Hard destiny and happy children in Dar es Salaam

The school bell rings to start another school day. The 190 children come running from all corners of the school yard. They are dressed in brightly coloured clothing in all shades of the rainbow and their hair is braided in complex patterns. The children are chattering excitedly as they gather at the classroom door where they are met by their class teachers who offer their hands to greet them.

The Hekima Waldorf School was founded in 1997 by two businessmen and their wives, who were disappointed by the lack of initiative and self-confidence of the school leavers who came to them seeking work. They first met Waldorf education through young Waldorf graduates from England who came to them as voluntary workers and who impressed them by demonstrating exactly the qualities that they found lacking in the Tanzanian young people.

After the two couples had directly experienced Waldorf schools on a trip to Holland they participated in a Waldorf conference in South Africa. There they convinced a kindergarten teacher to come for a year to Tanzania and found the first Waldorf kindergarten there and to train a successor. In 1999 they persuaded Irmgard Wutte, a Waldorf teacher from Nairobi to come likewise for a year and start the first class, before returning to the Mbagathi Waldorf School which she had founded with her husband.

In the following years the young Hekima Waldorf School experienced peaceful highlights but also troublesome periods in which everything went wrong and the pupil numbers fell drastically. By 2003 they had achieved a good stability and the pupil numbers grew again. Now they are preparing for their third move. But this time the school has been able to purchase land and build their own school house thanks to a large loan from the Friends. If all goes well the secondary school with eight classes could open in a year.

The success of a Waldorf school depends very much on the quality of the College of Teachers. Here the Eisele Foundation has been able to help, along with the Friends, to enable the teachers to participate in the two week teacher training modules in Nairobi. Five of the teachers have already completed all ten modules. Two teachers were able to gather in experience by visiting Waldorf schools in South Africa and England. These visits were expensive but highly valuable for the whole school.

The teachers are highly motivated and none have left the school for three years. This enthusiasm however brought a new problem. Up until now the salaries were based on those paid by the state to teachers. These are basically too low and most teachers have two jobs and also give private tuition. The teachers at Hekima however, whose understanding for and interest in Waldorf education continues to grow, have no time for second jobs. Therefore with great sacrifice and risk the school raised their salaries.

To see the happy and ever more self-confident children is a real joy, especially when one knows Tanzania. New parents are always asked why they wish to change schools. Almost all tell how they saw the Hekima children playing and noticed the difference to their own children. At other schools the children must reproduce set answers to set questions and mistakes are often punished with humiliation and physical punishment. Sometimes it takes weeks for the children who come to Hekima to relax and begin to feel secure.

Unfortunately running the school is costly. The state gives no money and the majority of people in Dar es Salaam have no regular work- and even when they do have work, they earn as little as a dollar a day. So to some extent the Hekima School is unfortunately an elite school. Yet many of the parents wish that children from all social groups should be able to attend such a school.

From the beginning the school attempted to find sponsors abroad. At present we have around 25 disadvantaged children, including several orphans. Many parents die from HIV/AIDS and there are many widows who have to provide for five or six children as well as having to look after the children of the deceased brother in law.

A six year old girl who we urgently wanted to admit to the school was totally undernourished and was found begging on the street. It turned out that the father had murdered the mother and had then himself died in prison. The child came to the grandfather whose wife sent her begging and beat her if she didn’t return with a pound of flour. In the meantime the grandfather has passed the care rights to the woman who had found her.

For each orphan in Hakima there are hundreds of others who we can’t accept, not only for financial reasons but also because we have no space. This is very sad because Hekima is a school in which the children are happy. The children love the school more than holidays and weekends. And when they play outside or work on a project together it is totally impossible to tell which children are disadvantaged and which come from better off families.

The new location of the school in Goba s 20 km from the centre of Dar es Salaam offers many prospects for development and enough space for a high school, garden and farm. Yet this new step is a great challenge and the school is dependent on the support of its friends.

Peta Spierings

Donation key word: 4100 Hekima