By Aman Mchau
Kisimiri Secondary School in Ngarenanyuki ward now has a modern high
school after running under tree shades and in an old building since
1994.
The Kisimiri school which is the only co-educational special talents school at A level in Tanzania now boasts of modern buildings including sufficient teachers quarters surpassing even better placed urban- based schools.
This positive development at Kisimiri school has come about through an Arusha born
President of Swiss Intermediate Education Fund, Professor Emil Karafiat, who was also brought up at Kisimiri until age of 12 years when his mother died. His father had to be sent home to Switzerland due to illness and died in 1965. He also had to leave Tanzania then.
Karafiat said Kisimiri, his childhood residence, had never gone out of his memory so he made a point of visiting it in 1994 and found students attending lessons under trees and in a dilapidated old estate buildings something that gave him a strong feeling to extend support towards the village.
So on return to Switzerland he started mobilising supporters to contribute towards a fund to develop the Kisimiri secondary school.
Karafiat told The Arusha Times that among the respondents towards Kisimiri school was Professor Nava Settler, the President of Swiss Talent Foundation who decided to take care of the high school. He transformed what was once an eyesore to a well- furnished co-educational special talents high school after the government of Tanzania had given him a go- ahead.
Professor Karafiat said he has prepared enough solar panels for supply of power in the school as the area has no electricity. The school, he said, must have computers and satellite communication system for better global contacts for the students and teachers.
The Swiss supporters have also planned to offer annual study tours of three weeks for teachers working in secondary schools based in Arumeru district to give them exposure and hence improve their teaching proficiency.
Karafiat was born in Arusha municipality (then township) in 1951, brought up by his parents in an estate at Kisimiri until he was 12 years old in the early sixties. He is now a Professor of English at the KME University in Switzerland.
He thanked the people of Tanzania and the government for their cooperation and commitment and promised to go on supporting educational efforts in Tanzania as he believes education is a pre-requisite in any meaningful advancement of humanity.
The founding head of the Kisimiri High School, Abner Mrema, said the school that he and his colleagues started under the forbidding conditions has at long last grown into the present ultra-
modern institution through the efforts of Professor Karafiat who had decided to extend a helping hand to the villages of his childhood.
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