ARRIVAL AT MPANDA.

It was a real interesting safari in a small charter of 12 passenger from Dar es Salaam to Mpanda in Rukwa region. Rukwa is one of the 26 regions of Tanzania. Sumbawanga serves as the region's capital. The region is bordered to the north by Kigoma and Tabora Regions, to the East by Mbeya Region, to the South by Zambia and to the West by Lake Tanganyika which forms a border between the region and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rukwa region has five different councils named Mpanda district council, Mpanda town council, Nkasi district council, Sumbawanga district council and Sumbawanga Municipal Council.

It took us two and half hours to the destination.

At Mpanda, the airport itself is just the normal pitch as football playground, no floor no run ways, so plane has to land on th e bare ground with some grasses. For the people of this area they do consider it the real airport as per the name of the place itself.

The above are pictures of children who came to see the plane.

For the whole District town center no even a single tarmac road but still very arranged and clean streets, including gardens for flower and trees along the roads.

People of this area seem to be different to other remote areas in terms of language of communication, in other areas you find one of the local dialects dominating means of communication but in here it is seldom hearing people talking using their mother tongues except Swahili. Mfipa tribe is the one of the origin here with most of the population followed by some other small tribes making the population looks neutral.

At the first day after arriving nothing was done as every one is busy preparing the coming of prime minister tomorrow morning.

The second day started with the arrival of the Prime Minister at 11:30 after all logistics I managed to meet council authority. We held the meeting at the Mpanda District Council Director's office for about 45 minutes includes the Town Council Director and other six council's officials with one head of a nearby secondary school. At the meeting together with other issues we identified three different schools to be visited the next day.

On the third day which is Saturday we start right away by visiting schools, I was with the town planner officer and the district water Engineer.

The first school was Mwangaza Secondary situated about 300meters from town council headquaters, followed by Rungwa and Mpanda Girls Secondary School. Rungwa is about 2km away from the headquarters and it's buildings are still under construction, meanwhile they hired rooms for classes. Mpanda Girls is one of the oldest school in these region and it has very nice infrastructures especially for the project, not only that but also it has good performance being the second school in the last year form six examination results.

Mpanda and Mwangaza has eletricity while Rungwa is just a few meters from the last electric post.,

Almost all new buildings in different schools look the same because they have been constructed using the same plan. The older one do look different from school to school.

These three schools are around town so easy to reach but on the next day I visited another two but distant schools. Mamba secondary which is 160km from local authority headquarter and Usevya secondary being 118km away. To reach these school you need to travel through rough roads in which some areas we passed with difficulties.

Usevya has no power yet but Mamba has the solar power project under experts from Germany to take place from 17th March 2008. All of the equipment has already arrived at the school, they only wait for the experts for installation to make the project takeoff. Below are pictures of some of boxes with these equipments including the room to be used as the computer room as well as solar room. On other hand Usevya secondary can manage to purchase the generator for power.

After that the trip was now to another district council known as Nkasi. Distance between Nkasi and Mpanda is about 180km. I visited two schools as well in here. Starting with Nkasi secondary schoool located only 3km from Nkasi district council headquarter thereafter Kate secondary school being 48km from the headquarter. Both of them are using generators as source of power and they are in a good condition to receive the project after a few modification in those classes to be used as computer rooms.

Sumbawanga was the next, where we have Sumbawanga district council for rural areas and Sumbawanga Municipal Council for urban areas. In these two categories I visited four schools, two from each council. Starting with those located at the Municipal council I visited Mazwi Secondary school which is 1.5km from Municipal headquarter then Kizwite Secondary School at 2km distance from the same headquarter. Being located at around town center both of them have electricity.

On the other hand schools located at District council are far from the council itself, the first one is Mpui Secondary School which is 60km away and the second was Mambwe Secondary School which is 110km away.

Mambwe has very efficient modern generator sponsored by Afrikan development bank while Mpui has solar panels which can give only 195wats output in total.

For all eleven visited schools, ie Mwangaza, Rungwa, Mpanda, Mamba, Usevya, Nkasi, Kate, Mazwi, Kizwite, Mpui and Mambwe, I found only one school with four outdated computers which are all broken,that means there were no computer classes for these schools although in every school there is a class which can be made a computer room.

There are several modification to be done for the classes includes putting strong doors for security, addition of switch sockets to supply twenty computers and putting proper wide tables for full PC set. By using our questioner which identify all requirements before getting the computers I explained to each school's officials of what to be done and all of them promised to meet them before April.

In other word schools in collaboration with local authority responsible will work together to make the project run. They were real excited and ready to receive the project, they consider it as the golden chance for the bright future of their schools.

In addition to that Mpanda District council is ready to give some of the skilled people from VETA to undergo our trainings so as to act as the support team to the schools which will receive the project so as to be sustainable and incase of any problem. This will help to some extent to solve the shortage of technical personnels for the project.

Generally the real challenges that we have to face includes the poor transport infrastructures, ie rough roads during the time of bringing computers to the distant schools, unstable power for some of schools as well as identifying and finding the skilled personnels who will maintain these systems at school level after our trainings.

Conclusively the trip was very successful as expected by getting the required data for the introduction of the project in this region. Local authorities together with schools welcomed the project with two hands, eagerly waiting to see those computers at schools.