Rain, mud and tossed classes

Day 3 – April 30

This morning it took us over an hour to get to school today. The rains started early, around 5:00am, and didn’t let up at all through the morning commute. We arrived at school just a few minutes after 8:00am to find no teachers there. However, the headmaster had been expecting this; many of the teachers come from far away and, just as for us, the rainy conditions make getting to the school a long and arduous process as it usually means choosing each step carefully as you walk down a long, slippery, muddy route. The headmaster said that on days like this the first two periods are often lost as teachers don’t show up until mid-morning.

Neither of the English teachers was there so I sat for a while in the staff room reading a book on planning lessons with no resources. Just into 3rd period, the headmaster came in and asked me if I wanted to observe a math class (I had asked earlier). He showed me to the Form IIB class where Mr. Nzara was teaching a lesson on quadratic equations. With heavily overcast skies outside and nothing more than the windows to light the room, it was very dark inside. The low-quality blackboards were very hard to read in such light and I wondered how students with less-than-great vision and the visual learners were managing with the board work. In addition, the pattering of the rain on the sheet aluminium roof made what the teacher and the students were saying almost impossible to hear.

The teacher was going very quickly through the lesson, checking every so often if the students were grasping the concepts with a perfunctory, “Ok? All together class,” to which the students replied in unison, “Yes.” The responses were drone-like and only led me to wonder if they were actually getting it. Some were, certainly, as evidenced by correct answers to certain questions posed by the students, but I’m sure others weren’t and there was nothing really done to check either way.

After the class I went back to the staff room. One of the English teachers had arrived but she was sitting at her desk doing work even though she was scheduled to be teaching the Form I class. I didn’t know what to make of it and didn’t know what to do, but the headmaster wanted me to accompany him to town anyway so he could introduce me to the regional education officer, so we headed off. I still feel a little out of place there and am not sure at all how things work.
The situation was made a little clearer for me by the headmaster as we started our trek into town. The first part was a precarious walk down a long road made slippery with mud by the rains. What we could have walked on a paved road in 15 minutes took us one hour and it was clear to me the amount of time wasted in a headmaster’s day by having to move around on roads like these, without a vehicle to boot. After the walk we packed into a over-stuffed communal bus for the 10-minute ride into town.

Our shoes caked with mud, the headmaster decided to get his cleaned by a shoe-shine guy on the side of the street. As we waited, he called a carpenter, who came to join us and talk about building desks for the students with the donations I had brought.

After a good half hour, we continued on to the Regional Office and were lucky to get a short sitting with the education officer. It’s a good thing we did, too, as after my introduction he proceeded to tell the headmaster that the government should have been advised of the internship before my arrival. He advised the headmaster to write a proper letter of introduction right away and deliver it on Friday. For me, however, he had a big smile and thanked me for coming. He also asked me to encourage other friends to volunteer here, as they very much need the help in the school system.

Our short meeting there finished, we went to a café to have a drink and wait for a teacher from the school to bring copies of the drawn up term examinations that had to be submitted to the regional education office by 3:30pm that afternoon. Originally, the principal was to have brought them with him, but a number of the teachers had shown up late (as mentioned above), and didn’t have their work completed when they did eventually show up. So we waited an incredible amount of time before the teacher finally showed up and when he did, it seems he didn’t have the examinations for all the subjects and so the headmaster could not submit them anyway. By this time it was 3:00pm and the whole day, to me, seemed an exercise in wasted time. After another café stop and chat with the vice-principal from Malewa SS, we headed home.