A lone teacher at Kanoro Primary School

By Erick Kabendera

Thirty-four-year old Alphoncina Kimbangile sits alone on a wooden chair outside Kanoro Primary School on a sunny Thursday afternoon in Ifakara district. The two-roomed structure behind her is newly built and the paint is fresh and contains the two classrooms for her pupils.

Her eyes looks on as she silently counts the pupils filing past her with plastic buckets and sacks balanced on their tiny heads, buckets that contained sand carried from the village. She watches a passing face and then ticks the appropriate name on the list she has on the exercise book on her lap.

It is rainy season and a huge part of the assembly ground on the school is filled with water. So Kimbangile has decided to cancel classes for a while and have the children bring in sand to put on the swamped area. As it is, they cannot hold assembly and it is difficult for the children to walk across the area.

The school has 81 students. Forty students are in standard 1 and 41 in standard two. The standard one students study in the morning session, which begins at eight in the morning and ends at eleven. After an afternoon break, standard two starts at one and ends at three.
Kimbangile is the only teacher at the school. Before she came to teach, she did not know that she would be the only teacher there.

Before prior to 1999 there was only one school and that was the Kisawasawa Primary School which served to the population of the Kisawawa Village. Then the village spilt and produced Kanoro village that was autonomous.

In 1999 Kanoro Village decided to build a school of its own because the children there were walking long distances to attend the school now located in Kisawasawa.

Apart from the daily 10-kilometre trek that the Kanoro children had to endure each day going to school in Kisawasawa, the villagers there felt that as a relatively self reliant village they also needed a school of their own. It was political decision as well as a social one.

After construction of the new school ended, the Kanoro Primary School officially opened in August this year.

Two classes, with the teacher’s office located in one of them, are being used.
“I was also shifted to come and teach at this school. I still live in Kisawasawa village,” says Kimbangile.

As the only teacher at the school, she handles everything that might arise, big or small. She attends to parents who come to the school with some problems about uniforms and some difficult children and also makes sure that the school is clean, among other things.
Nevertheless, Kimbangile does not feel overworked. She only misses the teachers she used to work with at her former school in Kisawasawa. “It is a challenge. I am happy that I have never gotten sick,” she says, noting that should she fall sick then classes will come to a halt.

The school is going to close and when it reopens in January the number of students will have risen. New children will be starting standard one. The school will need more classes and more teachers then.

The acting Ifakara district education officer, Gerald Gwalala, says the district authority has already sent people to the school to find out the number of the students who are going to start standard one next year. He says the district authority will use the figures obtained to determine the number of teachers to be added to the school.

“I do not think we can do otherwise. We are looking at the demand before sending teachers there,” Gwalala says.

Gwalala says that the teacher is not overworked because the ratio of teacher to students at the school corresponds to the primary education standard. The Primary School Education Development Plan aims to achieve a teacher to student ratio of one teacher to 45 students. Currently Kimbangile holds two classes in the morning and afternoon of about 40 pupils.

But Salumu Malikula, the secretary of Kanoro Barabarani ward within which Kanoro and Kisawsawa villages are located, says he does not think one teacher is enough to teach 81 students. He says the village leadership informed the district education office that it was in need of more teachers but nothing has been done to increase the number.

On her part, Kimbangile thinks the plan of having all classes at Kanoro finished before the beginning of next academic year is hard to achieve. She points out two half built classroom structures and which she says were supposed to have been completed by now. Apart from the money donated to boost the school construction by different donors, the villagers are also expected to volunteer in the construction process.

“Even the construction of the teacher’s house has not been completed. The classes are also still unfinished,” says Kimbangile.

The teacher’s house already has an iron roof but its windows and doors are not fitted with the wooden frames, they are still gaping holes in the house. The classes that are still under construction are also the same.

The school’s toilet, a solitary structure in the back of the main building, is built of logs and has a roof made up of grass and dry Banana leaves.

Kanoro is a farming village. At this time of the year, Kimbangile says the parents take out the children from the school and go with them to work on the rice fields located far away.
The trend results in some parents not participating in the on-going construction of the school and children also miss some classes or sometimes never come back to school at all.
To meet the foreseen need of more teachers at Kanoro Primary School the village elders have issued application forms for interested teachers. However, Malikula is not so positive about the whole thing. “There would be no salaries to pay the two teachers the village is seeking to recruit,” he says.

Every household is expected to contribute Sh1000 per month for paying the salary of those teachers. “How could it work while the salaries for paying the teachers is expected to come from the parents who are already so poor they struggle to feed themselves?” questions Malikula.

No matter the income status, whoever fails to pay the money will face a sanction imposed by the Kanoro division administration.

Malikula says some people might even be taken to the district court for failing to contribute for the education development.

On the parents’ involvement in the construction of the school, Malikula says the parents put enough effort into the school construction. But they stopped when the money to buy materials suddenly ran out. The village leadership had decided to use the money to construct two classes instead of one as the donor had directed. The money got finished before the construction ended.

He says none of the villagers could continue volunteering while the construction exercise stopped.

“I don’t think parents are to blame. How could they continue volunteering while the construction is not going on?” Malikula asks.

The initial money was from an Irish woman whose name Malikula does not remember but who was brought by the local Roman Catholic clergyman to the village. She gave three million shillings for building one classroom but the money was used to construct two classes.

The village leadership has only Sh300, 000 left but the construction of the classes is not complete.

Tanzania National Parks and World Wildlife Federation also contributed money for the construction of the school. Malikula says even the church itself contributed three million shillings and there was also money that came from Ifakara district council meant to construct teacher’s house, which is also unfinished.

When the Morogoro Regional Commissioner, Said Kalembo visited the village recently, he was requested to assist the village finish the construction of the school.
“He did not say clearly what he will help with but he was positive. The village has 420 people who can work and once we get the money, they can help us a lot,” says Malikula.
Magreth Nyange is the education coordinator for Kisawasawa Ward. She says since the village was independent, it needed its own school to be a self-reliant unit. She says the villagers are the ones who started constructing the school and the money for roofing the school came from the district council.

According to her, in the coming academic year, standard one and two pupils will use one of the two already complete classes on a shift basis while standard three will use the other class.

Nyange says all the facilities for finishing the construction of the other building have already been bought and the pre-school class will be in one of the rooms. “We have all the facilities and the villagers are supposed to bring blocks, sand and contribute the money for paying masons,” says Nyange.

The facilities, according to Nyange, will also be used to finish the teachers’ house and she says the district council provided Sh3.6 million for the construction of the house and the villagers were expected to contribute the manpower in the construction process. “The villagers are also going to be contributing some money every year until the construction of the whole school is complete,” she says.