Aggravation
Posted by krisc at 03:52 AM on November 21, 2008 in Tanzania.
My headmaster, who I've generally liked, is definitely on my shit list now. Another day, another dwindling of the list of Tanzanians who don't annoy me. Can you tell I'm extending? Hah.
I'll be going to Dar next week, along with my neighbor and her son, to do their visa applications (as well as getting my plane tickets). I had written a letter for my neighbor, from the headmaster, stating that she is a teacher at the school, her salary, length of employment, and that he has given her permission to travel next June. I don't know if they'll even look at it during her visa interview, but the purpose was to show that she's gainfully employed here (intent to return to a traveler's home country is the most important thing to establish during the visa interview).
So anyway, I printed it out and gave it to my neighbor to show the headmaster, so he could read and sign it. She came back a little while later saying that the headmaster refused to sign the letter until some corrections were made. I figured okay, maybe he didn't like the wording of the letter and wanted to change it, so I asked her for the corrections so I could make them.
As it turns out, his "corrections" were changing the spelling of Consular Officer (to whom the letter is addressed) to Consulate Officer, and changing United States to United States of America.
I explained to her that a) United States is a perfectly acceptable way to write the country name, and b) the title of the person who will be interviewing them is a Consular Officer, not Consulate Officer. I told her to go back to the headmaster with the letter, and explain to him that she talked to me, and that I said the letter is fine the way it is.
She comes back again, saying the headmaster was still refusing to sign the letter over the spelling of Consular Officer. She said he looked in his dictionary, and was insisting that he was correct (apparently he knows more than me about US visa applications, especially considering he's never even been to the US). Now I was getting pissed, because this guy is being obstinate for no rational reason. Just sign the damn letter already!
But I wasn't going to let it slide, because people who think they know everything annoy me, and I felt like putting him in his place. So I printed out the section of the US embassy in Tanzania website that deals with visa applications, and underlined the section that says the interview will be conducted by a Consular Officer. Hopefully that will convince him that he's wrong and he'll sign the letter. If not, I'm seriously going to go talk to him myself and give him a piece of my mind, because this is beyond ridiculous.
Just an example of how Tanzanians can get caught up in infinitesimally small matters of formality while completely missing the big picture.
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Of course, whether or not my neighbor and her son actually come with me to Dar isn't exactly certain yet, because my neighbor's son still has to do his final exams, which are supposedly scheduled to start on Monday. The problem is that he doesn't know when the exams will actually end, and we're planning to go to Dar on Saturday of next week. The reason is that I'm leaving Tanzania on Dec 6th, which gives us exactly a week from next Saturday to get the entire visa process done. It shouldn't take more than 2-3 days, but since this is the last realistic chance we have to get their visas, I don't want to take any chances. Plus, I need time to come back up to school so that I can get ready to leave.
So if, for some reason, his exams aren't finished on Friday and they are supposed to continue on Monday, that will create a rather large problem. He thinks they'll be done next week, but with Tanzanian schools, who knows? It's unbelievable to me that a school doesn't even know when final exams are going to finish considering there are about 2 weeks of school left, but it's just another example of the stupidity that exists in the school system here.
And since I'm already venting about the sorry state of the education system here, I'll mention something else. My neighbor's kid showed me a spot on his leg where he'd been hit by a teacher (there was a raised mark) last week. Yet the laws regarding corporal punishment state that the ONLY places a student may be hit are on the hand or on the buttocks (hand only for girls). So this teacher broke the law. But can you do anything about it? Of course not.
The best part, however, is what he was beaten for. I like to term a lot of schools here agricultural schools, because the students wind up doing so much work in school gardens that it's hard to believe they actually go to school to do anything else. Anyway, he (along with other students) had been sent to cut vegetables from the school garden. He did, and then went to give them to the teacher. But apparently the amount of vegetables he brought weren't enough, so the teacher hit him.
Just run this through your head a few times. A kid gets physically beaten for not cutting enough vegetables, which is already an activity that students shouldn't be doing at school anyway. And the teacher chose to do this instead of simply sending him back to cut more with maybe a verbal reprimand.
It just makes me ill. I've become "accustomed" to seeing corporal punishment, and it doesn't really affect me much when I see it here at school, but my neighbor's kid is another story. He's a good kid, and it's very painful for me to see someone who I think of as a kid brother being treated in such an awful manner.
I've become much less willing to hide my opinions on matters like corporal punishment, because it's behavior that I'm simply not willing to tolerate. I'm not going around school stopping it (like a couple of volunteers have done), but if it comes up in conversation I make my position very clear. I didn't say anything when I first got here because I was worried about voicing opinions, but now I just don't care. I'm so sick and tired of all the stupidity that goes on in schools here.
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Anyway, I had wanted to write a bit about the fact that we got the internet installed and opened our internet cafe, but after writing the above I think I'll have to wait until I no longer feel like putting my head through the nearest wall.