VOLUNTEERS IN JAMBIANI

A school girl's experience of ZAP - April 2010

Mark Wren and his daughter Izzy visited Jambiani and Stone Town during her school holidays. Mark found ZAP through this website, and asked if we could help him to give his daughter the chance to experience something of the lives being led by girls of her age in a very poor African community. With the help of Mr Pandu and Mr Vuai, we were able to do just this. Mark wanted Izzy to realise how fortunate she and her contemporaries are and to see at first hand the contrast between our comparatively luxurious existence and that of Jambiani school girls. Izzy has written a moving account of her experiences. Click here to read the article.

April 2009: Simon Oliver - Volunteer English teacher - reports on experiences in Jambiani

Expect the unexpected”. Of all the lessons we learned during our 6-months volunteering in Africa, this was probably the most useful. From the time we first read about ZAP in the April '08 edition of the OR Bulletin, to the power cut on the morning of our last day in Zanzibar, nothing ever went quite the way we had planned.

Nan – my wife – and I had visited Zanzibar on holiday in January, 2008, and had loved the whole experience: exotic history, beautiful scenery and friendly and welcoming people. When we read the plea from the Zanzibar Action Project for experienced teachers to spend some time in the fishing village of Jambiani, it didn't take long for us to make the decision. E-mails and phone calls ensued, and by September, we were packing up to leave, having let our house for six months, and looking forward to a winter that would be very different from those we are used to at home in Vancouver.

Click here to learn more....

LIZ ROSE – Last Report from Jambiani

It is time to leave and I am doing it with great regret. I have loved my time here and I am really appreciative of ZAP for giving me this opportunity. The support and friendliness of the villagers has been massive and I count so many of them as good friends. Fortunately I am not going far, just to Stone Town, so I shall be able to keep in contact. The work that ZAP has made possible on the library has been so admired that I have been asked to do the same thing for other schools. I shall start working as an advisor for the Ministry of Education in the New Year.

Zap has enabled the school to achieve a great deal. There are now sufficient English books for all the students in the secondary school and Jambiani is one of the few schools to have a decent range of literature books. USAID provided maths and science books at the beginning of the year and so I have been able to concentrate on improving the quality of the teaching in that subject. Maths teachers are rare in Zanzibar and most stay in town where the working conditions are far better. The two that I work with have worked really hard to ensure that the students are working independently (copying is rife here) and that they actually learning the topics.