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Mpanzi Secondary School is one of the 8 schools we have opened in the Rukwa region as a result of one man’s efforts to hold town meetings with people throughout the area. While his message that schools could be built by people themselves, and that we would be ready to partner with villages willing to work and work hard, was not received in every village, it was particularly very well received in the village of Myunga. The people of that village, together with the people of 4 neighboring villages, built six classrooms and a multi-purpose building (containing offices, a science laboratory, a library, and an assembly hall) with such speed that we have already been able to open their school. Today we have nearly 150 students studying English, with perhaps as many as another hundred preparing to enroll in September just as soon as they finish their primary school exams.

The young man who organized the building of Mpanzi Secondary School comes from the village of Kazovu, a fishing community on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, a hundred miles a way from Myunga. Francis was one of the few young people in his village whose father believed enough in the importance of education to send him far away to school and it was at Makuzani Secondary School (the school Steve and Susan founded when they fled from the war in Congo) that Francis learned of Village Schools Tanzania. He returned to his home village of Kazovu, convinced the whole village to involve themselves in building a school there, and then he told the leaders of VST that he was willing to go to any other village in the country where people were also interested in building a school. And so for the last year he has lived with the people of the village of Myunga and worked with them to build this school.