Tanzania, Day 3

July 19

I did not sleep well last night. I woke up for good around 3 am & by 6 am I admitted defeat & just got up. By 6:30 it was starting to get light & by 7 am it was full-blown beautiful daylight. I suppose when you live here you get used to the highly-compressed dawns & dusks but at this point I am still mightily impressed.

We were picked up right on schedule at 8:30 and shortly after 9 we began our day of meetings to find out more about MRI. It was a most productive day from that perspective. We listened first to Dr. Nruma, the Chair of the Advisory Committee and a very big player in mining education in Tanzania (internationally too, I believe). We learned that foreign mining companies operating in Tanzania will often import their skilled labour rather than hire Tanzanian technicians, because a) there are simply not enough trained Tanzanian mining technicians & b) the Tanzanian technicians may not be trained to the same standard as the foreigners. This fact certainly sheds some light on the strong desire to modernize technical training & evolve it to a more competency-based system.

We also heard about the various programs offered at MRI, the variety of students who participate in them, the challenges faced in evolving the system. Listening, you quickly become impressed with the intelligence, resourcefulness & passion of the educators here. Good educators do not choose a substandard system, they wrestle with it.

We arrived back at the hotel by about 5 pm, to find out that the internet is still not working. The computer technician has (perhaps) been called but no-one knows when he will be out to look at the system. Really: the food is lousy, the rooms are dark, there is no place at all to walk, & it's kind of buggy. We did get the hot water issue figured out... However, tomorrow we will see if there are any reasonable alternatives for accommodations.

And tomorrow we start in earnest our own presentations. We spent a few hours debriefing the day & fine-tuning the first couple of sessions but now it's time to call it a night.