Kambi ya Simba Through the Eyes of Its Youth
By the students at Awet Secondary School in Tanzania, East Africa and What Kids Can Do
Edited by Barbara Cervone
April 2006 ♦ Paperback ♦ 74 pages, 45 four-color photographs ♦ ISBN: 0-9762706-7-6 ♦ $10.95 (USD)
ORDER NOW! Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com or contact Next Generation Press for quantity discounts..
In Tanzania, close to the towering Mt. Kilimanjaro, the vast plains of the Serengeti, and the Great Rift Valley, lies a village called Kambi ya Simba. It is a rural village, with one road in and one road out. Its 5,000 residents, spread over 40 square kilometers, are farmers. By every measure they are poor. They know scarcity, which can make "enough" seem like plenty. In a world of digital technology and designer coffee, they illuminate the night with lanterns and drink from streams and pumps that often carry illness.
But poverty alone does not define Kambi ya Simba. As in so many small villages across the African continent, life here holds much richness and many stories. Yet a romantic view of village life also misses the mark.
This past August, an American-based NGO that works with young people in several countries spent two weeks with students at Awet Secondary School in Kambi ya Simba. Together, they shared an ambitious goal: to create a topnotch collection of photographs and stories about the village. The resulting book, In Our Village: Kambi ya Simba Through the Eyes of Its Youth (Next Generation Press), will be published in April 2006 and sold in Tanzania, the United States, and Europe. Proceeds from the book will fund student scholarships at Awet Secondary.
The village life Kambi ya Simba's youth document is at once ordinary and surprising, entrepreneurial and backward. Its dreams are both wide and narrow, its times both good and bad. When one of the students, Romana, was asked what she liked best about the village, she said: "Here, you know everything by heart."
None of the Awet students had ever held a camera before this project. Within minutes, however, they mastered the digital cameras the American NGO had brought and carried them everywhere. They took over a thousand photographs during the two weeks and, with only a few exceptions, the pictures in the book are theirs. They also interviewed as many of the village residents as they could, from a 103-year-old elder to the doctor who runs the medical dispensary.
This June, the Awet Secondary School students will also narrate a DVD that combines their photographs, stories, and music. It will be distributed around the world.
| Rivers and rain If land is our life in Kambi ya Simba, water is our life's blood. Our rivers flow down from the Ngorongoro Highlands, six kilometers to the north. The largest we call the River Seay. Like the simba (lions) for which our village is named, it crouches in a ravine at one turn, stretches out in full sun at another, barely moving. The river and the rain go together, and with them our fortunes. The right amount of rainfall, and the harvest is strong. Too much rain, and seeds wash away. Too little, and soil crumbles in our hands. Wet and dry, these are our majira (seasons). Short rains (mvuli) come in November, long ones (masika) in March and April. Rainfall averages 800 mm (30 inches), but it can vary as much as 50 percent year to year. The past three years have been uncommonly steady, though: It has rained little in our village. Everything seems smaller... |
To download a PDF version of the book, in sections, click below:
Section 1: Preface; Greetings; Soil covers our feet; Rivers and rain (2.7 MB)
Section 2: Wheat, maize, and papayas; Living with livestock; Ugali; Two meters by three; The village dispensary; Twenty customers a day (5 MB)
Section 3: Ox-plows and tractors; A bumpy ride; Wireless; Made by hand; Singing and dancing (3.7 MB)
Section 4: The more you win, the more you play; Good friends; Village government; Writing down every word; God's blessing; Children and sacrifice (4.6 MB)
Section 5: They call me Yame; I want to be a leader; More about Tanzania; Other facts; Swahili glossary; Acknowledgments (1.9 MB)
