Adventure's in Tanzania: May 2015

Over the past few months, I have been conducting a program at my school called Maua Mazuri, which translated means “Beautiful Flowers”. 18 Form 2 students between the ages 14 and 16 participated in the women’s empowerment project which pairs life skills lessons with various arts mediums. We met every night from 7:30pm to 9:30pm due to their very rigorous and full school schedules. But they always came with a smile on their faces and produced beautiful works of art.

The students discussed important lessons such as solidarity, communication, confidence/independence, individuality, HIV/AIDS, decision making, women’s education, etc while expressing what they learned through singing, dancing, acting, painting, drawing, and writing poems and stories.

My counterpart, CD Sanga, leading the students in our opening songs and cheers

This program is very unique to Tanzania. It was developed by a PCV named Emily Hoppes and not only helps empower girl’s in a culture that doesn’t encourage women to be confident, but it also gives the students an artistic outlet. Art is not a subject taught in Tanzanian schools. My students had never used paint or colored pencils before. It was a new experience to be able to draw anything they wanted, rather than diagrams and maps for class notes. They were encouraged to be free.

Look at those beautiful flowers!(lighting sucks since it's 10pm and the light is solar)

Painting for the first time!

One student in particular deserves recognition. Her name is Rachel and she is a shy student who isn’t very social. I often see her eating her meals alone in the grass. Rachel applied for Maua Mazuri and excelled! She is an amazing artist who thinks outside the box and thrived in the program. She had a hard time letting go in the performance art lessons, but when it came to drawing, writing, painting, etc I could see a spark in her I had never seen in the classroom. Rachel is the reason all children should be exposed to art and be given a chance to express themselves. She may not excel academically and she is shy around people, but she has found her talent, her gift and has never been given the encouragement, time or materials to express herself.

Rachel with her decorated portfolio

The highlight of this program occurred during the 10^th lesson which paired the art lesson of painting with the life-skills lesson about gender roles. After explaining the terms abstract and concrete, I asked the students to write concrete thoughts about Tanzanian women, for example “Women have babies.” They understood this concept and made a great list. But they struggled to understand the term abstract, so I gave them an example and wrote on the board “Tanzanian girls are shy.” Suddenly, every girl was screaming at me “No Madame, that is not correct.” I then crossed it out and told them to replace it with something true. They proceeded to say that “Tanzanian girls have power” and “Tanzanian girls are confident.” It made my heart soar! It was by far one of my greatest moments in Peace Corps.

These girls believe they can conquer the world. And so do I.

To complete the program, the students designed a mural and put on a show to display their talents along with the valuable lessons they learned with the rest of the school. They read poems they wrote about HIV/AIDS, read speeches they wrote about the importance of educating women, put on a play about HIV/AIDS, danced to express emotions and even rapped.

They were dressed in their Maua Mazuri shirts we made during our lesson about communication and wore a flower that was a gift from me to make them feel special on their day.