Due to the large amount of AIDS in the
Kavango region many children have been left orphaned. Our school of roughly 400
students had a bit more than 150 orphans. An orphan in the village in Africa
means something entirely different then one in Windhoek, Europe, the U.S or
anywhere else in the world. Here, because of poverty, orphans must take care of
themselves. The government gives them some assistance, 200 Namibian dollars per
month as long as you are under 18. Many of our grade twelve and grade eleven
learners are over 18 and must find ways to pay school fees, attend school, and
feed themselves without any assistance. These learners live by themselves. Many
miss days of school so they can work and feed themselves. A few anecdotes; near
school there is a 7th grader and a 4th grader who live by
themselves in a house that they built themselves. They get food from the good
graces of people who are willing to help them and from the measly stipend that
the government gives them. Another story, there is an orphaned learner from
Angola in grade seven who crosses the river every day to come to school. He
does not eat for the entire day as there is no food available for students. At
the end of the day he walks 3km back to the river crossing, gets on his canoe
and crosses the river and goes back home. Another reality that students face
are the distances that they are forced to walk to attend school. A significant
number walk 15 km, 1 way! This makes 30 km per day simply to go to school.
Walking. The learners that live these distances actually don’t attend school
until they are strong enough to make this daily trek. Performing well in school
becomes impossible for these children, how is a 15 year old supposed to walk 30
km in a day, get home and attend to familial duties (pounding mahangu, farming,
cleaning) and still find time to do homework? Learners have told me that they
start walking at four in the morning just to make it on time to school at
seven. Children only go to school when they are strong enough to make the walk.
So you see kids that are 14 in fourth and fifth grade classes. If they don’t
attend our school there is nowhere else that they can learn. Thankfully, we are
currently working on a water project to bring clean water to our school.
Following the completion of that project we will work to build a student
hostel. This will turn our school into a boarding school allowing students to
live on school grounds. In addition we once we have a hostel we will receive
extra money from the government so we can feed our students. This will allow
students to live at school and not have to suffer through olympian distances to
attend their classes. I will leave you with one final story. We have a twelfth
grader who is twenty years old. He is past the age to receive aid from the
government. He lives by himself and has no food. He told me that if it is a
good week he will eat once a day, if it is not, once every two days. His mother
is dead and his father lives in Windhoek. His father does not care about him.
Exam fees at the grade twelve level are 500 dollars. This student asked his
father for the money but his reply was, “Sorry I have other things I need to
buy.” This man has not given his son a single thing his entire life. The
student cannot receive help from anybody else in his family, they are all
drunkards. The student tries his hardest at school but he is hungry, he cannot
focus when his body is constantly craving energy. He is not even able to attend
school most days because he is working, fixing people’s houses, repairing
fences, and any kind of odd job he can find just to put the bare minimum of
food in his stomach. How is this student supposed to make it in this world?
Every conceivable odd is against him yet still he tries and does the best he
can in his studies, banking on the hope that one day he will be able to lift
himself up from the oppression of poverty.
