My name is Martin Mwanyika, born in 1987 in Iringa, Tanzania. I am volunteering in teaching and marketing at the Step-Up Center. In the morning I teach small kids, the play-unit class, then after classes I spend my time at the internet café writing and publishing about the center on the Facebook page that I opened soon after starting volunteering.
AVC Volunteer Martin Mwanyika outside of the Step-Up Center (Photo: Tegra Stone Nuess)
The challenges we face:
I have many challenges working with the kids, many due to having little experience working with NGO’s. Also, while I am a trained teacher, I had only worked with older students and never with nursery school children. Many of the challenges I face have to do with society as a whole knowing very little about early childhood education. Since they do not know about it, they do not value it. This means that people also do not show concern about children’s development.
Cooperation between the school and the parents is a very important challenge for us to overcome since caring for young children requires an information exchange between parents or guardians and teachers in order to help the children develop good behavior and to develop intellectually. We need to know how to have the parents work together with the school, to help the parents keep an open mind to the ideas of the school and to abide by school policies.
Furthermore, many of the children have behavior problems, such as theft, hitting, or fighting. They are often unresponsive to discipline. The challenge here is that we need to direct children so that they grow up with socially acceptable behavior.
I have tried to overcome these challenges by meeting with parents to teach them about the importance of early childhood education and its role in children’s development. This has helped the parents to participate in the children’s education. I have also talked to the parents about the importance of discipline at home and different strategies for discipline for young children. Overcoming this challenge and being able to shape positive social behavior has become the roots of lifting children to a better future.
Martin sings with his students
Vision for the future:
I find volunteering interesting because I like meeting people and making new friends with whom I can share ideas and knowledge. By being together in this way we create visions for the future of Tanzania. I also love that AVC helps the volunteers learn and diversify our knowledge, by having workshops, visiting Tanzanian projects and natural resources, and introducing us to new strategies for working with children.
I see a lot of potential for us to use what we learn in the workshops to help the management of local non-governmental organization (NGO’s). I am also very excited about the workshops AVC provides because one of the goals of AVC is to create a generation of African leaders and the workshops help bring about this reality in a practical way. It is my belief that the more AVC grows the more management of local NGO’s will improve as a result of African volunteers bringing in awareness and new ideas to strengthen management with productive goals and objectives.
To put it simply, I believe in the power of change, never allowing troubled roots of the past to affect the present and future. I believe in focusing on strength and possibilities and never on weakness and failures. I believe that everything done well, diligently, and in faith will bring about positive results needed by society.
I believe that AVC will be a breakthrough for young African leaders and for all community-based organizations (CBO’s) and NGO’s. Once young African leaders have a good understanding of leadership and CBO’s have understanding of this leadership, the effects will be seen in the community and the whole country, from the ground up. I believe that one day Tanzania will no longer be one of the poor countries in Africa and the world, as long as we have good leaders who are working for the country. Good leadership brings about development.
Translated with help from Caitlin Kelley