I was TEA 3C, married with a ten-month old son when we departed New York for Moshi.  I had two transfers: a move to Lindi while in Dar and later a transferred to Magamba Secondary School, my assignment outside Lushoto.  And I have lots of memories:  Traveled throughout Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika and Zanzibar.  Climbed Kilimanjaro.  Crossed Serengeti Plains during migration time.  My wife had twin boys at a mission school with very natural childbirth, taking just one aspirin.

     Magamba, with an elevation over four thousand feet elevation, was a new boarding school.  There was no heat in the dormitory, and the boys were always cold.  Each boy was allowed just one blanket. Many were issued sweaters by the missionary teachers, but some were not.  A few boys learned to knit their own.

     They faced larger challenges than the weather. Nearly all the boys were small and suffered from one malady or the other—hookworms, malaria, bilharzia, dietary deficiencies.  One of the boys, Simion, had an enlarged heart which killed him before he could graduate.  Andrew had only one leg, his right leg completely gone from the hip down.  He walked with a large stick in his huge right arm and could walk/hop  five miles to Lushoto and back with no noticeable discomfort.  John had walked from Sudan and went on to be the leader of the Southern Sudan revolution. Gadi went to California Polytechnic Institute and majored in electrical engineering.

     All the boys had to take turns cooking meals which were invariably ground corn, red beans, and, sometimes, bananas.  They had a full day of classes and then had an enforced study time each night, either two or three hours.   They worked so hard to learn.  All from small, subsistance villages, they were learning in English, which was their third language (1. A local tribal language 2. Swahili  3. English).

     Textbooks were British, and I wondered at the rationale for teaching British history.  Science, math, English, Swahili, geography—okay, but British history?  But it had to be done because that was what was on the Cambridge Exams, and the boys had to pass those exams or their education was over.  For most of them, there was no opportunity to move on, pass or not.  And there was no real infrastructure in Tanganyika to absorb hundreds and eventually thousands of high school graduates.  But once they had learned about the world, none of them wanted to go back to the villages.  I used  to  wonder whether it was right to teach them about a world that they could never be a part of, but I now believe that it was the right thing to do.