(Host) Commentator Nick Boke watched the reports of President Bush’s recent trip to Africa with special interest.
(Boke) I’ve got something in common with President Bush. Both he and I recently paid our first visits to sub-Saharan Africa. Our trips, of course, were quite different.
In April, I spent three weeks working in Tanzania. I was invited to create lessons for kids too busy earning money to go to school. This Interactive Radio Instruction program takes the education right to the kids. They leave off work for half an hour a day to study Swahili, life sciences, math and English. I developed radio scripts for second-graders. Yes, that’s second graders. The scripts would be broadcast into community centers near work sites.
I thought of Tanzania as I split wood in my backyard on the Fourth of July. It was hot mid 80s, maybe, and quite humid. As I stepped back to admire my handiwork, sweat almost blinding me, muscles aching, I thought about the children I had watched working at the Kunduchi mines north of Dar es Salaam.
Once Kunduchi was a full-fledged, mechanized quarry. Today, children, young adults, parents and grandparents spend the day in sun much hotter than that I worked under in my backyard. Using small, metal mallets, they pound rocks into gravel, piles of which are sold to construction crews.
I watched a couple of dozen kids respond to the radio script we were testing. When the narrator asked them to name colors, they did so with vigor. When she asked them to add numbers, they did that just as enthusiastically. They worked on Swahili grammar, and repeated some English sentences. Then they briefly discussed the program with us, picked up their mallets and went back to work.
And there were the kids that the community development people Davis and Hawa met working on a tobacco plantation further inland. They spent the day sorting leaves in a dusty shed, or swinging a machete in the fields. These kids told Davis that if he could get them some food they’d come not only for a lesson, but they’d stay for school all day their daily pay was just enough to buy them each one meal.
President Bush probably never got quite so close to the relentless poverty and hardship that make up most of sub-Saharan Africa. But every afternoon on the crowded streets of Dar es Salaam I encountered hundreds of jobless men; and hundreds of others who earn not much more than the kids working in the tobacco fields; all living in endless miles of shanties without water or electricity.
But through it all, I encountered a resilient, positive spirit, full of hope and generosity.
I’m glad I went to Africa. And I’m glad the president went there too. I’ll be going back next April to finish my work. And I’ll be paying close attention to make sure our country continues the work our president promised on his visit.
This is Nick Boke, pleased to be back in Weathersfield, Vermont.