Oddly and unpredictably enough, it appears that I will both begin and end my time in Tanzania at an orphanage: having started in Karatu, helping to raise a co-ed group of primary school-aged children, I find myself now in Mbezi Louis helping to educate 140 secondary school girls who have spent their whole previous lives on the streets or in the shambas of Tanzania.

The pressures and the schedules here are at the Olania school are intense: at 5:30 this morning I was awoken by the girls singing hymns to the pitch black sky; they had already been out of bed for an hour, having only slept for five preceding that. Their long days are consumed with a combination of hard study and hard physical labor: when there is not enough of one or the other, the headmistress, Mama Maristella, invents something for the girls to do. For instance, as I write, she is directing a crowd to level the land around the school dining hall; this is, in many respects, a senseless effort: the school is terraced into a precipitously sloped hillside of sand, and to level the land would require many months’ work with heavy machinery and supports for the shifting soil. Mama Maristella, however, expects them to dig away for the rest of the daylight hours, the crowds of purple and red clad girls swinging hoes high into the air and sinking them into soil that has already been dampened and loosened by buckets of water.

Yet Mama Maristella is neither sadistic nor insane. The stakes here are just incredibly, unbelievably high.

For everything about the existence of this school and the continuance of these girls’ educations is tenuous. The school subsists strictly on charitable donations; if no local parish sends a truck on Saturday, the meager gardens that the girls rake and hoe and water from five until seven at night are their only source of sustenance that week. Their scholarly futures are similarly uncertain: Olania can only offer the first four—instead of the full six—years of secondary school, and once the class of fourth-year students takes their completion exams in August, they will be on their own again, as legal adults. How they fare, once released back into the world that Olania “rescued” them from hangs on what they have learned—at the very least, in order to try to continue their education elsewhere or get a job in Dar es Salaam, they will need excellent English skills and high grades on the leaving exams. For Mama Maristella, then, every moment is crucial: if the girls are not tending the gardens, they may well starve tomorrow; if they are not studying their books, they may well starve next year. The work she invents is conceived and born of this desperate vision.

At the same time—as much as I rebel against this tableau of constant, unending work, this version of adolescence spent in a semi-convent without a moment’s rest—it is not all so dire. The girls’ exam results are incredible: despite Olania’s meager resources, the scores on last year’s leaving exams placed the school 27th out of a regional crowd of 538 other secondary academies. Moreover, the scene is not one out of Oliver Twist or Annie, the girls are engaging and engaged, they dance as they carry water to the garden or stand to sing during a pause in their afternoon study time. They laugh; they do aerobics with a German volunteer on Wednesday afternoons. They mercilessly tease the only male volunteer (he can never find his flip flops).

Indeed, as much as they are driven by Mama Maristella, there is in them the seeds of their own internal drive: whether the headmistress has lit that light or whether the girls came here with it already flickering, it is amazing to see.