Like schools almost all over the globe, CEFZ has spent many weeks of 2020 closed, while we worried about the health and sustainability of our community. During our 14 week closure, we tried our best to maintain close contact with all of our students, but without access to computers or the internet, this was rather tricky.

Our teachers went to visit their students in taxis and on vespas distributing Home Learning Packs and collecting homework. Teachers often helped students with their work during these visits and always checked student and family wellbeing. Many of the children have such challenging home situations, and ensuring our students felt they were still loved and held by their community, as part of our family during this time of isolation became much of our focus. When school is the only constant in a child’s life, a visit from a teacher can go a long way to relieving some of the trauma of being suddenly isolated from friends and teachers.

Since our students were not in school, and we needed to ensure the nutrition of the most vulnerable, we diverted student nutrition funds to supplying food to whole families in need. We couldn’t feed just one child from a family (like we do at school) so we helping widowed mothers and the most food insecure homes became our focus. We supplied rice, flour, beans, lentils, soap and eggs from our very own chickens, avocados and cassava grown on the school farm during the lockdown. Overall, we gifted the equivalent of over one thousand meals, all made possible by sponsors of the Student Nutrition Program.

Happily, we reopened Zanzibar Steiner School on July 4 after a closure of 14 weeks, receiving our children back into arms with a week of celebratory and therapeutic activities. Consciously scheduled to heal the trauma of separation for all. Tanzania was declared COVID free and to this day remains free of COVID. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Long-term, there has been a substantial loss of effective learning time -relying on handing our photocopied worksheets means we could only mostly review student work, not begin new work. In December 2020, our grades 6 and 8 have to sit compulsory government exams, and now, in the hope of compensating for lost learning time, we have increased our learning resources budget to help our students pass these exams. We are thankful our students are in this position – if they were in their original government schools, learning resources would not be freely available and their teachers may not be able to cover missed subjects in the curriculum. We proudly hold on to the Steiner belief that each child has a unique gift to bring to this world, and that exams don’t measure a many different types of intelligences present within we human beings.