Dear Friends,   Over the past 15 years St. Mary’s Mazinde Juu has played an important role in bringing quality education to a forgotten corner of the Usambara Mountains and to the neglected children of the poor farmers whose daughters could only dream of school.  Now it became a reality with a door opening to their future.  And they have begun a determined march through that door in the hundreds since that propitious opening in 1989.    MAZINDE JUU: 1989   On the crest of the restoration of cordial relations between the Government and the missions, Mazinde Juu Secondary School opened its doors in Feb. 1989 just 100 years after the collapse of the doors of our first school in the flames of Blushiri’s uprising in 1889.   How gratified Sister Maetha Wanzing would be today to know that there are secure and loving places for children to learn and to grow safe from flames and gunfire as she witnessed in Pugu a hundred years ago.   The opening of St. Mary’s Mazinde Juu secondary school for girls has a curious nativity and one not without anxiety and pangs.  Our local bishop at the time was a very conservative individual.  He rebuked me as an intruder when I made the suggestion of staring a school for girls in the remote Usambara mountain area of his diocese of Tanga.  He informed me that the most important things for African women to know were how to bear healthy children, raise her family as Christians and never shame her husband.  Anything more than this, his Excellency told me, was idle distractions in mind of a woman.  Providentially this man resigned after a few short months and his successor blessed the whole school project enthusiastically.    When we started our first class of 40 there was still an undercurrent of cynicism about such a school for local village children.  Teachers from the local primary chided me for filling the school with what they styled “waste basket” children.  They were convinced that the local children would never be able to make the grade competing with the children from the cities and the wealthy areas in the pursuit of higher education.   Now with the school a success and the children performing with top academic honors the critics have a new complaint.

They say that we have a school that caters only to the elite, also that we have neglected the children of the poor.  My simple reply is that we do not select the elite, rather we take in the poor and neglected and make them the elite.  What is education after all but "e-ducate", to lead out from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge.       PERFORMANCE   We took the National form four Examination for the first time in 1992.  Not to praise ourselves but we have done well fdrom the very beginning.  For years we have been amoung the highest academic scoring secondary schools in the country.  Out of 635 registered secondary schools now we are consistently among the top 20.  Our college entrance rate is over 90%.   SCHOLARSHIPS   Friends in Europe and America who have seen and appreciated the work being done here at Mazinde Juu have make it possible for 12 of our African Sisters to pursue University degrees in America.  All of these Sisters are back in Africa now sharing the gift of knowledge that they were so generously given.  15 former Mazinde Juu students presently are studying at Universites in Europe and America.  For me one of the greatest pleasures is to see one of our former students walk into the classroom and stand at the teacher’s desk in the very classroom where she herself started out a first year student in 1989.  These to me are signs of growth, signs of permanence, signs of promise for the future.