Meeting the students

Day 2 – April 29

The commute to the school is not an easy one, especially when it has rained. We left the house just before 7am, walking along a few neighbourhood roads. In no time, our shoes were caked in mud and the cuffs of our pants stained red. At a certain point, we trudged carefully on a shortcut path through a bean field, leading to a nearby hospital. From there, we caught a collective bus for a kilometre or so. When the weather is nice, the bus will often go right near the school, but on wet days like today it turns around early because the roads are too muddy. So, we continued on foot, walking for another 20 minutes or so, the last of it through coffee plantations and corn fields. The air wasn’t extremely warm, but the humidity is incredibly high, so it doesn’t take much to sweat early in the morning.

Just before 8:00, we arrived at the school and two students approached us and took our bags from us and carried them into the office ahead of us. I felt that I had all eyes on me as I walked with him through the schoolyard, but the students were all smiling, and a few of them even ventured a “Good morning, sir.” They wear wine-coloured uniforms; the boys wear pants; the girls, skirts, and both wear white shirts and maroon sweaters.

The school grounds are quite small. There are 4 rough, brick buildings that are each divided into two classrooms. The classrooms are as spartan as can be imagined, containing two old blackboards and the desks for the students. The walls are still raw brick and the roof is sheet aluminium. There is no glass on the windows and there are no lights in the room (the school has no electricity).

What will be the headmaster’s office is currently being used by all the staff as construction on the staffroom (a separate building) has only just begun. However, even for the staff there are not enough desks and chairs for everyone.

The headmaster told me that classes start at 8:00am. However, while all the students were there at that time, only two teachers were present. Apparently the wet weather (it wasn’t raining but had rained) makes transport a lot more difficult and much more time-consuming.
So one of the students rang the bell (literally, a hand bell), and the headmaster addressed all the students in the open ground between the classroom buildings. They were all abuzz about the new foreigner. The headmaster was firm in telling them to be quiet, but friendly when addressing them.

It seems that their English is already quite good. Swahili students begin learning English as a subject in grade one, so by Form I (grade 8, the first grade of high school), the students can already read well and understand spoken English quite decently. In addition to this, since Swahili uses the same alphabet as English, they are already proficient in writing the language.
The headmaster introduced me to all the students and then I spoke very briefly to them myself. When he asked them where Canada was, no one could reply correctly. Most thought it was a country somewhere in Africa. It’s evident that they know as little about North America as North Americans know about Africa.

After our brief assembly, the headmaster showed me the classrooms and the kitchen, a roofless half-building where an old woman had a large cauldron over a wood fire, camp style. We then saw the two English teachers coming up the walk, so we greeted them and then I went inside to talk with them a little about what would be happening with the classes. Both teachers are quite young women, but very friendly. They showed me the syllabus for Form I-IV, which was a fairly thin booklet. I told them that I would like to observe classes for a couple of days to see exactly what they teach and exactly how they teach it, and they seemed fine with that.

We then left the school and visited a neighbouring (literally) high school. While Chief Sabas SS has been open for only a year, Mawella SS was built in 2000 (still pretty recently!). The difference was clear though, in the buildings that had been painted, dedicated staff and department rooms (however primitive), and electricity in selected rooms of the school. A few of the buildings bore plaques stating that they had been built with financing from American and Canadian relief efforts. This school also had a computer lab containing old computers, likely donated from Europe or the United States. Their library is scheduled to open sometime in July; the building is built, the shelves are inside and they have plastic patio furniture for chairs and tables. The books, mostly donated through organizations like Books for Africa, will be logged and shelved over the course of the next few months.

Teachers here earn little. Their take-home pay for one month is about $140 USD, and the headmaster, surprisingly, makes no more than the regular teachers. Given the relatively high cost of living here (a bottle of beer is $1), I can’t understand how they make the money stretch a month.

Tomorrow I will have more of a chance to interact with the students as I observe the classes.