by Lisa Gregoire

Whims can take you anywhere. Sometimes they take you to the other side of the world.

A year or so ago, teacher and Acadia University graduate Peter Martyn(B.A. ‘73, B.Ed. ‘74) pulled up the Cuso International website on a whim to explore volunteer opportunities overseas for veteran educators.

Less than a year later, in October 2011, he and his wife Debra (Hayman) Martyn (B.Sc. Home Economics, ‘72) are speaking enough Kiswahili to haggle prices at the local market in Kibaya, Tanzania, a small village two-and-a-half hours from the nearest pavement, by bus, down a rutted dirt track.

It feels like the middle of nowhere sometimes, but the middle of nowhere can be an interesting destination, Peter says on the phone from Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous clutch of islands in the Indian Ocean belonging to the United Republic of Tanzania. He and Debra were in the spice island paradise for a week recently to assist with a teacher professional development training course.

Teaching teachers

The pair will be instructing teachers for a year in participatory teaching methods that help children get active and engaged in their learning. Up until now, Tanzania’s schools have been dominated by lecture style “chalk-and-talk” instruction, something the government, in partnership with Cuso, is trying to reform. “We take it for granted in Canada, but here it’s revolutionary,” Peter says.

The Martyns are also helping teachers gain confidence and proficiency in speaking and teaching in English. This is important because in primary school Tanzanian students learn and are taught in Kiswahili, but in secondary school the entire curriculum is taught in English.

Peter and Debra are no strangers to working abroad, but it has been a slowly evolving journey. Raising two children, Heather and Alexander, conspired to keep them rooted mostly in Montreal, where Peter was teaching high school and Debra was an integration aide for challenged students.

They had always wanted to live and teach in developing countries and once their kids were older they started taking sabbaticals every five years to teach and travel. They’ve taught kindergarten in South Korea and twice taught English at university in China.

Perfect fit

After retirement, Peter and Debra decided it was time to look more closely at education volunteering. Cuso International seemed like the perfect fit.

Now settled in their modest but comfortable accommodations in Kibaya, in the central region of the country, they are accustomed to being two of only five conspicuous Caucasians in a town of a few thousand. They reflect a little on how far they’ve come in only two months:

“I was quite apprehensive about things before I came. Would I like it? What would the culture be like? And I was pleasantly surprised at how gracious the people are and how much I’ve enjoyed myself so far,” Debra says. “Tanzania has been a real eye-opener. The people have so little, they’re so poor, but all the religious groups get along very well.”

Tanzanians are roughly one-third Muslim, one-third Christian and about one-third follow indigenous spirituality. “Other countries could take a look at what’s going on here — peaceful co-existence and mutual respect.”

While life may be peaceful for the most part, it’s still a daily struggle for locals to keep a roof overhead, pay for a child’s secondary schooling and stave off malaria, HIV, cholera and tuberculosis when every trip to the hospital costs money. According to Unicef, nearly 90 per cent of Tanzanians live below the international poverty line of $1.25 U.S. per day. Life expectancy is 56. In Canada, it is 81.

“When we first arrived, we were quite shocked. It was incredibly dusty and very, very poor. Kiteto (region) is one of the poorest areas in one of the poorest countries in the world, so we were taken aback by the poverty,” Peter says. “But the area is growing on us. We’re really starting to like it here. People are kind and welcoming. Now we know the lady who sells us vegetables in the market, we have a good relationship with the butcher and, more importantly, the teachers we work with.”

Trials of transportation

A hardscrabble life under the equatorial sun is challenging and the pair is adapting to scarcity of many familiar foods, unclean water and power outages. But one of the biggest adjustments was simply getting used to the trials of transportation.

At 940,000 or so square kilometres, Tanzania is equivalent in size to British Columbia. Roads are rarely paved or straight, and they skirt rivers, mountains, plateaus, lakes and other features. Weather, especially during the rainy season, traffic accidents and the sorry state of some Tanzanian vehicles also hinder domestic travel. In Canada, driving from Wolfville to Halifax might take an hour, but driving the same distance in Tanzania would take double or triple that time or even longer.

“Tanzania doesn’t seem that big, but it takes an incredible amount of time to get anywhere,” Peter says. “Here, a 10-, 12- or 15-hour bus ride is not unusual, but you’re more resilient than you think and you find kindred spirits wherever you go. You never know that, of course, until you leave your zone of comfort and leap into the unknown.” That takes confidence and curiosity about the world, two things Peter says they both developed at Acadia.

“There’s no question Acadia helped to shape who I am.” He singles out Acadia history professor James Stokesbury as one of many teachers who made a lasting impact on his life and career. “He was an inspiring teacher. He gave me and other students a sense of what could be, how you could try to do interesting things with your life. That was the main thing I got from Acadia, that sense of possibility.”

You may follow their journey at: debra-peter-martyn.blogspot.com

Unicef stats can be found at:

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/tanzania_statistics.html

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/canada_statistics.html