Bad Hair Day

"Some of you have come to school without combing your hair today. You look very untidy! Please remember to comb your hair every morning!"

I look around the sea of shaved heads and wonder to whom this remark is addressed. Can it be me…? No-one else, so far as I can see, has enough hair to cover their scalp let alone to pull a comb through; however, the pupils look appropriately chastened and run their hands over their heads in a gesture of compliance.

"What is more," continues the teacher who is taking morning prayers today "What is more, some of you have not cleaned your shoes today!". The children look down at their feet, many of them bare, others shod in a variety of ill-fitting, uncleanable footwear caked with the unavoidable playground mud, and shuffle nervously as the teacher glares at them. The same ritual takes place every day, once the hymns have been sung and the prayers said. As well as being reprimanded regularly for the state of their hair and their shoes the children are admonished for their untidy uniform – despite the fact that for many these are in tatters – and for not having washed well enough. A glimmer of understanding of this seemingly unfair and inappropriate daily haranguing is beginning to dawn on me: just because you are poor, the teacher is subtly reminding them, you don't have to lose your self-respect. If you were to have hair it would have had to have been combed; if you had shoes to wear you would be expected to polish them. Poverty is no excuse for letting yourself go: you can still take a pride in your appearance and look the world in the eye. Standards, even in the poorest part of rural Uganda, must be maintained....

Morning prayers is one of my favourite times of the school day. The children gather as the bell goes at 7.30am, and stand in their class lines on the muddy patch of playground by the hall: the drum beat starts and they launch into the first hymn, which is never announced but simply chosen and started off by any child who feels moved to do so. Two or three other hymns follow, everyone clapping, dancing, and singing enthusiastically enough to raise – well, if not the roof, then at least the delicate early-morning clouds under which we are gathered. Clusters of children quietly join the assembled group: some coming from their morning tasks of cleaning the latrines and dormitories, some from early morning prep, others just late. Soon the whole school is there from the tiny Nursery children to the gangly teenage boys at the top of the school – some as tall as grown men and, with their carefully trimmed moustaches and shaved chins, looking oddly vulnerable in their schoolboy shorts. Pupils volunteer to lead the prayers, usually three or four spontaneous and thoughtful stream-of-consciousness outpourings. Desire is praying earnestly for the sick today and ends her rambling prayer "Lord God, you are the doctor of all doctors, the nurse of all nurses and the patient of all patients." Or is that "patience"? Either way she has provided me with a new picture of God as a kind of Holy Trinity of health-care - doctor, nurse and holy (or should that be wholly?)patient - which I will treasure….
We finish with a prayer of thanks for the sponsors, parents and teachers and a rendition of the Lord's Prayer full of baffling Anglo-African approximations of the words – including the incomprehensible "..and forgive us our sessases as we sussessusussssessus against us" - and finally, a last hymn to round things off cheerfully before the daily notices are announced and the inevitable ticking-off about appearances delivered. The children are then sent to get ready for their first lesson at 8 o'clock. A new day has begun at the Primary School.

The term is moving rapidly towards its conclusion and next week the children will sit their end of year exams. These are set by the government and, rather like our National Curriculum tests, aim to measure standards across the country. The tests are also important because the staff at Kirima Primary will use them to decide about which children w ill go up to the next class, or 'be promoted' as they call it. Children who have done poorly throughout the year, but especially in these final tests, will be kept down to repeat the year. Some children will repeat several classes during their time at primary school and will reach P7 at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Sadly, these pupils often have learning difficulties that are simply not recognized, understood or helped. I visited one school where I met a thirteen year old boy who was still in the Reception class having failed to make the necessary progress one year after another. I wonder how many more years the poor disheartened boy will have to stay there before he gets the specific support that he needs – maybe something as simple as some individual help with learning to read…?

Children who have not learned to read fluently are usually kept down a year and are generally regarded, as they used to be in England in less enlightened times, as rather slow. Dyslexia, it would seem, does not exist here: whenever I ask teachers about its incidence I am met with a blank look. If a child fails to learn to read he or she repeats the year, and carries on with the drilling and copying that form the literacy programme until the penny drops. Books, apart from the occasional textbook and the Bible, are rare things indeed in Ugandan classrooms and reading books non-existent. This is partly, at least, due to practical considerations: school buildings are very rudimentary and classrooms generally have neither glass at the windows nor lockable doors – they are open to all comers and so nothing can be left in them apart from the bench-and-desk furniture; but in any case, in both the cash-starved schools and the children's very poor homes books are unheard-of luxuries. The children arrive at school speaking only Rukiiga and most never having seen or handled a book. Yet within two years they are having all their lessons in English and can read, write and spell in the language. Reluctantly, I have had to accept that children can and do learn to read without ever possessing a reading book, without having had stories read to them and without any individual help whatsoever. I find myself in the astonishing position of having everything I believed and held dear about the teaching of reading turned completely on its head...

Whatever would Uganda make, I wonder, of the great phonics debate that rages on in our schools in England, of the Literacy Strategy, the massive body of educational research, the political manoeuvrings, the in-and-out fads and fashions of the classroom? Here, refreshingly, none of these have the remotest influence. Here, we still live in the Edwardian era of education. We drill, we repeat, we chant. We copy, we scribe, we emulate. We work, work, work.

The children in P1 – Year 1 and the first official year of schooling – have six one-hour lessons a day. They remain in their classroom for the entire six hours apart from a half hour break at 10.00am and a lunch break at 12.30pm. There are no PE lessons, no movement, art, or choosing time; no time to draw, paint, construct or experiment. Each hour-long lesson – be it English, social studies, agriculture , science or any other subject - is spent at their desks, listening, repeating, chanting and copying from the board. They learn to read, I have deduced, by writing: they create their own reading materials and gradually, day by day, the words they write begin to make sense to them. By the time they start to write independently their spelling is remarkably good because they have never had the opportunity to write a word incorrectly: endless copying and repetition have implanted the correct form of the word for posterity in their brain. With six hours of copying from the board and endless repetition of lists of consonant-vowel patterns, day in and day out, they gradually build up to three-letter words, then four and so on. It is dull, but it works – for most children at least.

Of course, this method of learning to read has its limitations. Children learn to communicate largely in formal, functional, text-book English with the restricted vocabulary that goes with it. They do not learn the words needed to express their thoughts, ideas or feelings; nor the enriching descriptive words of the imaginative and creative writing forms. They do not experience the pleasure that stories bring nor the doors that they open into the mysteries of the mind and the ways of the world. It is as if they have been taught to read the Highway Code but never introduced to the countless exciting accounts of travel and exploration that exist, nor the tales of the fabled and fascinating lands that the roads lead to. Yet they crave for stories and their eyes light up when I take a book from my bag at the end of a lesson. The boarders have started reading stories to each other at night from the couple of anthologies I have brought with me and I only wish I had more for them to enjoy. Perhaps a trickle of book parcels will soon start arriving for them from faraway England....how much pleasure they will bring if they do!

While I am picking up crackling radio reports of more job losses and growing tension in the financial world in England, shortage of money is also taken its toll here this week. I find Internet Emily in tears when I arrive to do some emailing. She has had a bad cold and her eyes are now swollen and inflamed – she suffers from recurrent eye problems. She weeps as she tells me that she knows she should have her eyes tested but can't afford to go to Kampala to see an optician, let alone pay first for his services and then for glasses should she need them. She cannot even afford the fee to see a doctor locally and so faces the prospect of deteriorating eyesight and chronic pain and discomfort from the recurrent inflammation. 'Isn't there anyone who can help you pay for treatment?' I ask. There is no-one, she tells me: all her family are poor. I wish I had the money to help; but know that if I helped her I would have a queue outside my door tomorrow of other needy and equally deserving villagers; it is perhaps just as well that I am on a tight budget myself now and having to eke out my remaining shillings to make them last until I leave....

One of the teachers at school comes up to me at break. "Do you think there is anyone in England who would sponsor an adult rather than a child?" he asks desperately. He has two children at university and three at school and has to find fees for all of them from his modest teacher's salary. He also supports his mother and is paying medical bills and food bills for other relations. The only way he can increase his salary is by gaining a further qualification; however he can't afford the college fees to do this. He is buckling under the strain of his financial burdens. I have to tell him gently that this kind of support is not available from any organisation that I know of; and that anyway it would be an unworkable arrangement. He walks away with his shoulders sagging under the weight of his responsibilities. Here, anyone who has a job is expected to support and help the less well-off members of the extended family and it would be unthinkable for them not to do so. He has no alternative but to struggle on.

There are problems at the High School today, too: the violent storms a fortnight ago washed away the equipment that pumps the water to the school and they have no running water. The pupils are having to fetch water themselves for washing, cleaning, cooking and sanitation from the nearest tap one and a half kilometres away. The cost of the repairs will be thousands of shillings. No-one seems to know where that money will come from - but it will have to be found...

It is my last day at the High School today as the pupils have exams next week. I have so much enjoyed teaching the students here – more, perhaps than the younger children because I have found it so hard to adapt to the very formal methods used here with that age group. When I gather in their books for marking one pupil has written in small letters at the end of her work "God bless you, Teacher Julea". I feel very touched...

At morning break a plate piled high with deep-fried grasshoppers arrives in the staffroom with the posho. These are a prized wet-season delicacy and looked forward to with the same fervour as asparagus in England and truffles in Perigord. It would cause offence to refuse the proudly proffered morsels so, rather gingerly, I take a bite of one. It is delicious! I am soon wolfing them down along with everyone else. In size and texture they are rather like non-fishy whitebait; they are crisp, tasty and, of course, absolutely free. In such financially precarious times one must be thankful for small – and crunchy – mercies...