PHS staff has been working hard! Theopista and her husband Victor welcomed their new baby, Daniel, at the end of March. She will be rejoining us for some training on a couple days before returning to work full time in May.
We are excited to have Brad Board with us for the month of April. Brad is a former principal in Minnetonka, now living in the Seattle area. He is gifted in so many areas when it comes to staff development and starting up educational programs. His strong faith has led him to work in Mexico, Romania, the Ukraine, and now Tanzania. We are so blessed to have him with us this month!
The big push right now is student selection. We have previously tested about 550 students in reading and writing in both Swahili and English. We collected information from their pastors and village leaders about their orphan/poverty status and from their primary schools about their final exam scores. We were not able to verify most of the information with the local government offices, however, because they had not gotten around to updating their orphan lists or collecting last year's exam results. Going back to try to verify any of that information before we visited students' homes took more time than we had planned. The students were ranked according to exam scores, entrance scores, and orphan status (of the 120 students we will take, we have a target of 75% being orphans). We compiled a list of about 150 students to start.
Last week we started out to visit the homes of the prospective students. Of course, there are no addresses or phone numbers and often we're not completely sure where the village even is, although the teachers do have a general idea. So we drive toward the village. When we think we're close, we stop and ask people. When we think we are at the village we just start showing the kids' pictures to people on the road. Sure enough, someone quickly recognizes a face and points us in the right direction and amazingly we find the house! You can imagine, though, that it does take quite a bit of time to find each student this way!
We meet with the student if they are there (if not, we have to go find them at their school which can be quite a ways away) and talk to the family/parent/guardian. While someone is doing this, other teachers are out talking to other children and neighbors to try to determine the family's status. Tanzanians are pretty knowledgeable about each other's business and are generally more than willing to cooperate and share information. Trying to determine whether a student meets the criteria for poverty is very difficult. Some leap out right away (see the following post). Others are trickier. We ask questions and look at clothing, furniture, the condition of the house, try to determine how much the family makes, who might be able to provide money for the child, how many other children are in the home and are school-age, how many other family members are being cared for, etc. From all of that we make a determination as to whether the child qualifies. So far it's been a combination of data and gut instinct. Our teachers are definitely taking the lead in decision-making. Max, Mark, or I are on each of the visits, but primarily as the driver--many family members don't read or write, much less speak English, so everything is in Swahili, and while we can generally follow a conversation, we can't ask questions or read the body language to know if someone's lying as well as our teachers can. They are doing a great job!
So far we have seen about 20 students in 7 days. We have accepted around 8. Today was a great day as we were able to accept all of the students we saw! Other days we've had to turn down every student we visited. Many families (and the referring pastors and village leaders) have lied on the application about a child's economic or orphan status, which automatically disqualifies the family from consideration. It's a difficult decision, especially since the offer of a free education is so very tempting, but corruption is rife in all areas and we need to be very strict. We have gotten very positive feedback on many levels about how we are approaching the work that tells us that we are on the right track.
To meet our very first students accepted to PHS, read on to the next post!
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