New Scholar Interviews!

Yesterday morning we went to Burka Primary school to interview 10 students that both have need and good academics. This was a great practice for the health assessment that Emanueli and Irene will be conducting because they could practice the moderator and note-taker roles. One of them asked the questions and the other took notes. They switched roles halfway through. After every interview, they filled out a judging form based on criteria we came up with before: well-spoken, discipline, need, drive to learn, caring for community, and awareness about issues. I decided that since they’ll be the ones picking scholars in the future (and the interviews are conducted in Swahili), I will not help pick the scholars, but will rather help guide them through the selection process. We had a long debriefing session where we revised interview questions and processes for next year.

We then went to the bookstore, where we got all of the prices for all of the subjects for each form to see if it is feasible to add textbooks into the scholarship. This is one of the main problems cited in the student letters. We also started talking about the scholarship and Emanueli said he thought that we should include an English-Swahili dictionary in the scholarship, which is a great idea.

I realized just how much of an asset it is to actually have a place that is exclusive to the scholars where they can use laptops, read books, etc. A lot of scholarship programs, even in the US, strive to add value that is exclusive to their scholars in ways other than financial aid, but it’s hard if students are spread out among different schools and there isn’t a common place for them to spend time. The Sakina Scholars program definitely needs to use this asset to its potential.

Emanueli and I had a good conversation about health practices, which helped both of us start to think critically about health. Health works the same way as electricity (some pay bills, some don’t), phones, water, and everything else. Pay as you go. There are no checkups. I explained that the commonly accepted practice in the US is to get a checkup every year at the doctor, 2 times a year at the dentist, and 1 time a year at the eye doctor. Here, they only go when they get sick. Basically, it doesn’t make sense for people here to get checked out “just to see” because they don’t have the money to do that. I told him that we only go to specialty doctors (ears, nose, and throat, foot, back, etc.) when we have a problem, but that there are standard doctors we see every year. I explained that the benefits are that you can catch diseases early and that doctors can warn you ahead of time if they notice you are doing something bad for your health. I gave cancer as an example and Emanueli noted that there’s only one hospital in TZ that can treat cancer. I also asked him about people’s teeth here, which have lots of discoloration, and he said that it’s from some mineral in the water that is in excess. He asked me if we drink water from the tap in the US, and I explained that all the water goes to a kind of water factory, where they clean it first and it then goes to pipes which flow into people’s homes. It was great to swap experiences and think about the most basic things that we just accept as the norm, both here and in the US.

The idea with the health assessment that we are doing is to find out what kind of health program would benefit Sakina. Our initial hypothesis is that a community health worker program could be a real asset. Our hope is that we’ll see an improvement in people’s health and decrease in disease and death if we can catch disease, poor hygiene, and other negative health practices early by having community health workers visit households monthly to check in and record how health practices and rates of disease are changing.

Vocab word of the day:
Jumamosi - saturday