Tom Levitt MP has been READ International’s Patron since he hosted our parliamentary launch at House of Commons in October 2007. In September 2009 he travelled to Tanzania at his own expense to accompany a one week trustee/patron tour, to see first hand the work READ is doing out there. This is his account of the week.

Monday (Travel from Dar es Salaam to Tabora)

Flying towards the heart of Tanzania from Dar es Salaam we looked down on desolate hillsides and sparsely populated scrubland. Our travels over the next five days would take us many miles on road and on dirt tracks, visiting schools which were receiving help from READ International volunteers throughout August and September. We were almost literally following in the steps of David Livingston, the explorer.

First stop was a visit to the Boys’ and Girls’ schools in Tabora, which were home in their time to several Tanzanian Cabinet ministers – and it shows. There is a confidence to them which was less evident elsewhere. They were business-like, organised in a way that Europeans would recognise. ‘Well established’ is the clue.

At the Girls’ School we were greeted in a hangar-like assembly hall with a school song that was delicate if interminable. The girls were thrilled to be receiving not just our books but also the most massive television I have ever seen, courtesy of the local MP, Mama Sitta. Clearly electricity, influence and aspiration are not in short supply here.

Tabora is a bustling town, busy, important, a major economic centre today and a confluence of the slave trade in the past. It was an ideal place to start our travels, allowing us to appreciate stark contrasts. Tabora’s schools were certainly at one end of the spectrum.

Nine out of ten of Tanzania’s 2,000 secondary schools are less than five years old.

Tuesday (Travel from Tabora to Urambo)

At Kililani Secondary School there are two teachers and a headmaster working with 140 pupils. Built just two years ago, this secondary school has not yet had a full cohort of pupils pass through it. The boys outnumber the girls in this sparse rural area because economics, and the politics of sex, determine it that way. In the sunshine it must have been forty degrees. The assembly hall is a space under the cool branches of a large tree. The parents have come in large numbers to witness the white people bringing the gift of reading; they have nowhere else to go.

“Why have you got so few teachers? Is it a shortage? Are you not able to pay them?”

“There are teachers and we have the money to pay them. They are sent here by the Government. They look around and there is nothing here for them so, after two weeks, they go away again.”

A 15-year old boy tells us he wants to be a doctor when he grows up. Our books are his only avenue to science as both his teachers are humanities-trained. We tell him to work hard and do well at his exams. It is his best chance of becoming a doctor.

Wednesday (Travel from Urambo to Shinyanga)

Near Shinyanga we found a secondary school which was well disciplined, well balanced and complete. All four years were in attendance and the facilities were better than basic. The Head teacher was bright and keen, authoritative and respected, all qualities which would endear him to school governors and educational administrators anywhere.

He co-operated well with our volunteers who had done a fine job in creating a library room from an empty hull, their names and those of their Tanzanian volunteer counterparts now painted and immortal on the walls in neat copper plate script. The school’s balance was right, the course well set: but there was something wrong.

The READ team had discovered the hidden boxes. On top of them were the dead husks of cockroaches and their flying cousins who had perished in the arid heat, proof that no box had been opened in the recent past. A thousand school books, brought by our own volunteers to the school two years ago, lay unused, abandoned and neglected. Why?

It is about confidence. It is about relevance. It is about culture.

The children speak English but their reading and writing is limited by their essentially oral tradition. Their curriculum is precise and specific, but unless we ensure that the books are embedded in the psyche of the teachers and the aspirations of the pupils they will not be identified as appropriate in the toolbox of education in this school.

Two years on, READ has learned the lesson. Techniques to embed the books in the schools, in just a few short days, are already more sophisticated and more successful and in future the follow-up monitoring will be tighter.

Thursday (Travel from Shinyanga to Kahama, then on to Mwanza)

On reflection, Ngaya Secondary School had the strangest feel of all the schools we saw. Everyone was happy to see us, as ever, and the community came to witness our visit too. They included a barefoot man who proudly sported the Second World War medal we British had given to him, with thanks at 19, in 1945. The singing and dancing was wonderful, just wonderful. The song of the Party workers, about how well their Member of Parliament served them, was evidence of a tradition I want to foster back in Britain!

They told us they had only 9 books between 150 children, though we never got to see them. They were proud of their science laboratory, though all we could see was its overgrown concrete foundations. And when the boxes were opened the children descended upon the books like jackals on a fresh wildebeest carcass, with less of the proud and sober dignity we saw elsewhere.

All this was set against Ngaya’s moonscape landscape of improbable rocks balanced absurdly upon each other in a dry and sandy, roadless and desolate land.

At Bulegi Secondary School we were greeted with an unexpected meal of chicken soup, samosa, goat and fruit. As the honoured guest, ‘Mzee’, I was treated to the bird’s gizzard, washed down with Fanta.

There is electricity in this remote corner of Tanzania, but it is exceptional: four austere photovoltaic panels feed a system provided at his personal expense by the assiduous MP, Honourable Maige.

The yellow t-shirts and purple trousers of the pupils exhibited a civilised brashness which was to the fore as the Head Boy delivered his eulogy: “We thank READ International for these books. You make us promises and you keep them, which is more than can be said for the civil servants around here,” he says, to great laughter and applause from fellow pupils and the MP. The school staff, governors and district administrators appear to join in the humour, though I wondered what private words would be exchanged later.

Friday (Travel from Mwanza back to Dar)

On our last official night in Tanzania we moved from the shoeless dust and the mud huts to the surreal surroundings of the British High Commissioner’s garden, complete with swimming pool and outside caterers.

We said thank you to her for our Government’s support for our work, presaged in Douglas Alexander’s comments to me on the floor of the Commons a few weeks earlier. We had 60 guests, colleagues from Unicef and Oxfam, our local business sponsors and representatives of some lesser known trusts and foundations. Mama Sitta and Honourable Maige joined us too, all friends together. A dozen of our young volunteers played host in expert and professional fashion as we notched up our final speeches in a week that had been brimming with success.

We are not alone in the work that we do and we are very aware of that fact. But the way we do what we do commands the notice, confidence and respect of our peers.

Reflections on the week

So we had witnessed the bustle and status of Tabora, the gold rush frenzy of Kahama and the beauty of Lake Victoria at Mwanza. In between, we saw rural schools struggling to provide secondary education for children who were thirsty to learn.

Cleanliness – often with its own space on the school timetable – is paramount in every school. When people such as Rob, READ’s Director, or our incredible team of young volunteers, speak to the assemblies the pupils listen, wrapt; they laugh politely when an English attempt to speak Swahili ends in a stumble. The laughter is warm, encouraging, shared. Not afraid to speak English themselves, the pupils we met were universally gracious, good humoured and appreciative without being obsequious.

In an education system with no secondary tradition it is rare to find adults with that experience, so school boards are composed of well intentioned people without the best grasp of what they are doing. Much of the teaching is by rote and so is the administration.

Some of the staff are 18 years old, equipped with just four weeks of teacher training experience since leaving college. They have no posters or handouts and few writing materials. In the play area, a bundle of rags is tied together as a football, kicked around happily by naked feet.

With a handful of books, a blackboard and a mountain of chalk, the teacher is very much alone. Though primary education is long established and free, which explains Tanzania’s very high level of literacy at that age, the same privilege is not yet universal for the over 14s. This is not for want of trying.

A massive recent expansion in secondary education is complemented by the work of READ and others. We provide appropriate reading material at a price which is affordable – free of charge – in a manner which does not damage local book production, where that exists, nor undermines the independence of the Tanzanian curriculum. Our work is appreciated by local politicians and communities, the schools and the pupils themselves. Other agencies know what we are doing and commend our initiative, care and purpose.

READ is a young charity, still feeling its way. Half a million books so far, half of which were delivered this year, says we are doing all right but we know we can do better. READ is well led, well organised and well motivated, populated by young spirits who know what is right and enjoy volunteering to do it.

We set out to do a job – and we do it.