the festival in Winome one of the guests was a man living with HIV, whose lump-in-throat inducing speech urged those that hadn't already, to go and test for the virus and to stop stigmatising those who are living with it. This had a huge impact on the audience, seeing a man that looked no different to themselves, living his life with hope when many of them held the view that the virus is a short-term death sentence. After the festival, Jacob and I invited him to come to speak to our secondary students and villagers, he agreed and we were given a date when he and others from his 'living with hope' group would come to Ukumbi.
It was difficult to get permission from the school for them to disrupt the school timetable by coming to speak, but we eventually got the required permission, and from the village too, so made all the preparations, posters around the village announcing the seminar/discussion, a special thank-you meal for the guests etc etc. So the day comes, they get late, we worry a little, but punctuality is highly unusual in Tanzania so we don't panic too much. Morning turns into afternoon, they miss their slot to speak at the school, but we still have hopes that they'll show up for the seminar with the villagers. Lunch gets cold, we finally get through to them on the phone, and discover that they're not coming at all, because they had a special guest themselves in their health centre without notice - the President of Tanzania! It's one of those moments here that you have to fight back the tears and just laugh instead and shout TIT! (This Is Tanzania) We've now had all manner of disruptions to our work; bee stings, chicken vaccinations, pregnancy tests, students being sent to clean the farms, and now the president himself!
Football in Tanzania is serious. Grown men suddenly turn into petulant children. Fans turn into soldiers. Referees wish the ground would swallow them up. It takes the smallest thing to spark a huge problem, so planning a league between the three teams in our ward is a delicate task. Sadly, the other volunteers in our ward were hugely biased towards their own teams so sought to bend the rules of the league and invent new ones at every opportunity. The first match fell apart before half time because a drunken goalkeeper was injured in a fair tackle, so the whole team walked off the pitch complaining about the safety of the match, then invented other problems: the referee had no red or yellow cards (but I've never seen them used in any village football) and that our team had teachers playing for it, which was within the rules. There were six matches in total, and only two went by without problems. We had considered scrapping the league altogether when a man from my village was stabbed at a game, but thankfully it wasn't an SPW league game. 99 problems later, my village of Ukumbi ended up top on points after the last game was played, so we won first prize of a set of football kits, and for days afterward I was treated like a hero in village as everyone was so happy our team won. The players were so excited they all went out for training the following day in their new jerseys!
This was the start of a great end to my time in village. Last Friday a group of young people from Dance 4 Life (another NGO affiliated with SPW) came to my village to have a mini-festival. They showed up with a truck, speakers and a mini-stage, so I called all of the students from primary and secondary school to the football pitch to come and watch/participate, over 1000 students in total. There should have been more, but most of the secondary school students had gone to the school farm to burn rubbish - because obviously that's more important than getting an education! Anyway, the idea of Dance 4 Life is to educate through dance and music, and emphasise that everyone is responsible for keeping themselves healthy and to make the right choices relating to sexual relationships. All the kids were really receptive and enjoyed themselves greatly. Definitely a highlight of all my time in village.
After the festival, I went straight to town with the Dance 4 Life truck to catch up with Jacob, who had left in the morning with Faton, our student artist, to compete in the regional competition and festival. At 16, Faton had only ever been to any town once, as a very small child, and he could remember nothing of that trip. I was as excited as he was to take him to see buildings more than one storey high, paved roads and sit-down toilets! He was competing against 11 other young artists from all over the region, and when the results were announced I literally jumped with joy to hear he'd taken first prize for his picture of a woman breast-feeding together with a heading saying that to know how to protect ourselves we must know how the virus is spread, and an explanation that HIV can be transmitted in breast milk. He was given various prizes, including drawing materials, so I hope he'll continue to draw and to improve, eventually making a career out of it. We proudly brought him back to village to tell all the school of what he had achieved in town, and already people in village are offering to pay him small sums to draw for them!
Our last stay in village was just a couple of days, to finish decorating the primary school sexual health resource centre, by making a 'promise wall', where each student in the SRH club would make a hand print on a piece of paper with his/her name on, then write a promise below and stick it on the wall (e.g I won't have any sexual relationships until I finish school / I won't give in to temptation / I'll always use a condom etc etc). They all had fun doing it and it'll remind them of their promise whenever they visit it.
On our last day in village, while packing up our things in the house, we had a surprise visit from the guys from the 'living with hope' group of people living with HIV and AIDS. Apparently they'd sent us a letter which we hadn't received, saying that they'd come that day because they couldn't make it the day the President went to visit them. So I dropped the packing (if you know me you know how much I hate packing anyway!) and went begging for permission at the school again for them to come to speak. Understandably the Headmaster was more weary this time, but since the guests had arrived already he gave in! We called all the students together and each one of the six guests spoke excellently, telling their stories and giving advice to their audience of very sexually active secondary school students. I'm so glad we made this happen before leaving, there's only so much you can teach in a classroom and for some of the students it took for them to see a man who'd been living with HIV for six years to understand the gravity of the HIV & AIDS pandemic. That afternoon I had some of the students come and tell me what an impact those guys had had on them, some students looking more quiet and sombre than usual, a little shaken.
So it is perhaps due to the recent successes in village and the happy tone on which we have left, that it wasn't too sad to leave. I found it difficult to say goodbye to three of my good friends there, James - a student, George - a shopkeeper and Tiki, a house boy, but apart from that I felt like I was ready and that it was a good time to leave my beloved village of Ukumbi.
I'm now twitchy with excitement about coming back, I'll be home on the 30th and hope to see you soon after that!
Love,
Dipak
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mzuka