On the border with Congo…

July, 2015

I love this photo of a boy, wearing one shoe, and holding his precious notebooks and pencil box. Something as simple as a book, so common here in America, is just not available as a resource. Without a book, the teachers do not have a sequence of lessons to work from that correspond to what students will be tested on at the end of the year. They can work from memory, and often do an amazing job with very little. However, working from memory has its limitations and when it comes to helping students to graduate from Primary and go on to Secondary, or Secondary and go on to Technical School or University, fewer and fewer students are able to keep up. A goal of the UN is for all children in African countries to achieve a primary education by the year 2015. This is a challenging goal, as 70% of students in Uganda drop out of school before completing their Primary School education.

For the ten schools in Arua and Soroti, life has just changed. A large box of carefully selected textbooks has arrived, and teachers are eager to begin using the new lessons to work with the children. Books teachers have selected have been chosen in English, Literature (classics), Math, Science, History, Geography, and other areas as well. One exciting thing about Arua, is the connection with a thriving Rotarian group. They have already been instrumental in putting in latrines and water tanks in some of the schools, and since education and literacy is one of their main tenets, Rotary has agreed to monitor the progress of the schools now that the books have been in place. This partnership with the Rotary of Arua will help us to understand why some schools are making significant progress, while others seem to be taking more time to see growth.