The General Langfitt Story
Chapter 5 - Dispersal (continued)
Zdzislawa Wasylkowska, her mother Anna and sister Aleksandra Wisniewska arrived in Tengeru in 1944 after spending two years in Tehràn.
How we cried when we arrived in Tengeru! After all the civilisation in Tehràn where, although the conditions were not so good, you could at least get out, go to the pictures, and see the Persian sights and the shops. Here we were in a camp in the middle of nowhere. After a while you get used to many things. With time we made friends. You do when you are young. For my mother, who was a young woman with two children, it was no life but she just got over it.
I stayed at school until I matriculated and then I tried to get out of the camp. I got a job as a nanny in Kenya but they recognised that I was not the material for children and sent me back to Tengeru where I got a position in the school. I had no advice on how to teach. You just went to the class and did what you could. But you know, I was good at it. My mother was a teacher, my father was a teacher, three uncles were teachers. I think I was a born teacher and I looked to see how other people teach. We had hardly any resources so you improvised and tried to remember what you had learnt. The Polish army printed some school books and that was a great help. I still have some here. That was a help. Secondary school in Africa didn't have very high standards. In Tehràn yes, but not in Tengeru. Anyway we taught and we tried to learn and eventually I was teaching history, which is my favourite subject, and geography so I really liked it.
Helena Lancucka had been a teacher in Poland before the war and once she regained her health, she went back to teaching at Tengeru. She recalled the health problems, particularly malaria, which plagued many of the school children, observing that 'Africa is tough for white people'. At first there were not enough qualified teachers and they had to organise classes outside until more buildings were erected.
Initially, I was a primary teacher and then I became the administrator of the agricultural school where I also gave Polish language lessons. After our life in the Soviet Union, we were very happy. We had meals and we had school. We organised a teachers' kitchen where we paid for a cook to prepare our meals. I saw many young people grow up in Africa. Many of our pupils were eighteen or twenty years old, only girls, and many of the students were corresponding with our soldiers in England and Italy. After the war some of the girls married them. We had one sewing machine and a dressmaker who taught the girls. The other teacher taught cooking and cultivation of vegetable gardens. That was experimental because it was very different in the tropics to what we were used to. We tried growing some medical herbs and corn but when that was ripe some big animals came and ate it.
Wladyslawa Smenda was also a qualified teacher who taught at Tengeru. She had clear memories of the difficulties of teaching without resources.
It was very hard in the first weeks and months. We had nothing until we got help from the American Polish Association who sent us books. I had one lexicon (encyclopaedia) so if I forgot something that was the only thing I had for researching. It was very hard to prepare lessons because we had only the storm lamps - the kerosene lamps. I lost my eyesight because we had to make our own ruled paper for the kids in our homes at night. We had to do everything for ourselves. It was very hard at first.
Many of our students were three or four years behind so we had 18-year-olds in the first year of high school along with 12- or I 3-year-olds. I was very strict and they didn't like it much then, but when they grew up they appreciated it. As a teacher you have satisfaction when you see what you are making for these children as they grow from first form to fourth form.
The camps were full of women and girls as more and more of the boys joined the army. Aleksandra Wisniewska, who finished her school years in Tengeru, reflected on the low number of males.
Although there were hardly any men, I didn't find it strange. If you don't know something you don't miss it. But when I went out of the camp I felt very shy. This was the consequence. We used to have school dances and girls used to dance with girls. That was normal for us so, when we got to a right environment it was strange. It wasn't normal because you didn't talk to somebody different. Usually we made friends of the same age, from the same classroom, from the same school, and always females. We lived in a very protected environment. You couldn't think for yourself, you couldn't make decisions for yourself. In a way, everything was decided and done for you.