PBH Approves Project Tanganyika; Teaching Group Begins Fifth Year

Project Tanganyika, the volunteer teaching program in East Africa sponsored by Phillips Brooks House, has gained special PBH Cabinet approval for the fifth straight year.

The Project plans to send a dozen Harvard and Radcliffe students to Tanganyika in June, 1965, to teach for a year in several locations. Applications for the 1965 Project are now being solicited, and the volunteers will be screened and chosen before the Christmas vacation.

Malcolm R. Pfunder '65, vice-president of PBH, explained that the Project has the status of a "provisional standing committee" and as such must get yearly approval before it can begin raising funds and selecting volunteers. After two extensive reports last week by the Project's organizers, the Cabinet voted it unanimous support.

Project Tangnyika was started in the fall of 1960, some six months before the Peace Corps began, and the first group of 18 teachers arrived in Dares Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika, in June, 1961. Initially a summer program, the Project took teachers for a full year in its second group, and last year the summer portion was dropped completely.

Refugee Work Planned

Gail M. Gillam '65-3 and John D. Gerhart '65-3, leaders of the 1965 Project, said that the Project's members would be working mainly with refugees and in special non-government schools, where Peace Corps teachers usually do not or can not work.

At present there are nine students teaching in Tanganyika, six of whom are working primarily with refugees. Two members are teaching refugees from Rwanda at a camp in the northwestern part of the country, and four others are instructors at a special school for refugees fom southern Africa, located in Dares Salaam. Two members teach seventh and eighth graders in an African middleschool near the city and one is a history tutor at an adult-education college there.

Plans for the 1965 Project will be explained at an introductory meeting for interested students on Monday, September 26, at PBH. Swahill classes for the group are planned during the spring.