Moshi Campus Service Review

This newsletter is to highlight some of the projects that the students have been involved in this year. It does not cover all of them, but should provide an idea of what students have accomplished.

I would also note that this only hits on the service aspects of the students’ work and not any of the other arts, clubs, or sports they engage in regularly. 

 

Improving the classroom conditions of the classroom at the day care, the day care service group came to a realization that the children at the day care were in need of new teaching and recreational equipment. We therefore made posters with basic mathematical concepts, letters of the alphabet, different short words and playing equipment like puzzles.
We have also been celebrating Day-Care birthdays. The day care service group made it their responsibility to celebrate and make each and every birthday of the children at the day care special. The children have therefore been receiving small gifts ranging from sweets to chocolates. This is a habit we hope is carried on by the future day care service groups.

“Do you have the courage to make a change?” This was the introductory phrase presented to us, members of Courage Cafe CAS, as we started our CAS journey, our answer was yes. We indeed wanted to make a change, especially regarding such a relevant topic as sexual abuse. Working with an organization that aims to help prevent sexual abuse opened conversations for us to have an insightful dialogue. The experience definitely taught us that cooperating with large institutions makes it difficult as a group of individuals to generate their own ideas for change or actually implement them. As such, a valuable lesson to be learned is that we need smaller focalized groups that have plans of their own and concrete goals if we are ever to generate change in such a large global scale matter.

AGRICULTURE

During this semester we made a poster with a message alluding to our fruit and vegetable trees that are in our school called “Seeds for the future”. It should also be noted that this activity helped us improve communication and group integration, in addition to be aware of our trees and have a direct connection with the environment that surrounds us. In addition to being able to expand our knowledge of the behavior of trees, either in the factors that affect them to develop and those that do not.

RECYCLING
The environmental club this year has generally focused on working on minimizing the amount of waste that the school and community around us produces. As a service group, we first started off with bringing into coincidence some of the environmental issues within the school and the Moshi community, but we initially prioritized our school for this project. We discussed the amount of waste from the dining hall, the residential houses and the general waste, but we initially focused on the waste [leftovers] produced by the dinning hall.

We also organized the Earth day assembly, which included (among other things) a trivia game that had to do with the earth and environment to educate the school on general knowledge about our earth.

We began the year by attempting to determine how we may assist our peers in many elements of our school life. Within the group, we defined distinct roles for participants to play, such as peer listeners, media and communication, and group leaders. We also worked on the wellbeing wall and published information about various mental health-related subjects to help our friends cope with the stress they face throughout the semester. Ms Frida led a peer listening training for the peer listeners where she provided us with appropriate strategies for supporting our peers. We also organized a dinner as a farewell to the D2s with Kimbilio. It was a great experience, and we all learned a lot not just from our peers but also about ourselves. We witnessed the power of collaboration, commitment, and patience, all of which we feel will help us become better people.

During the first semester our CAS’ main focus was the visitations of More Than a Drop. There we played games and got to know each other but also got to know about their backgrounds, which taught us about the struggles that these girls had to face. The highlight of this semester was definitely the Women’s Day assembly. Femmezania collaborated with the PRISMA club and the Courage Cafe service group to put together an assembly for the whole school on March 7th. We had recitations of poems, an educational presentation, speeches and performances. The assembly ended with the Chilean protest song “El Violador Eres Tu” which was organized by PRISMA.

Since the beginning of this semester, we managed to finish two endeavors from the first semester. Firstly, we got to finalize the new beehive through our joint efforts. Though many nails and planks were lost along the way, this project awakened an inner craftsman in each one of us. With advice from Mr. Simon Mtuy we managed to complete Ivan’s beehive design and hang it in place of the previous beehive. From then on we are patiently waiting for new bees to inhabit the structure and hopefully find it cozy enough to stay, for future generations to observe. Our second undertaking was the creation of an Instagram account, to spread awareness of bees on social media as well. Although still in the works, the account has an amazing logo designed by our talented D2 students. The most successful project this semester however was by far the trip to a beekeeping farm which we organized for PYP students. Simultaneously educational and entertaining, it helped inform the youngest about the importance of bees and the craft of beekeeping.

The Coral Reef Project aims to rebuild the Coral Reef on the Coast of Tanzania. Currently we are working with Fish Eagle Point, a place near Tanga. The coast has been greatly affected by dynamite fishing and there is a huge amount of coral that are dead and/or broken. The aim of our project is to raise funds to be able to finance the building of the coral nurseries and a raft mechanism to bring out the artificial coral domes to sea, providing a spot for coral to grow and fish to live safely. This year we have achieved an incredible number of things. Our main achievements were building coral nurseries, a new swim through reef and a new raft which we used to move many coral domes out into the ocean to create a new artificial reef.

For the Simba’s Footprints Foundation, our highlight of the year has to be the PYP movie night that we organized. This was a great way to start our year we raised about 250,000 Tanzanian shillings. This money was used to buy resources for the children at the Simba Footprint foundation. We have also visited the foundation several times, where we have carried out various activities such as math games, music, dancing, football, board games and reading of stories at the after-school programme the foundation is running.

This school year has been a productive one for the KCMC CAS. We managed to organize two blood drives, one in November of 2021 and another one in March of 2022. The first one was an especially huge success as we beat last year’s donor count – 126! We hope to see even more donors next year, please come to the drive. We also continued with weekly food deliveries to the children at KCMC, walking a wagon of protein plentiful meals to the hospital on Fridays. Thank you to the school community for participating in our efforts to help the hospital.

It has been a lovely year. Working in nature and in the garden did not seem to us like a tedious task really, because it’s something we genuinely enjoyed doing. This semester was by far better than the last as we were able to plant various seedlings of cacti, strawberries and an array of different colored flowers. We also have been able to create an irrigation system for the convenience of the gardeners and anyone taking care of the garden. These two were the highlight of our work this year and we are proud of what we were able to achieve!

In October 2019, the smokeless kitchen service was a recipient of the Young Aurora award. The goal of the CAS is to design, build, and provide smokeless kitchens to people cooking under smoky conditions to help reduce the number of respiratory diseases in the community. As a group, we were able to build two functioning stoves during the course of this service. Throughout the year, we were able to build confidence in each other and improve our collaboration and communication skills. We also gained experience in the field of manual work, as well as built connections within our local community.

This year the campus beautification service was able to refurbish some of the designs on the walls. One of these includes the heart outside of the physics room, which now has vibrant colors and careful details. We also worked on some designs that didn’t seem clear, eg. the windmill drawing outside of the French room. To this we added new colors and details in order to make the meaning a little clearer to those walking by. The books outside the Swahili room was no small task, as we had to take what was left over from a few streaks of paints and pencil sketches in order to finish the mural in all its entirety.

UWC Connection is a service that is intended to showcase the activities of this campus mostly to connect to other UWC’s as well as to show the prospective students what life is like here. Starting the service anew and building relationships with our members as well as our school community has given us the privilege of capturing key moments on campus. We have over 260 followers now and would like to continue the service for future students to see how the school will continue to develop. Further we are particularly proud of how many views our reels have gotten and would like to see how this becomes more impactful to our school community as we proceed.

For the last few months since March, a group of students from D1 & D2 class, have volunteered to paint the wall in the Oncology department in KCMC hospital, devoting hours of their weekends to this project. A lot of progress has been made, it also helps the children while fighting their cancer to have something appealing in their department. 

We took it upon ourselves to leave something remarkable from us and the school in the hospital.

Focus Days – That’s How we Gave Back!

Reflecting on the MYP Focus Days has been a series of discussions with students, teachers and parents.

One chorus from a famous song keeps replaying in my head as I walk around over and over again to explore what this MYP cohort created and accomplished the past three days, Metaphorically of course

“Tonight We are young
So let’s set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun”

Their creative sparks were all over campus and caused a positive snowball effect that transferred collaboration and smiles all over campus. The results are truly incredible, and the outcome is honestly something great. The students truly demonstrated the values of the school, worked together to give back to their community, created some amazing things and above all showed excitement to complete tasks and get things done.

The collaboration that was going around was truly infectious and left everyone smiling and excited to see what the end results would be. Students were constantly walking around and asking what more can be done. The past three days showed maturity and true commitment and self-management of high caliber.

One major benefit of all of this is the students have now a set of resources that they are able to upcycle for use in next year’s service projects.