Mzungu Maasai

As I mentioned in my first post, I am here because I started a nursery school almost five years ago in a little village called Losimingiori which is named for the mountain nearby. Side note: there are mountains all over Tanzania which is definitely not the first thing you think about when you think of a country in Africa, am I right? Is that just me? Anyway, this school is for preschool-aged children, 3-5 (ish), who live near Losi. Some walk many kilometers each way to get to school every morning. It’s very interesting to me as an American to see such young children walking to school every day all over villages and towns in Tanzania. They typically walk in pairs or groups with their school uniforms on. I’m talking these kids are walking on major roads (tarmac!!) and busy highways to get to school. Even my little babies walk to school in groups and go home the same way. We would never allow our kids in America to walk so far to school by themselves! In the past few years, I have started to see little, yellow school buses which drive around and pick up kids for school.

Our school mainly focuses on teaching the students how to go to school and learning some Swahili and some English. We do follow the Tanzanian nursery school curriculum as well. We partner with the local primary school down the street, and their headmistress comes and assesses our students to see who is ready to move up each year. All of their personal children (headmistress and staff) have been educated at Namayana Nursery, so they really support our work in the community. By law, students have to start primary school at age six, and the school year starts in January and goes through December. There are three vacation times throughout the year. The first is around Easter which is the fall season here. This one is typically two weeks long. The next one is usually the month of June (or June 7-July 7-ish). The last one is around September and is also usually about two weeks long. Then they get the month of December off until the next school year starts again in January. Of course there are various holiday days sprinkled throughout the year, and this year is an election year, so they will get that day off next week. Students are not required to go through a preschool curriculum, but the headmistress has told us that she can see a difference between the ones who have and the ones who have not.

One of the things we are striving to do as a nursery school is to instill a love of learning in our students. We purposely accept more girls than boys into our program because girls are typically not as educated as boys in the Maasai culture. Our students are learning vowel sounds and how to put sounds together to form words and numbers up to and even beyond twenty (in both Swahili and English). They even are learning some basic addition and subtraction! They learn various things about their environment like dangers to avoid: bees, fire, snakes, etc. They sing songs and play games which all enhance their learning while having fun. One of the most important things we do is feed them a nutritional porridge every day during recess time. And one of my “jobs” while I am here is to teach the kids a Bible story every week. All of this is funded through donations from people in America who believe that what we are doing in this small village will make a lasting impact on generations to come. You can follow the school on both Facebook and Instagram by searching for “The Namayana Project” or just “Namayana Project” (and there are links to our PayPal and Venmo there).