Day 10 Mambo!
As we near the end of the week, the list of homestay highlights continues to grow. Our group sessions have shifted from a time to share our challenges to a time to share our joys. This morning we arrived at school to find a series of games set out for us. After a rowdy game of Charades, we traversed through an obstacle course blindfolded, led by the Banjika students. The added challenge was that we all had to direct our partners in Swahili, meaning we learned new words like "forward", "left", and "up". Carlos, our trip leader, then led a learning session centered around the idea of leadership. We divided ourselves into four categories based on our leadership style: the conceptualizers (reliant on logic), idealists (reliant on spirituality), traditionalists (reliant on hardwork), and experiencers (reliant on spontaneity).
The rest of the day was equally exciting. We had a Kiswahili lesson taught by Sirili, a Banjika student, and we practiced phrases such as "good morning", (habari za asubuhi) and words such "school" (shule). Afterwards, all 30 of us fit in a 20 person bus and visited a local primary school. At the school we witnessed the benefits of learning with iPads and visited the 7th grade class. We saw some more variety of the education here in Tanzania. Here at Banjika, we are fortunate enough to see bright class rooms with good student to teacher ratios. At the primary school, we saw 70 kids squeezed into a small dark classroom. It reminded us of how lucky we are at Menlo to have such a large staff and fantastic facilities. It has also inspired some Menlo kids to plan to take action back at home after viewing this blatant inequality in education.
Asante,
Maddie and Allie
