With Monday morning brings the end of WLT!! It was successful - our tactic was to invite two women from each NGO with 10/11 NGOs per day. This way we invited 20 per day, with the hopes of 12 showing up every day. Thursday we had 12, Friday we had 18, Saturday we had 20, and Sunday we had 10. However, not as many confirmed as those that showed up, and so the numbers (especially Friday and Saturday) were more then we expected - fantastic!
Needs Assessment is still progressing, with the goal of having all of the NGOs completed by Saturday June 2nd. Around half are done, which is pretty good progress for all of the logistics of finding time when the NGO members are available, as well as the people assigned to visit them. Hurrah! It is all getting done.
Now I have to write 3 reports. Yippie! And I arrive home in 13 days - which means I board the plane in 12 days (24 hours of travel, more Yippie!).
Before I give a more detailed update about the projects and results of my programs (in another post), I wanted to shed a little light on education, from a book that I borrowed from Ben: The Betrayal of Africa - Gerald Caplan.
"As anyone who's visited an African school can attest, just attending school is hardly the same as getting an education. With few exceptions, and especially in rural and city slum schools, students are likely to endure wildly overcrowded classrooms, few learning resources, lack of clean water and proper sanitation, no separate toilets for girls, no capacity to feed hungry children, not enough teachers, teachers who are untrained, unmotivated, badly paid, often absent, and teachers who use harsh, authoritarian methods of discipline to hammer home their teacher through memory work alone".
Here are more of the facts: A lot of schools do not have clean water for the students, but comes out of a spout in the middle of the "school-yard", many of the toilets do not have doors or appropriate waste systems so the waste ends up on the ground around the toilets. Some classrooms are packed with 100 students (- 100 students! I don't think I could even fit 100 students into my elementary school classroom in Ontario.)
In 2005 barely 60% of children in sub-Saharan Africa went to primary school. This is the lowest enrolment anywhere in the world - more than 40 MILLION African children received no schooling - that is almost half of the school-aged child population.
Don't forget the gender inequalities - 2/3 of those who do not receive an education are girls. In terms of secondary school, only 27% of boys and 21% of girls attend. If you want to talk university, only 6% of males and 4% of females attend - for a comparison, 2/3 of students in rich countries go to post-secondary institutions.
This is just the tip of the iceberg - and obviously different countries have different statistics, because even though a lot of people like to think Africa is one big mash of a place, it is actually 54 separate nations.
However, in my own experiences (this year and last year in Morogoro) I witnessed these practices in the school system of Tanzania. Overcrowded classrooms; teachers not trained; teachers who do not care; harsh discipline - often involving being beaten with a stick; children being let off of school early, not coming to school; teachers not showing up for school; a tap in the middle of the school buildings that serves as drinking water and a place to wash your hands; bathroom stalls (a building on its own, not in the school) missing doors so people watch while you use the washroom; inadequate bathroom sewage so waste is no drained properly, or at all, spewing out of the stalls.
This is 'the Africa' most people think about from the Western world. This isn't true for every place, and in fact some of the schools I visited had adequate toilet facilities, and regular hours, for example. But the statistics point to the same phenomenon of inadequate education systems in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa - in large part due to SAPs (structural adjustment programs) by the IMF and World Bank. There are a lot of factors at play, and I by no measure know the solution to the problem. What I do know, however, is the appreciation for education and knowledge from people who are not given it: when you have to fight to attend school, you do not take it for granted.
Education. School. Grades1-12. Post-secondary education. The availability of OSAP and bank loans. These are things which, in Canada, are either mandatory (school) or easily attainable (loans to attend school). There are misfortunate and poor people in Canada, I know this. And attaining education is not easy for them, and I am not reducing their hardships or their experience or their lust for knowledge and education. But nothing compares to the appreciation of education and knowledge from those who do not have easy access to it.
So for today, when you read this, think of your education. Think of the days you whined and cried to your parents because you didn't want to go to school, because your teacher was mean, because you didn't care; or when you were just too lazy to get up for that 8:30am lecture. Then think of all the other places in the world where children do not get an education because they cannot afford the annual $12 USD school fee (ex: Kenya at one point in time); where there is no school in their rural village; or where children go to school during the day when they can, and work all night selling plastic bags at the market or nuts in the traffic-jammed street of the big city.
Think of all the people in the world where education is a dream, not a reality.
Remember how fortunate you are. Then get dressed and go to school.
Jamie the inspirational speaker! Love you!!
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