Educating Boys

Students in Tanzania can go through six years of primary school without paying fees but they have to pay for secondary school. Those fees are about $70 a year and for some students and their families that is more money than they have ever seen.

Let me tell you what this means in real life. We know a student – I’ll call him Thomas – who was born in a rural area about four hundred miles north of here. His family had very little money and, from the day that Thomas could toddle around, he helped in the fields around their home. His parents had never gone to school and they didn’t encourage him to go, either.

Thomas’s older brother never spent a day in the classroom. But Thomas yearned to study and he managed to get to primary school on his own for six years. With the help of some teachers he did exceedingly well. So well, in fact, that when he took the national exams at the end of his sixth year he was one of the few bright students who qualified to come to Mzumbe Secondary School, a select boarding school near us. A kind soul gave Thomas the money to come here alone on the bus but he’s never been home since because he has no money: zero, zilch, nada. Over every school break, including Christmas, he stays in the dormitory and keeps studying.

When secondary school students are in dire straits, they aren’t thrown out. BUT, in order to take their final exams and get a diploma, their fees have to be paid up entirely. By the end of six years, that’s over $400 dollars. Some students, like Thomas, who pass the national exams after primary school but have no way of paying for secondary school come here anyway, hoping against hope that a miracle will happen and they can pay the fees in the end. Often, even though they have top-notch grades, they have to leave without ever getting their diploma. Without that in hand, it’s very tough to get a job that pays a decent wage and, of course, they can never go to university.

Thomas wants to excel, go to university and study agriculture because he says that improved agriculture is one way to lift people like his family out of poverty. Recently, his excellent grades have declined just a little. A teacher at Mzumbe asked him about that and he told her that, with exam deadlines coming up, he thinks about that missing money all the time and then it’s hard to study. On top of this, several months ago someone from his village called the school to say that Thomas’ father died and his mother left and no one knows where she is. That news has made it harder for him to study, too, he said. For a seventeen-year old boy, Thomas has a lot on his mind.

Last week, one of his teachers told him that she was going to talk to some friends of hers who might be able to pay his school fees. She wasn’t sure, she said, and she didn’t want to promise anything but she was going to try. Now, despite everything, Thomas has a sunny disposition that belies his life circumstances and he is usually smiling and upbeat. But, when his teacher gave him this news he became visibly sober. “I hope that your friends can pay this money,” he said quietly, “because, if it is paid, it may help take away this great sadness that I feel.”

There are a lot of promising students like Thomas at Mzumbe Secondary School. We’re going to pay his school fees and the fees of a few others, too. I wish we could pay them all. These students just may make it to university so we are working to line up a laptop that they can access and learn how to use. To date, their only experience with computers has been by reading an ancient computer textbook. But, with a diploma and good computer skills, I think they can go very far.