Three sticks...

June 1 is International Children's day and Mozambique is going to celebrate. No holding back on sugar, as many cakes and sweets as can be afforded will be granted to the waiting little hands, no longer grubby on this special day. Certainly that amount of sugar is likely much less than what might be allotted during an American Easter week. It is very unevenly distributed to include almost exclusively the children in urban areas. It will contribute to the rotting of teeth.

Nonetheless I think the idea of celebrating children, especially those who are often overlooked, is a good step towards helping them acheive their potential... Which I'm realizing more and more, is more often than not being acheived here in Mozambique. I hope that doesn't sound too harsh, but I say it because I've been realizing more and more deeply how poor the education system is in this country.

Third graders who can't write their own names.

Fifth graders who can't yet even try to sound out words they've never seen.

Very few children can recite the alphabet in its proper order.

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Some primary school students in the Anglican school in Sena

I wrote these first few paragraphs a week ago, on May 31st. I visited a state-run primary school in a rural location on June 2nd, a Monday, a school day. But I found no children and no teachers. "Why?" I asked. Yesterday was a holiday, the teachers were probably drinking, was the response I heard. (the holiday, you might recall, is CHILDREN's day).

I returned to the same school on Friday morning. The morning term is supposed to start at 7 a.m. and go til 11 a.m. At 8:30 the children had finally arrived and started sweeping the yard, at 8:45 they sang the national anthem and finally started classes. They had at least a half an hour interval (I don't call it a recess because I associate recesses with playing on the playground...these kids just fight or sit in the dust). They left school at 11 a.m.

It's honestly only now, in my fourth year of work here that I'm really really realizing, as I said above, how drastically poor the quality of these schools are. The big push these days is for there to be education for all, and actually Mozambique is improving drastically, most children at least start school, though they still don't get very far. But, the "education" they're getting, is not what I would equate to education. It's the sort of things that I could rant on about for quite some time. Instead, I'm including a report that I recently wrote for Global Family (a branch of MCC that is now giving our project funding). For the interested it will hopefully give a bit more understanding to the issues of what I'm talking about. For the uninterested, skip to the bottom to see another picture.

A famous bear, called Winnie-the-Pooh, once said, “To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.” Decades of oppressive colonialism, war, and the ensuing poverty have left a high percentage of Mozambicans illiterate. But since the end of their civil war in 1992, a generation of children are growing up with a new hope of education As the Anglican church reaches out to rural communities throughout their ecclesiastical district, they realize that there are still children lacking this hope and see it as part of their mission to bring access to quality education.

Writing Names: The context
The Ecclesiastical District of Pungue covers three provinces in central Mozambique. In the past six years these areas have suffered from drought, floods and cyclones, severely affecting the food security of the population made of eighty percent subsistence farmers. Ever-increasing national and international traffic has heightened the spread of HIV/AIDS in the region where the infection rate is as high as 35% in some places. These situations along with general poverty have affected the number of schools available, the attendance of children, and the number of trained teachers. While the majority of children are able to attend early primary school, the classes are over-flowing, with as many as 70 or 80 children per teacher and the children only study for 3 hours a day in order for other terms to enter.

Beyond these problems, erosion and depletion of the soil have forced these agricultural dependent communities to relocate to areas far from schools, hospitals, or other governmental facilities in search of fertile land. The government does not have the capacity to follow these nomadic movements and open a school in each new zone. So the children in these communities either walk long distances to attend school or don’t attend at all. Because of these distances and a lack of awareness of the importance of sending children to school at a young age, children start grade one when they are eight or nine years old. This delay, and the fact that the children are learning in Portuguese, their second language, makes it more difficult to learn well and to complete a higher level education.

In Zove, a rural community where children speak Ndau, a Bantu language, a group of third graders were asked at the start of the year to draw a picture of themselves and write their name under it. Only two of the twelve could actually write their names.

Looking for readers: The church’s response
As the Anglican Church searched for leaders in these areas, they found it difficult to find literate church members to read the Bible and liturgy. This opened their eyes to the fact that not only were many of the adults unschooled, but that in many of the rural communities there was no school close by for young children. The communities asked for help in organizing schools and since 2000, the Anglican church has been instrumental in initiating nine primary schools, six of which the government now supports with paid teachers and books. They have also started fifteen preschools, identifying the need for an early start to education.

Transforming the sticks: The preschools
As a church community decides to start a preschool, it works together to mobilize the children, volunteer teachers, and a place where the classes can take place, usually in the church building made of local material or in the shade of a tree. The church on the level of the District arranges for training of the preschool teachers and informs the government branch of Social Action who is responsible for supervision of preschools.

The preschools are safe places where young children can be nurtured spiritually, physically, emotionally, socially, and in a deeper cognitive way without the intimidation that often occurs in the primary schools. The children sing, dance, play games and do exercises, draw, have a free play time, hear Bible stories and other local stories and poems, and are led in simple activities. Toys and educational materials are often made out of locally available materials such as clay, recycled items, wood, reeds, or bamboo. The teachers are trained in how young children learn and how to treat them with love and care. The letter A becomes more than just three sticks only when children are in the right environment full of positive stimulation and love.

Part of that environment must be assuring physical health, and the need for better nutrition is obvious in many of the children of these preschools. The Anglican Church with the support of MCC has been able to provide a breakfast of sweet potatoes or porridge with ground peanuts for three of the schools.

The church district works to coordinate and monitor the work of the community schools through the work of a central office. A field official frequently visits each preschool working with the leaders and teachers to discover how the community can fully support its preschool or primary school and assure that it will continue for years to come. This includes agriculture projects, such as small fields for raising corn, peanuts, sesame, or vegetables that can sustain the breakfast programs, or building a structure with more resistant materials.

Walk for Chalk: Your involvement
The community of Nhartuzo is located approximately sixteen kilometers from the nearest primary school. So when two youth from the Anglican Church started giving preschool and first grade classes last year, the church through MCC helped them by giving a blackboard. Half way through the year when their chalk ran out, the two teachers walked to the school to ask for a few pieces of chalk for their classes.

Your Global Family sponsorship will support these preschools and primary schools in the District of Pungue by providing some simple educational materials such as chalkboards, chalk, story cards and children’s books in Portuguese. However, to ensure that they will be able to continue to obtain these materials even without outside help the project includes funding of agriculture projects and works at internal community management and organization.

Along with some additional MCC funds, the Global Family support will also provide for trainings for new teachers and continued learning for others. It grants the field official to travel and support the communities with capacity-building and encouragement, both abstractly as the work at management of the schools, but also concretely with better facilities.



Me on my first day of school, January in North Dakota.