volunteers detachment tradition education enclosure
construction pastoralism by kasia mychajlowycz
The Maasai Women Secondary School, Arusha, Tanzania
The two low-lying, half-finished buildings of the Maasai Women Secondary School were dwarfed by the expanse of sky and grass, and the peaks of Mounts Meru and Kilimanjaro. I had just arrived, at the end of May, in Arusha, Tanzania to volunteer on a school-building project which had been underway just two weeks. The buildings’ skeletons sat defiant against a landscape of constant movement; clouds pass overhead between the peaks of Meru and Kilimanjaro, while cattle lazily pass by on the ground. The fence that rings the new buildings, only notional until the weedy seedlings grow into a hedge, looked like a ridiculous, futile attempt to enclose even a small piece of this massive open space. The project is a partnership between Canadian not-for-profit Reach Out to Humanity (ROTH), which manages and funds the construction, and the Maasai Women Development Organisation (MWEDO), which will run the school. MWEDO was founded by and for Maasai women, and has paid the tuition and living costs for almost 300 girls’ secondary educations, which less than 1% of Maasai women have completed. By building their own school, MWEDO will be able to increase the number of girls they can afford to educate by not having to pay tuition to other organisations that run schools in the area. They will also be able to better monitor the quality of the education and the girls’ progress. 1 The Maasai are traditionally a pastoralist tribe, moving with their cattle to wherever life can be sustained. As grazing lands were fenced off to become the national parks system whose revenue profits the Tanzanian and Kenyan governments, the Maasai life has changed. Young men have traded their traditional role of cattle raiders for sedentary lives as farmers or security guards in the towns. The Maasai culture as a whole moves towards fixity.
A traditional Maasai home, part of a boma (village) near the base of Longido mountain in northern Tanzania’s Maasailand, approximately 10 kilometres from the Kenyan border.The house is made of a mixture of dung and earth over woven twigs; because the Maasai Women Secondary School was built with concrete to ensure its durability, the original concept of recreating round Maasai buildings had to be abandoned for more cost-efficient right angles.
Still, most of the Maasai live in a giant territory from northern Tanzania into Kenya. Residents of Arusha refer to it simply as ‘the bush’, but on maps it is Maasailand, or the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. So widely dispersed and isolated, Maasai are often forgotten (or ignored) by government, and access to public services is difficult. In schools, for the few that can afford the books and uniforms, the Maasai learn a foreign language (Swahili, then English, not their native Maa) and another people’s history that posits that their homes and knowledge are primitive, their medicine outdated and their religion blasphemous. I was told that some of the students who have had their tuition paid through MWEDO’s sponsorhip program were baptised and given Christian names at their schools. One outcome of providing girls from pastoralist communities with an education is estrangement and rejection of the traditional Maasai life. This has fostered a mistrust of education initiatives in some people in the community. MWEDO employee and Maasai woman Skolastica Porokwa, who has completed a degree in journalism, told me, “When I go back to my village, I see that people look at me with worries in their eyes”.
1 MWEDO founder and president Ndinini Kimesera
On Site review 24
49
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator