All's good in Mili

The past couple of weeks in the village have been excellent. My standard 6 pupils are finally starting to get past their teenage grumpiness and shyness and now participate and enjoy my lessons... who knows, they may even understand personal pronouns by the time I leave! Standard 4 continue to be fun to teach but it is forever a losing battle with some children trying to get them to learn English when they still can not read or write in Kiswahili. Marking 70 books is tiring enough but when you can not read what half of them have written despite the fact that they should have copied it from the board, it's a real chore. At least most children in the school now arrive with a pen or pencil since receiving one each from us at Christmas. That makes life a bit easier!

Another major problem we have been facing is that a lot of children do not come to school everyday or they turn up at lessons half way through. With the shortage of teachers and the physical openness of the building it is really difficult to control this. It is so frustrating when you spend several lessons teaching a class of 70 kids and then the next day half of them don't come to school but a different 20 turn up with no idea what you taught yesterday. In my standard 4 class there should be 130 children! Thank goodness they don't come to school at once in some ways... there is no where for them to sit for a start. However, they are never going to get a good education by turning up when they like.

So Joanna and I put our teacher heads together and organised some staff meetings to try and solve some difficult behaviour issues, the main ones being absence, lateness, fighting and swearing. We discussed why pupils were often absent/ late and among others the teachers gave us reasons such as they are hungry and go looking for fruit in the forest, they live 1-2 hours walk away from school, they have no parents to look after them, they have to work on the farm or look after younger brothers and sisters, they have no teacher for most of their lessons... and so on. We laughed at some of the smaller problems that come up and made new rules such as No ducklings, goats or chickens in the classroom! and No baby brothers or sisters! How different life is here from home. Sometimes I do think it is a lot to expect of a child to sit in a classroom with no teacher for hours on end with no toys, resources, posters on the walls etc... in fact most of them have only got half a wall and a dusty floor! But still they have to learn to behave well.

I have been busy writing a new behaviour policy this weekend and hope that it has a major affect on the school and in turn, on the village. The Head Teacher has long wanted to get rid of the cane and has lots of great ideas, but did not know how to go about making changes so really appreciated our training and support. The three major things to motivate pupils to come to school more would be having enough desks to sit at, having enough teachers and knowing that their education could lead to going on to secondary school. Now that the desks are being made, that is one problem taken care of and the first classroom of the secondary school is almost complete.

The lack of teachers unfortunately is a problem which is only getting worse. In a few weeks Joanna, Tuba and I have to leave because our visas expire, leaving poor Leila as the only volunteer. Unfortunately as yet there are no volunteers wishing to come to Milingano in the foreseable future so I am glad that I am coming back in August for a few weeks. Mr Baruani who is the best local teacher in the school has been there for 8 years and has had enough of the hard life so he will also be leaving soon. It is awful to think that soon there could be just 7 teachers between 900 pupils on register. We are hoping that the Head Teacher can use the information we have put together to convince the authorities to send more teachers to Milingano. Unfortunately there is a major shortage of teachers in the country and most of them would far prefer to work in a town than a remote village.

If anyone is interested in teaching in Milingano for a few months, please get in touch with Personal Overseas Development (www.thepodsite.co.uk) and find out more.