Vera Stücker, Director of Ngila coffee farm in Tanzania, recently conducted an interview with Miss Goodness, the head of local primary school Sumawe. Ngila has a special relationship with Sumawe Primary; since 2005 they’ve been supporting the school by providing learning materials and installing infrastructure like solar panels and water collection.
*Why does Miss Goodness say she works from 1 until 9, but Vera says 7 until 4? This is because in countries like Tanzania that speak Swahili have clocks that are a bit different to the ones we’re familiar with in Europe. Our ‘zero hour’ (00:00) is midnight, whereas Swahili time’s zero hour is sunrise (which tends to be a consistent time throughout the year in these countries as they are near the equator).
So if we went to visit Tanzania, we might try to say that it’s 7am an hour after the sun rises, but Miss Goodness would correct us to say that it’s actually 1am!
In the video above Vera was kind enough to translate the time for us so that we wouldn’t be confused; thank you Vera!