Beside the hospital and the special school for disabled children, we also had the chance to visit the primary school, which is also run by the missionary sisters. Children up to 13 years old are educated here.
All the classes are overfilled with pupils. The younger ones have no furniture in their class room and have to sit on the floor. Only few had a tattered exercise book with them. When we entered a classroom, we were every time greeted with a well studied phrase.
In the preschool group, the children were working with clay. Afterwards they had a break, where they received a cup of porridge as breakfast.
Many children are coming from far away, which means they have to walk in the dark for up to 2 hours. Therefore the school offers them to stay overnight and turned 2 classrooms into dormitories.
We were shocked, under which conditions they are supposed to learn for life. The teaching consists to a big part of repeating in a chorus what the teacher tells them. Any individual attention is just impossible, with that number of pupils per class. School books are few and kept in the teachers office, when they are not used in class. But we also noticed a clever method a math teacher had implemented. The children had little sticks from a bush, which they used, while adding big numbers.
It is really hard to believe until you see it with your own eyes. I visited the secondary school in Kipili and am not surprised that out of 140 graduates before Christmas, only 24 passed.