Tanzania Journey...

My name's Bethany and at the end of 2008 alongside James, another pupil at Stantonbury, we won the Steve Sinnott Award for the Young Global Education Campaigners of the Year. World leaders have promised to get all children into school by 2015 and we want to make sure that they live up to those promises. 75 million children in the world are still unjustly deprived of an education, simply because of where they are born or who their parents are. We want to give these students a voice. As a result of winning the award at the beginning of March ‘09, we had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go on a fact-finding trip to Tanzania, Africa.

Packing for Africa
Picture me as I normally am: ripped jeans, “Scene-Kid” clothes, Punky Fish sneakers, hoodies. When my teacher told me I would have to wear skirts in Tanzania, I thought 'arrrggghhh.' I don’t even own a skirt! I would have to borrow my sister’s and stock up on shirts that would cover my shoulders so as not to offend African women who are much more conservative in their dress. I usually wear heavy make-up and soon learned that this wouldn’t be appropriate either. So through this act of reinventing myself I gained my first taste of how life for girls in Tanzania would be much more restrictive and shaped by tradition than what I was used to in England.

Arriving in new guise in Tanzania
Having arrived in Tanzania feeling slightly uncomfortable in my new clothes, I soon began to discover the challenges girls face that stop them from reaching their true potential. I had expected to find some gender inequality, teenage pregnancy and young marriages, but I hadn’t really taken in what this would mean. When you see it for yourself you start to imagine what it would be like if you were married at such a young age and how tied down and under pressure you’d feel.

Meeting the Masai
When I visited the Masai tribe in their Boma, or village, I met Sofia. At the age of 14 she had never been to school and was about to be married to a man ten years older than her. She didn’t seem to want to get married at all and disagreed with her father’s views, but she just obeyed him. It made me realise how sexist the Masai culture is and how girls’ views do not matter. If she had a choice, I think Sofia would definitely choose education over marriage.

In Tanzania there is a law that once a girl gets pregnant she is not allowed to go to school. This shocked me, especially when I learned getting pregnant was often not the girls’ fault as many are raped, sometimes on their way to school. This law seems very immoral to me and I am glad the government is reviewing it. In many schools, girls go to the extreme of shaving their heads so they won’t be attractive to men and be married off too early.

Going to school in Tanzania
Nastura and Zainabu, who I met at the Makayuni Primary School, are being held back for a different reason - extreme poverty and sexist bullying. Nastura is an orphan who doesn’t even know her own age. She told how she was often bullied by boys and how the teachers don’t listen to the girls, or treat them the same as the boys in lessons. As boys and girls share the same toilets, the bullying is particularly bad there.

Zainabu has no father and lives in one room, with one bed, which she shares with her mother and two younger brothers and sisters. They often only had one meal a day which made it hard for her to concentrate at school. She's really quiet and clever and when I sat next to her in maths I noticed she'd finished all the questions well before I had! I wondered whether her quietness was deliberate so she wouldn’t get bullied. At the end of our meeting, Zainabu asked me for several simple things – my baseball cap (I felt bad that I wouldn’t part with that, but it’s very special to me), some water, a football, but most importantly – a pen. This told me how much the chance of an education means to her. It seems so unfair that poverty might take away her chance.

Equality for girls
The girls who met us at the TENMET headquarters in Dar Es Salaam, and who were young campaigners themselves, had equality with boys in our meeting and seemed respected and happy at school. Even more inspiring was the lady I met at the Makayuni Primary School. She was a role model for what girls could achieve. She had persuaded the Masai elders to let her go to school. She is now well-educated and has lived up to her true potential. She showed everyone that girls aren’t less smart than boys in Tanzania and that they have the potential to do great things, to make a difference, to change everything.

What we can do to help
Going to Tanzania has made me all the more determined to make people at home make an effort to help girls like us in poorer parts of the world. We need to help to change traditional tribal views that girls have less potential and are less worthy of an education because they're female.

Help those who have no voice by joining the Send My Friend to School Campaign and by asking your school to take part in the Big Read 2009, and together we will make a difference. www.sendmyfriend.org