John Gibbs posted on April 06, 2011 08:05
Heide Schooling came to our meeting in September 2010 to tell us of her mission to improve the schooling and outlook for students in Mwamapala, Tanzania where Heide has taken on a position as the head teacher. The board of the Rotary Club of Liverpool West agreed to support this mission by applying to register the project with RAWCS. Past President Jim Leahy is happy to report as of this month the Rotary Club in Shinyanga in district 9200 Tanzania & the district governor Mr. Stephen Mwanje at last have signed all of the forms and we have now applied for Registration with RAWCS.
Jim has also reported that Heide has a website for the project at: www.utawala.com
The following is then what appears on the front page of her website;
Welcome to the Utawala School Project & Founder
Heide Schooling was born and educated in Austria. After graduating from teacher’s college, she completed a Master of Science degree majoring in Physics at the University of Vienna. She travelled overland from Austria to South Africa to work as a research assistant at the Council for Industrial Research in Pretoria where she met her architect husband. They spent their early married life in South Africa and immigrated to Australia in 1974.
Over the next 35 years she completed a Graduate Diploma in I.T. at the University of Technology in Sydney, a Certificate IV in Adult Education and a Graduate Diploma in English as a Second Language at Macquarie University. She also taught at a variety of primary and secondary schools as well as at North Sydney TAFE and Sydney University.
After her husband’s death and the marriages of both of her sons she decided to take a voluntary position as a teacher trainer in Tanzania, where she was asked to manage Utawala Secondary School.
Having lived in the area for the best part of the past two and a half years Heide knows that a well functioning school with decent facilities will attract motivated and capable students and good teachers, thus ensuring students from the local area pass the national year 10 examinations, ultimately helping to alleviate poverty.
The aim is to make the existing school self-sufficient and to demonstrate how an African school in an impoverished rural area can be successfully run by local staff, thus being an example for similar institutions in the country.
Also an extract from some recent correspondence gives an insight to some of the challenges;
There are many things missing, the power is out every second day and to run a generator is expensive. There is very poor mobile reception so I can't use the Internet with a modem. We have to fetch water in buckets from a near-by pump. All the buildings are falling apart, except for the 4 I have fixed. The kitchen is a disgrace, so is the library. The front office was locked for a year because it had bees in the ceiling. I got rid of them and made it decent place again. It is nearly finished. And there is no fence, so it is hard to control the kids. School fees of approx $300.00 a year is another issue.
To learn more about this project, please visits the website at www.utawala.com and/or see our article from our bulletin of 14 Dec 2010: Utawala School, Mwamapala, Tanzania – Heide Schooling