FROM THE FIELD
My
first stop is Claratown - a huge slum in Monrovia. It’s almost like a town now, with many hundreds of people living and trading in its maze of lanes. Oxfam has renovated a school and is helping
to train the teachers who work there. It’s the only chance for the children who live nearby of getting an education - and everyone in Liberia, it seems, is desperate for an education. It’s
their only hope of a decent future.We visit the home of one of the girls who attends the school, ten-year-old Sarah Nnyepah. She lives about three minutes away with her parents,
fourteen-year-old sister and little brother, who is about five. They live in two tiny rooms, which are unbearably hot and damp. There’s no light, but the family say that next door has a
generator and some light so they can see a bit at night. Sarah and her sister go to school for half a day and spend the afternoon helping their mother cook and sell fish. During the evening, they do
their homework by the half-light.They both want to be nurses when they grow up. There are no grants to train as a nurse.Claratown is very grim, but on the way back we stop at Happy
Corner - it used to be the red light district. This is the worst slum I’ve seen. To gain extra land, people collect garbage and pack it into the marshy land: they are literally living on
rubbish. Cholera is endemic - latrines drop straight into the water and that is the water people use, filtering it through plastic carrier bags full of sand.On our second day, we’re up
early because it’s very hot. The air conditioning in the hotel has gone off, and I can’t switch it back on as all the instructions are Chinese!We’re going to a rural school
today in Voloblai in Bong County in the Hinterland. It takes four hours to get there and the last hour is over terrible rutted roads which have been partly washed away by the recent rains.Typically this school has a mixed age group - from 25 to five years old. Quite a challenge for the teachers. More of a challenge is that they have no exercise books, no textbooks, no water, no
toilets and - beat this - no salary! There are eight teachers and only one gets a salary - a grand $50 a month. The others are volunteers. This is a state school. This is not good.[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
