Wednesday May 18 KidzCare

Today we went to KidzCare orphanage, which is situated just outside of Dar es Salaam at Kerege Farms. Mary, the lady that owns the orphanage is very inspiring and makes me want to do the same some day. She wants to keep the number of kids under twenty so it remains a home and lets the kids stay until they are ready to leave, even it isn’t until they are 25 years old. There’s a main house where they live and then there is also a small primary school just a minute away. For the morning we worked with the primary classes, there were two of them and then in the afternoon when the older kids got home from school we played with them. The primary school was interesting because the teachers didn’t have much of a lesson plan, they were teaching the kids the English alphabet and numbers. There was a sheet in the classroom with the alphabet on it and pictures of things that start with the letter of each letter in the alphabet, for example A is for apple. We asked the teacher if the kids knew the words that go with each letter and she responded ‘no’, so we tried to teach the kids what each word was, but it was very hard for them to grasp. I was surprised that they had not learned these words yet considering there was only that and one other learning sheet in the classroom. The room was bare except for a chalk board and one desk up front that the teacher uses. All the kids just sat on the floor. We also taught them a few songs in English and then both classrooms went outside to play. It is sad to read in a newspaper that many of the children in schools in Tanzania have only one meal a day and the kids are often going home to teach their parents what they have learned, including how to speak English and how to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS. According to the Tanzania education network, the enrolment rate for primary aged children is around 77% with only 20% completing their primary education (stat is from 2009, so it may be higher now?). This may be due to many factors, but a likely reason for lack of completion is the need to help their parents pay rent and food costs, therefore they must drop out of school to get jobs. Although many public schools no longer require tuition, parents are expected to pay for additional costs such as uniforms, guards, Aids foundations, and other costs. Some families are just not able to afford to send their children to school. Many of the children that do go to school must walk many miles, sometimes 10 miles, just to get to school. This was evident when we had to wait about an hour for the kids from KidzCare to get home from school as well as finding a primary school student on the road on our way to Kerege Farms in the morning, whom we picked up and dropped off at her school. She was only six years old and was walking in the opposite direction because she got lost and was all alone. It is especially difficult for girls to get and remain in quality education because they must walk to school and are prone to rapists. This is apparently very common in Tanzania and the law here is that if a girl becomes pregnant, she is kicked out of school and cannot return later. I was also shocked to notice that the bathrooms at the primary school were outside without any doors, they faced the main play/learning area and were for both boys and girls. It’s a good thing I didn’t have to use the washroom while I was there! Another common reason for low school completion rates is that many children from the Masai tribe, especially girls, are forbidden to go to school by their fathers. The Masai tribe is very patriarchal and therefore the father has all the power in deciding what his family is and isn’t allowed to do. Only recently have some Masai’s started to let their children to go primary school. There are a lot of Masai’s in Tanzania, including two that sit outside our house at night with sticks as guards. I will take a picture of them one of these days to show!

After working with the primary school kids went went over to hang out with the older kids. We had a lot of fun playing hopscotch, soccer, basketball, drawing and singing. We all fell in love with the kids and want to go back as soon as possible. After we left my heart broke because we found out that of the fifteen kids at the orphanage, six of them are HIV+ and this really put things into perspective for me and really was aware just how big of a problem it is here. I know that I definitely want to research and help kids/adults in Africa with HIV/AIDS because it is such a huge problem.