UWAKIKI-Nursery-School
The UWAKIKI-Nursery-School is not what a European would associate with the term "nursery school". At the moment, UWAKIKI has one classroom in the building constructed in 2003 with financial support of UWAKIKI friends. The former building, built out of clay and timber by the women, finally collapsed in 2004 and is therefore useless. It had contained almost no inventory and its capacity was only 25 pupils (out of 75), anyway.
The children are grouped by ability and taught by (usually) 2 teachers in the subjects of math, reading, writing, English, agriculture, health/hygiene and playing. The teachers give their lessons ex-cathedral, which can be very hard and tiring for the children, especially as the temperatures rise to unbearable highs after 10 a.m..
Most pupils own no exercise books or pencils, because their (foster)parents cannot afford these. UWAKIKI provides such materials as much as possible, but everything else has to be improvised (blackboard, soda caps or simple sticks for calculation).
In Autumn 2003 we could organise the construction of a school building, subsequently equipped with classroom furniture. As there still is a growing number of orphaned pre-school children, it becomes more and more difficult to find an appropriate way of teaching these different age groups in one classroom. Inquiries of Tanzanian UWAKIKI members encourage us now to organise the building of another classroom.