Prologue

Mambo! (Swahili slang for hello and not just the name of a now semi-insolvent Australian surf-wear brand)

Before I begin, I’d just to thank my legion of fans, whose only comments on my previous note were to to remark upon the spelling and grammatical errors. I know — it’s a real shock they let me finish high school.

Swings and roundabouts

I’m going to frame my discussion about teaching at the School of St Judes in the context of luck. People avoid making eye contact with black cats, failing to respond to chain letters, placing chopsticks upright in a bowl of food or failing to employ feng shui consultants when purchasing property — all in efforts to avoid bad luck. Clearly, it hasn’t escaped the notice of many cultures and Shakespearean characters that fortune is a fickle mistress.

In my deeper moments on this trip (of which there have been a lot — I’ll come back to Australia wearing tied-died hemp clothing demanding to be called Calypso) it has occurred to me that luck is an incredibly relative concept.

In the West, we have wins and losses. You grow up in a nice house with a swimming pool — win. You experience a “Sliding Doors” moment where the love of your life misses your train by a millisecond — loss. You get a free hash-brown on the McDonalds Scratch-n’-Win Monopoly promotion — jackpot! However, you always have a base of capital around you which is sufficient to ensure the ski season goes ahead, so to speak. The powder may be lacking, but the chairlifts still work and the joyous sounds of the Milo kids echo around the mountains each season (of approximately 1 week, given the pitiful state of Australian snow).

In Tanzania, there is no base snow cover. Unless you have been living under a rock, this will be unsurprising news to you about the Third World.

What is unique about the students at the School of St Judes is that they are among the 0.0076% of Tanzanians who get a quality primary and secondary education, however Lady Luck has not been generous enough to grant them tertiary or employment opportunities beyond this and, perhaps most interestingly, most students are acutely aware of this misfortune.

They are, in short, unlucky enough to be lucky.

The School of St Judes: admittance equivalent to winning Tanzanian $50 mil cash jackpot lotto

I will not bother explaining the day-to-day of Tanzanian poverty, suffice to say that Tanzania is ranked 159th on the HDI index, which means that only 6 countries have a higher ratio of potholes+chickens+goats+dust:tarmac.

I’ve been thinking very hard about how to describe the School — and one of the bus drivers described it to me best —this place is “little heaven”.

A spitting image of an Australian private schools (including opulent garden, itchy, ill-fitting uniform and a ban on students walking on the grass), what the team at St Jude’s have attempted to create here is nothing short of incredible.

Run largely of Australian donations (shameless plug — donate here [to all my wanker banker mates — the ROI is 50x the initial investment, a far better return than any hybrid derivative you’ll invest in, and it has a soul too!]), Australian Story covered the School in a story 10 years ago, which began my journey here.

There are close to 2,000 students across 2 boarding school campuses (primary and secondary) located about 1 hour from each other. In the space of a little over a decade, the School has chalked up some of the best results in Tanzania (and Africa!) across standardised tests.

Schooling is free and selection is tough — you have to be incredibly bright and incredibly poor (an otherwise terribly frustrating combination). Cohorts of 200 are chosen from candidatures of 5,000. After a series of tests that makes getting acceptance into the Marines look like child’s play, home visits occur to ensure students meet relevant poverty thresholds.

Fun facts about St Judes:

• The primary campus contains the only play equipment in Tanzania. Despite multiple studies evidencing the importance of play in a child’s development, play is not part of Tanzanian culture and there simply isn’t the resources to spend on large colourful blobs of plastic in the shape of animals.
• The School prepares over 1 million meals a year for teachers and students — which, based on the range of menus sampled by yours truly, means a hell of a lot of beans and pulvarised maize.
• The School only employs local teachers (with a few international teacher mentors to assist with professional development) and has 1 resident cat (we’re best buds already).

Relative to the Government schools, where the average student to textbook ratio is 20:1 and even getting to high school is contingent upon completing national exams with a sub-50% pass-rate, it is clear that students here have won jackpot.

My heroes : the students

The students I have worked with (primarily in the Senior School, both in classes and after school) have been nothing short of incredible. Their determination to succeed despite the odds is nothing short of inspiring. They are clever, responsible and hardworking, waking up at 5:20am for morning study and chores (which include cleaning the classrooms and mowing the lawns). The satisfaction and fulfilment from teaching here is something I’ve never experienced before in any facet of my life.

Kevan and I have taken the business of convincing the students to drink our Kool-Aid very seriously. We’ve done more staff door-knocking than a Jehova’s Witness in a door showroom. We have also adopted a WHAM (Winning Hearts and Minds) strategy with the students (not unlike the stratergy utilised by the Americans in ‘Nam). We’ve hung/chilled with the boys down at the jungle gym, let people braid our hair (I’ve looked like Bob Marley for the past day) and engaged in good ol’ fashioned bribery in the form of chocolate.

To borrow the words of the great Nick Cummins, we’re busier than a one-armed bricklayer in Baghdad. So far, we have taught public speaking, debating, English (relief teaching — try helping a class to prepare essays for an upcoming national exam on 2 Tanzanian plays you’ve never read), ESL, maths (Kevan only — you wouldn’t let me teach a goldfish maths) and careers guidance sessions. I’ve now volunteered myself to look after the “lights out” process of a girls’ boarding wing — which involves prayer, song (I save their eardrums from rupturing by staying silent), chit-chat about our day and me moralising about something. Unsurprisingly to those who know me, they’ve all been on the flavour of female empowerment — I’m hoping to breed the next generation of Tanzanian feminists.

However, don’t get me wrong — teenagers are teenagers no matter where they are in the world. There is a silent competition amongst for boys to wear their pants as close to their knees as possible, say things in class that sail close to the wind on the line of decency, or give me dirty looks for making them do something they don’t want to. Basically, all human beings between the ages of 14–16 should be sent until Mars until their hormones return to situation normal.

Close but not close enough

Back to the emotional rollercoaster that is luck — which affects none more-so than the first cohort of Form 6's who graduated last month.

Some of the students that I have taught at St Judes would have to be among the smartest and most enthusiastic that I have ever taught. Most are acutely aware of the need to monitise their schooling by obtaining tertiary qualifications and later, (well-paying) careers. Put simply, their families and communities depend on it. However, despite catching a shooting star in terms of their entrance and education at the school of St Judes, obtaining tertiary education is by no means a slam-dunk. Luck is not that kind.

It costs a minimum of US$5,000 per year for these students to attend university in Tanzania, which is laughably out of the question (the average wealth of a Tanzanian person is US$200).

To make matters worse, the Government offers few loans, and only in the areas of medicine and science (which are a national priority). Thus if you ask a student what they want to become, everyone responds “a doctor”— no matter if they hate the sight of blood or a calculus textbook. Students do not have the luxury of “finding their passion” — everyone sits A-level science, whether they like it or not. Like putting a firehose through a pin-hole, competition for Government loans is fierce.

When competing for scholarships at international universities, Tanzanian students are lumped in the “Africa bucket” and lose out to the Kenyans and South Africans who are comparatively well-resourced.

Worse yet, the students know that their post-school opportunities are limited when compared to their African counterparts (let alone the ROW). The library is stocked full of Australian donated books, so students have a very clear understanding of the opportunities that exist in the West.

Sadly, it’s not always enough to catch a shooting star.