The road on the way to the house where Tom Kombe grew up in Tanzania passes by the primary school in the small community of Meera. The school is built on the land where a Lutheran church once stood — the church Tom attended when he was a boy. In the early ’90s when the congregation moved into a bigger building, a school was started and the site was later turned over to the government.
It’s a basic structure. Bars over the windows secure it, but there is no glass in the frames or shutters to keep out the weather. And the toilets are outside, shielded from view by a row of banana trees.
For years, during trips to visit his father, Tom would look at the school as he drove by and think about what he might do to improve it. Then during his last visit, the head teacher came to his father’s house to talk about conditions at the school.
“For a while I had convinced myself that sometime I would do something about the school,” he said. After that trip he decided not to wait any longer. “I grew up there — I went to church there, and though I did not go to school there, my school was very much like this. I would like to see it in better shape.”
By the time he returns for his next extended stay, Tom hopes to raise $4,000 — enough money to rebuild the toilets at the school. The school needs other improvements, too: glass or shutters for the windows to keep out the rain, books, and eventually computers to help teachers prepare the children for a changing world. But at this very minute the most important thing is replacing the existing lavatory.
A schoolhouse in a farming village
The government of Tanzania provides an annual budget for the Meera school, enough to cover teacher salaries and a few supplies, but not enough to cover capital improvements and repairs, and the community does not have the wealth to improve the facility on their own.
The families that the Meera schoolchildren come from are subsistence farmers. They grow coffee, bananas, corn, beans, peas and cassava — a root vegetable that does well in poor soil. In a good year a few families may grow more than what they need, but for the most part the acre plots are the families’ only support.
The school’s toilet is a type in use all over Tanzania. It’s basically a pit about 20 feet deep. At about 10 feet the pit widens and the walls are reinforced with brick. A building that houses the toilets straddles the pit. The whole thing uses no water — an advantage in a country where clean water is precious and infrastructure for sewage treatment is non-existent. And when built correctly — deep enough, and lined with brick — a toilet like this works well and can last 20 to 30 years.
The toilet at the school, however, was built cheaply. To save funds the pit was not lined, and as a result the walls are beginning to cave in. It’s been 20 years since the school was constructed, so the lavatory is on borrowed time. Usually when one of these toilets fails it is filled in and a new one is built elsewhere on the property. That’s what will happen at the Meera school, but the school doesn’t have much land to start with, so it’s important to construct the new one properly — so it lasts.
The $4,000 that Tom wants to raise will pay the special crew that digs these very deep holes. It will also buy brick for the liner, and the building materials and supplies needed to construct the bathrooms. There will be four seats for 300 children: two for boys, two for girls.
One thing Tom is eager to provide is more privacy for the children.
Education in the shadow of Kilimanjaro
The Meera school is the first step on a path that leads to university. For most children, though, this is the only school they’ll know.
Tom himself went to a school similar to the one in Meera, a few miles from his family’s home. Tom’s father, Martin, now 84, was a deacon at the Lutheran church that stood on the land now occupied by the Meera school. As a deacon Martin volunteered during services and sat on the governing board. At one time the senior Kombe was also a member of the school committee, and Tom remembers teachers bringing valuables from the school to his house for safe keeping.
Primary school lasts seven years. Education is prized in Tanzania — a cultural legacy of the German and British colonial rule, Tom thinks. So despite the fact that subsistence farming is labor intensive, families send their children to school as long as possible.
At the end of the seven years children take an exam for boarding school. “You knew if you did well on your exams you would go to boarding school,” Tom said. “You looked forward to it.”
At that time, the government paid for boarding school. Tom attended Moshi Secondary School, which was called “Old Moshi” before he was there. For those who did well, high school followed — Tom attended Mkwana High School, which was even farther away from home. A small percentage made it to university; Tom himself went to the University of Dar es Salaam. All of his education was paid for by the government, including room, meals, supplies and a stipend.
Because he was on a tenure track for a faculty position at Dar es Salaam, he was sent to Canada for his masters degree and to Arizona State University for a Ph.D. in industrial engineering. During a return to Tanzania before he started at ASU, Tom met and married Edith. Circumstances out of Tom’s control — the length of time required to complete an American Ph.D. — precluded Tom from taking that position at the university back home, so the couple settled in Arizona. They have a son. Albert. Tom works for the state Department of Transportation.
Unfortunately, in Tanzania government support for education beyond primary school is very minimal these days. “The leaders that took over did not have the same belief in government education,” Tom says. Now it is monumentally more difficult for children from schools like the one in Meera, where most are from poor (by Western standards) farm families, to advance.
“Sometimes it means the best students don’t go,” Tom said.
From the ground up — literally
Thinking about the children in the Meera school it’s easy to dream about putting glass in the window frames, shutters to keep out the rain and a shelter over the passageway between the two buildings. But why stop with the building? Bringing computers to these schools would open up vistas. And think what scholarship funds might accomplish! Boarding school costs a family $1,000. Think of it! For $1,000 you could fund a year of education for a bright young person. Talented students should not be forced to end their education after primary school.
For now, however, Tom’s concentrating on the basics — finding the money to provide something most of America, certainly Ahwatukee, takes for granted.
Clean, private toilets.
Tom and Edith Kombe and son Albert are members of Esperanza.
