Those who have visited us here will also be surprised. The children in our schools smile so easily. There is a general joyousness about them but life for children here is not so easy. Life is hard and it carries over into everyone’s life.

I am not sure of the conclusions reached by the people interviewed by Bernard James. Poverty is not the overall cause of all ills, even the circumstances that arise from poverty… but it is a big worry for us especially when we see it in the schools where almost all teachers are convinced of the need for corporal punishment.

This is a subject I would very much like to discuss with anyone who cares to add a comment to this blog. Is all corporal punishment bad in all circumstances? What actually constitutes brutality? Why are African children in general much more carefree than those in the West?  Does sparing the rod indeed spoil the child? Should unacceptable behavior be permitted? How can it be corrected in a culture far different from the introspective culture of the West that has been studied so well?

I would so much like to know!

Tanzania: Why This Brutality Against Children?

Extracted from: The Citizen (Dar es Salaam)

by Bernard James
23 May 2010

With mounting cases of parents around the country committing horrendous acts of cruelty against their own children, there is grave concern among psychologists, the authorities, including police and administration officials, and the society, at large.

In the recent past, there have been chilling reports of parents hacking children to death, mothers burning their own offspring’s hands to punish them for theft and not long ago, the heart-rending story of a father who colluded with the perpetrators of the witchcraft fuelled albino killings in the Lake Region to have his own son slaughtered so he could earn some blood money.

With this grim picture captured by the media, the survival of the Tanzanian child is, indeed, at stake! And experts are warning that with the biting widespread poverty, especially in the rural areas, rapid breakdown of the family unit and the erosion of traditional social values and morals, the country faces a tough test: securing its own future by ensuring the protection and wellbeing of its children.

The high rate of cases of gross abuse of the rights of the children has human rights campaigners and psychologists warning that the trend does not augur well for the country.

The delay in enacting a special children’s law has not helped matters, either. Unicef is now calling for the immediate operationalisation of the Law of the Child Act, 2009, which was passed by Parliament last November, to enhance their protection.

“Significant investment by the government and development partners will be needed to ensure that these laws are applied appropriately and fulfill their promise to protect Tanzanian children,” says Mr Andrew Brooks, the chief of child protection, Unicef Tanzania.

A lecturer at the Institute of Social Work (ISW) in Dar es Salaam, Mr Andrew Mchomvu, says that just like the notorious albino killings, the rising cases of child abuse, including murder by their own parents, is an indication of the strains on the existing social order that calls for immediate intervention.

“There is what I can describe as unbecoming social phenomena, with foster and biological parents torturing or beating their children to death or subjecting them to extreme brutality leading to permanent disability,” says Mr Mchomvu, who spoke extensively to the Sunday Citizen in an interview on the subject he has studied at length.

The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, he says, should revisit family policies and address legal loopholes to curb the injustices.

An Assistant Commissioner for Social Welfare (family, child welfare & childhood development) in the ministry, Ms Jeanne Ndyetabula, and the Legal Officer, Mr Boniface Mwabukusi, while admitting that the widespread abuse of children is of concern, are optimistic that the new law will help solve the problem.

A lawyer with the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC), Ms Letitia Petro, says that up to a million children are “most vulnerable.” She says reports of child abuse across the country since January are alarming.

“We need a comprehensive strategy for the rights and legal protection of children,” she says, adding that the 2009 LHRC Human Rights Report released last month placed abuse of the rights of the child above all other kinds of violations.

Some of the cases that have recently stunned the country include the Moshi incident in which a woman suspected to be on unsound mind allegedly hacked her three children to death. Another two children were beaten to death by their parents, one for eating food that had been kept, and the other for cooking seeds set aside for planting. A teenage boy is admitted to Muhimbili National Hospital after his father speared him for coming home late and daring ask for food.

Says Mr Mchomvu: “Families, especially in the rural areas, are mired in untold hardships. Extremely depressed parents are venting their frustrations on innocent children. While national wealth is shown as growing, earnings by individuals have dwindled.”

He cites food price increases and high taxation as pushing many against the wall and as they fight for survival, they end up abusing their children.

Five years ago, the price of sugar ranged between Sh400 (Tanzanian Shillings) and Sh600 per kilogramme. Today, it goes for between Sh1,600-Sh2,000. The price of beans, a common feature on the menu for many, has shot up from Sh400 to Sh1,000-Sh1,600. (1 US$ = Sh1400 May 2010)

When the Kikwete administration came to power in 2005, a packet of maize flour cost Sh300. This has risen to between Sh1,000-Sh1,200, a nearly 400 per cent increase. A kilo of price costs between Sh1,300 and Sh1,600, from Sh500 less than five years ago. A kilo of meat cost Sh1,200 then and between Sh4,500 and Sh5,000 today. The price of a bucketful of water has increased 20 fold.

“People survive on one meal a day or skip meals altogether. In such circumstances many parents are driven to self destruction to run away from the reality that they can’t put food on the table for their own,” says Mr Mchomvu.

“As a psychologist, I’m worried that the brutality will continue unless a system, which ensures equity and caring for the poor, is enforced instead of trying to appease sufferers with mere words.”

The LHRC also sees a link between poverty and the rising parental brutality. “Children have become victims of hardships facing their breadwinners,” lawyer Petro says.

Mr Mchomvu says that even in Dar es Salaam, which has better opportunities to eke out a living, research conducted in 2007 among 100 single mothers in Kinondoni District revealed that 65 per cent of them wished they had not given birth at all.

Titled, ‘Psychological Torture and Its Influence in Personality Growth’, the study found out that the women considered bringing up children tiresome and cumbersome. “They were doing it because they did not have an alternative,” says the researcher.

Fifteen per cent of the interviewees aged 20 to the mid 30s, confessed to locking up their children as they went out to look for means of survival. Mr Mchomvu says there is a high rate of abortion in that group.

Foster parenting is yet another cause of child abuse. Studies in Ngara, Kigoma, and Biharamulo between 1996 and 2007 confirmed that up to 75 per cent of foster parents do not offer a guarantee of love and continuous growth, development or safety for orphans and destitute.

Most of the children are overworked, ridiculed, deprived of food, caned and tortured emotionally. Those who can’t stand the mistreatment run away into the streets.

Tanzanian Primary Schools teach in Kiswahili but there is a desperate need for teachers of English as a Second Language and we have many vacancies in village schools in safe and beautiful locations.

Secondary Schools Teach in English and the whole nation has a serious shortage of teachers in all subjects, particularly Maths, all the sciences and English.

Music and sports instructors are needed at all schools for training both the teachers and students.

We have a need for school development officers who can travel around the schools with our local workers to raise the standard of teaching and school administration.

All the villages where we work need assistance in crop development and discovering new and appropriate plant types, especially trees. All farms would benefit from some fruit trees and many areas would gain greater income by replacing at least some of the subsistence maize crop with consumable and marketable fruits.

School building construction is constant and our local tradesmen benefit from supervision by experienced volunteer builders and tradesmen. In all villages bricklaying methods can be much improved and training by an experienced bricklayer is of great benefit. We are always experimenting with new ideas and are open to learn more. If you have expertise to share with us please let us know.

Human rights are of particular concern for us, particularly the empowerment of women, children and the villagers in relation to the government. This however is a particularly sensitive area where aggressive advocacy is of little benefit. This work calls for experience, patience and a gentle soul.

Volunteers need to be self supporting and will be housed in village accommodation which we have prepared to make as comfortable as possible. We charge no fees for volunteers and assist in every way we can, but volunteers should be experienced in the task applied for; of exceptionally high conduct and prepared to throw themselves into the work.

The minimum period of service for a volunteer is three months. Six months or one year is preferred. Even three months is two short for cultural adjustment and to learn African ways. Volunteering with the Earth Assistance Foundation is not a holiday. It is an opportunity to experience in the most profound way a vastly different way of life and to make a lasting contribution of great benefit to those most in need.

Please pass this blog on to anyone you may know who could be interested and ask them to check out our web site and contact us.

Hysteria in Tanzanian Schools

Mass fainting in Tanzanian exam

But pond water is completely undrinkable owing to its very high content of mineral salts. Cattle can drink it only after heavy rains. At other times it is toxic.

Water was available to the school from a pipe over two kilometres away or from a river five kilometres from the school. The water from the pipe is erratic and flows only one day per week in the dry season.

Our first attempt to provide water to the school was to connect the pipe to the school and store water in drums but then the water dried up completely as villagers made illegal connections to the line.

We were then left with two alternatives. To dig a well for the provision of water for washing and the gardens and to build a water tank for the collection of rain water.

Fig 1. The Well

At one stage the villagers had dug a pit that was intended for use as a pit toilet for teachers but the toilet had never been constructed. As we were constructing another toilet for teachers near a new teacher’s house we decided to dig further until we found permanent water. We dug down (by hand through soft rock) until we reached a depth of 20 meters and found a good flow of water. The water is salty and no doubt contains some pathogens but it is adequate for washing and the gardens.

We capped the well with concrete and a lockable iron hatch so that children would not fall in. The well is now in daily use and saves hundreds of hours and the exhaustion of children carrying water from far away.

But drinking water was still necessary and for a school that will has 300 students and will soon have 500 we needed a lot of it.

Figure 2 Mbaaseny before we started work. The bank in front of the roofed building was eroding and it was there we built the tank.

When it rains at Mbaaseny it is in torrents and there is the potential to capture a lot of water from the school roofs. When the foundations for the school were originally set they were laid in a slope that was collapsing and there was danger of the school settling and the walls cracking or at worst, collapsing.

The earth bank needed substantial reinforcing so we decided to combine this work with a huge water tank. We built a solid concrete block wall along the slope of the bank and continued it out and around until we had constructed a tank that is roughly kidney shaped. It will hold over 150,000 litres.

Figure 3 The water tank under construction

Then the recent credit crisis hit and our funds dried up before we could cap the tank and install the guttering and plumbing. As the rainy season drew near we were very concerned that we could not collect water for the following dry season. Then two of our volunteers came to our aid and we were able to complete the tank before the end of the rainy season.

During all this work we have had the usual problems of stolen materials. Avaricious tradesmen that need constant supervision to ensure engineering standards and villagers who do not show up to help with the work. With a water tank this size you cannot make any mistakes. A broken wall could be a disaster. To say this was an easy project would be a fantastic prevarication.

Figure 4 Installing the guttering

But now Mbaaseny Primary School will never be short of water unless the teachers start selling water from the locked tap to the villagers which is a common occurrence. We have no way to supervise this unless we place a volunteer permanently in the school. Even then it has occurred late at night.

The real value of this project is to provide water to the children but importantly it demonstrates how water can be collected from school roofs.

It is a surprise to many that the simple and inexpensive method of collecting water from roofs is rarely seen in Tanzania. Less than one roof in 10,000 will collect water. instead women and children will walk long distances to get inferior water or buy it from merchants who sell it from the backs of overloaded donkeys.

Figure 5 The tank prior to completion. A wall has been built around the top edge to prevent children falling. The tank has also been rendered.

This is technology transfer and village development in action. We are now to see if villagers will take to the idea which is easy for them to implement or if the women and children will still be sent on the laborious and life shortening task of collecting water.

Overlooking (underlooking?) Mt Kilimanjaro is one of the most spectacular school dunnies (pit toilets) ever constructed in Tanzania.

Chick Sale’s specialist would have been very impressed that this is a 17 holer with a long urinal. Not a bad size for a village school. A little too big for the 240 students there now but necessary for the more than 1000 that will be there when all the classrooms are complete. The size was set by the education authorities with the future in mind.

Invariably the design of village school pit toilets leaves much to be desired. Apart from the rough shod and incomplete construction they are rarely hygienic and the fragrance is somewhat less than desirable.

This project attempts to correct these problems and provide a template for construction at other schools. While introducing new design criteria the concept has been to keep costs down to those affordable by villagers and to provide methods of construction that are easily understood.

The most innovative aspect of the design is the Thin Shell Concrete (TSC) hat roofs with a hypar geometric shape. These have not been constructed in Tanzania before and it is hoped the method will replace galvanized iron which lasts no more thaqn 10 years in this climate. It  is hot and expensive as it is imported. The basic materials of the TSC roofs, cement, paint, cloth,wire and wood are all available and manufactured in Tanzania.

Work starts on the hypar roof by constructing a wooden frame on the ground. Over this is stretched any cheap cloth tacked down with a staple gun. This is followed by a layer of chicken wire. The structure is then painted with a mix of cement, acrylic paint and a little sand. After two coats of this the roof is ready to be lifted into place. Once in place thicker layers of the cement/sand/acrylic are poured and brushed over the roof to form a layer about one centimeter thick. That’s all there is to it.

This roof will be in two sections or hats. Each hat has a skylight made from translucent corrugated plastic. Very inexpensive and easy to install.

The full size of the roof is 5×10 meters. That is a lot of space for water catchment and availability of water is a major problemn in Kirenga where presently we are bringing water by donkey from over five kilometers away. This buliding will feature guttering made from the same local bricks as the building and harvested rainwater will be led into a large water tank incorporated into the building also made of the same bricks.

The existing toilet which is largely being rebuilt had a four inch pipe to serve as a vent but this was very far from adequate. The reconstructed toilet has a 34 centimeter square (inside) flue either side of the building. This will set up a draft through the pit to reduce odor and encourage rapid drying of the waste.

Two cubicles have been separated for the teachers. For visiting donors and volunteers there is even a sitting toilet at one end of the building. Chick Sale’s Specialist was very proud of his innovation of square holes with sharp edges in the sitting toilet. This, he discovered, very much reduced the time that employees relaxed in the toilet and industrial productivity increased. The dunny at Kirenga however is designed for comfort and visitors are welcome at any time.

The bricks for the building have been made and supplied by the Kirenga villagers who have also helped with a lot of the labor. Funding for the rest of the work has come from the Nuba Water Project and The Earth Assistance Foundation.

Today I was travelling with Tim Carr from the US who has come to help with a new technique of roof construction we headed out to the Eastern schools to start work. First we went to Mikuuni Primary School where we are about to restore two classrooms build a veranda and install a rain water harvesting system with a 40,000 litre water tank. If funds are available we will be completing a teachers house which will be used by volunteers, trainers and guests. As well as this there is still a fair bit of landscaping work and tree planting.

We were met by Marcelina Mrukwanba the head teacher who was very happy to see us as we had just succeeded in getting one of her teachers transferred . He had been disrupting the function of the school for more than two years and now it seems that peace is being restored. While the builder was working out the specifications of his work we sat and talked with the teachers and the village leaders. I explained that we were taking a new approach to the adopted schools which required us to chair the school board and take a much more active roll in school administration. I was surprised that everyone welcomed the idea and in fact were enthusiastic about it. I had expected some worries about loosing control but if there were any they were not apparent.

There had been a lot of political problems in this school. Where most schools serve only one village this school serves two and there is often conflict between them. It is often hard to get the villagers to help with the work in the schools as they don’t want to work together and are jealous that they may do more work than the rival village. For months I had been explaining that this was not a village matter it was a school matter and they should put aside their differences for the benefit of their children.

This seems to have worked and there has been assistance with the recent landscaping work and with the continued digging of the drain to carry away flood water. The drain is a village job and I have been on their back for 9 months to finish it. This time I said there was no way we would start on the current work until the drain was finished and if there were further delays I’d take the funding elsewhere..

This put the wind up them as I had just done that with the Mareu Health Centre nearby that had been presenting a lot of problems. They gave the usual excuses but I said I had been hearing them for nine months and that was long enough. Now I think they will get the job done.

It is not always that we leave a school with a positive attitude but today this was the case with Mikuuni. It feels good to be making progress.

1. We will trial the new thin shell concrete roofing system
2. We will construct a low cost rain water harvesting system.
3. The building will incorporate a sitting toilet for volunteers and overseas guests
4. The toilet will incorporate a much improved ventilation system.

It might seem strange to get excited about constructing an oversize outback dunny but this project incorporates a lot of new ideas that will be widely useful for village houses and classrooms. As well as building the toilet we are going to build a small gazebo with a domed roof to test the thin shell concrete in a domed shape.. The only use of this building is to provide a nice little place for the kids to sit and chat but it will be a prototype for a whole range of domed houses. Round houses are traditional in Africa and by building in this way we can fit the houses to the culture. The cost estimates for this system indicate that the houses will be much cheaper even than the low cost houses built in villages now.

With the last period of work our arrangement was for the village to pay for some of the tradesmen’s costs with funds provided by the District |Education office. We paid for all materials and some of the wages. The village had held back some of the money due to the tradesmen as the work was not up to the standard we require. It was up to us to come and see how the tradesmen had finished the work and to see if we were satisfied.

We most certainly were not. The work was even sloppier than before and it was clear that we would have to employ our own tradesman to finish the work properly. But I could not ask that the tradesmen do the work again as the teachers and villagers themselves had allowed the school to degenerate into a very untidy and dirty condition. It was clear that no effort had been spent on cleaning the school except for sweeping the floors.

As the teachers and school leaders were all assembled I took the opportunity to give them another good talking to. I explained that our job was not to come and spend a lot of money constructing their school and that our main purpose was to provide a good education for the children in a wholesome environment. What we are looking at now certainly isn’t. If we construct a quality school we expect to see it well maintained and the responsibility for that falls on both the teachers and the villagers who own the school.

I then explained our new policy of having our schools development officer chair the school board. Again to my surprise this was well received and there will soon be a village meeting to respond to our letter concerning future development of the school . The village will also donate to us a piece of land to construct a volunteer house using the low cost techniques we are currently developing at the school.

We then went off to start work on the toilet block. After a brief meeting to finalise the design we got into it in the normal way for simple school buildings. With nothing but the roughest sketch done on the spot we marked out the foundations to be dug by the villagers over the weekend. One of the beauties of working in rural Africa is the total lack of government supervision. You just figure out what you want to do and do it. Just to protect ourselves we get a government engineer to approve our work but we have never had our ideas refused.

It was all a very friendly and profitable day with problems resolved and a substantial new beginning..

This has not fully sank in at Mbaaseny and work that should have been done by the village and tradesmen has not been done. We have provided all the materials and they are sitting there in the school but I’m very glad to report that none have been stolen.

We are in a difficult position at this school as funding were expecting for this year will not be forthcoming and we are struggling to find some to keep the development program going. The school is still short of classrooms and presently two classes have to share one classroom. This would not be a problem in Australia where country teachers are familiar with and trained to handle multiple grades in one class but Tanzanian teachers receive no such training and class sizes are huge. Even if teachers are trained the class sizes make efficient teaching almost impossible.

I want to be able to say that they should finish what they agreed before we start again but I can’t as I am unsure when we can. I don’t have a bargaining chip.

Despite the fact that the tradesman had been paid for work not yet done he had the temerity to come and ask for more funds. I not so politely refused. Had he been an Australian he would have been answered much more thoroughly.

There had been some effort to keep the gardens in order and cut the grass and the teachers had kept the school looking clean. This school has a great headmaster and a good staff but the headmaster is from a different tribe and the Meru people of Mbaaseny are notoriously insular and resentful of other tribes. This is a very common problem and one which is very difficult to resolve. Cooperation between the head teacher and the village is necessary to make the school work..

We went to look at the piece of land where we intend to build the volunteer house. Again this building is designed as an example of low cost construction appropriate to an African village.

We need the house to be constructed before we can be considered a resident of the village and so chair the school board.

There are a lot of uncertainties at this school which is a shame because it is the one we have made most progress with. Certainly we will be working very hard to bring this school up to the standard we would like but presently politics and lack of funds is a serious obstacle.