Wednesday Night Rotary Club

Last night, Jenny and Mike invited me to go to their weekly meeting with them, so I did. It's a new club, about six weeks old, and they are not yet chartered. There were 17 people, seven female and six muzungus. Some had Fantas and some had a Mosi. The scheduled speaker did not attend, and there was a critical discussion about this. He is the head teacher at the Mfuwe School and was supposed to talk about standards. Instead, a school teacher talked about the problems of education in the Valley. Number one is hunger. The children are hungry. Number two is over enrollment. The classes have between 70-90 students and this is too many. Next, there are no books. The government is supposed to provide text books for the students, but there are no books. Typically there is one book which the teacher uses. Infrastructure was next on the list. There are not enough teachers. Also, many of the teachers do not do their jobs. They are seen at the bank and this is not good to leave the students. The teachers who have heart are good teachers. They care about the country. Many teachers do not have heart. Absenteeism is also a problem. This led into the last problem of no parental support. The parents do not insist the students go to school. They do not support them with books. Although this topic did not come up, parental support has got to be extra challenging with a great percentage of the kids not having parents! Having two parents is very, very unusual. When the speaker was finished it was opened to questions. There were a few. Jenny wanted to know who was responsible for providing textbooks and the answer was 'the government.' Evidently, books are provided every five years but they disappear rapidly. After the discussion on education, it was open to other business. Dave of Project Luangwa had forms for villages needing bore holes dug. Jenny wondered if the village at the far bridge needed a bore hole because she often sees them digging in the dry river bed sand for water. The Rotary president was going to follow up on it. The paperwork needed to be completed by the village chief. Last of all, I was asked to share something. So, I mentioned that we used to struggle with parent involvement until we started opening the schools to family nights. I said this has been successful for us in developing partnerships. I couldn't bring myself to mention that we feed the families all the pizza and hotdogs they can eat. Besides not having food, many of the villages don't have electricity. When I left the meeting I had a feeling of hopelessness. There are so many problems. Then, this morning Jenny and I went to Uyoba School, as we have been doing each day, and worked with the kids who showed up. This is their four week holiday, yet many came to learn. We continued to work on vocabulary words by teaching them charades. Then, they painted their words on paper and wrote a sentence using the word. We hung these posters on the walls, the only color in the room and the only objects on the walls. It was also the first time they had ever done anything at school besides listening to a teacher who stood in the front of the room lecturing. They wanted to learn and they did learn. So, I found the HOPE.