BBC visitors & Sinya Primary

BBC film crew

Damian in the Micro Light (aka flying motorcycle)

We unzipped our tents the next morning at dawn and were surprised to find two BBC documentary filmmakers enjoying breakfast at our campsite.  Damian in his micro light plane (imagine a motorcycle with kite wings, see photo) had been outfitted earlier that morning with cameras to capture the heights of Mt. Kilimanjaro from the air.  A BBC “follower plane” was trailing him, filming his flight for the documentary and these two filmmakers were awaiting his landing to get shots from the ground.  We enjoyed breakfast with our guests and learned about their project.  They are featuring some of the Honeyguide Foundation’s work in the documentary.  The film – Earth’s Natural Wonders - debuts in March on PBS.  We will definitely be sharing it with our students, along with our personal experience, and hope you check it out as well.

From there, we packed ourselves up and visited a Maasai boarding school – Sinya Primary.  Maasai boarding schools are essential, because of migration of students’ families in order to look for water and food for their animals.  The boarding option has increased attendance at Sinya Primary to 96%.  This great attendance and consistency, has resulted in the school being ranked first place in academics in the district over the past 5 years.  The “Better Together” philosophy is universal, as Sinya values the co-operation of teachers, pupils, and families in unity.   The folks at Sinya welcomed us warmly with open arms, as we similarly experienced so strongly at Kilimani. 

Sinya Primary

As Honeyguide is partnering with educational institutions like Tanzania People and Wildlife to boost conservation education in local schools, it was wonderful to visit one such school.  Seeing how conservation education is truly about long-term community partnerships and investment in conservation and wildlife, our thinking began to evolve.  With firsthand information that we are bringing back to our classroom via the FFT grant, we are energized to educate our students.  Before our FFT fellowship, we were limited in our perspective of conservation as a singular unit of study within our COSEE Oceans curriculum.  However, our thinking as been revolutionized to realize that conservation permeates all areas of our lives and our community and we will in turn teach it much more holistically.  We will now incorporate this information throughout our Science units of study.  We can see how the message of conservation is vital to our simple machines and engineering design unit, our measuring time and solar system unit, etc.  We cannot wait to continue fostering our Honeyguide relationship and furthering our learning as we are back in the classroom teaching. This was a keen role reversal for us as we were students in their hands, subject to cutting-edge information. We hope to remain strongly connected to Honeyguide’s educational outreach programs as we move forward in the future and hope to collaborate with them as well.