The "Start" of the School Year

I was very excited last week, on January 5, to get the school year started. Since coming to Malawi, I hadn't really done anything significant in my role as a PCV. With the start of school, I would be kept busy with some meaningful work. Unfortunately, we had a little problem this year. Here's a little background info first. There are three major exams the students must take in order to complete primary and secondary school. First, at the end of primary school they must pass an exam (the name eludes me at the moment) in order to be placed at a secondary school. The brighter students most likely go on to conventional (boarding) schools, while the mediocre students move on to Community Day Secondary Schools (where I teach). Second, after Form 2 (equivalent to 10th grade in the States) the students take the JCE exams. If they pass, they can move on to Form 3, and finally, after Form 4, they take the MSCE exam, which basically determines the outcome of the rest of their life (this is not an overstatement). Each of these are national government exams. For better or (more likely) for worse, the evaluation of student performance is centered upon these three exams. All other forms of evaluating the students progress, such as assignments and mid-term/final exams, don't have a very big impact on the measured success of the student. At the end of each school year, in October, the appropriate students take these exams. This gives the government almost three full months to grade the exams and get the results back to the schools and the students so that everyone will know who will be going where the following school year.

However, this year three months apparently wasn't enough time to grade the exams. By the first official day of school, the scores for the exams still hadn't been released. Since I am only teaching Forms 1 and 3 this year, I had no students to teach. The results were finally released last Thursday, and some of my students finally started showing up this week. I say "some of my students" because the other teachers have told me that only about half of the students have shown up thus far, two weeks into the school year. From what I have heard, this dearth of students is due to the fact that many of them are having a difficult time collecting enough money to pay the school fees. One of the Form 4 students told me that a lot of the students won't even come until the next semester (after the harvest, when people have a little more money).

On this blog, I'm going to try to limit myself to one complaint per post so I think I have reached my quota for today, and I will now move on to happy thoughts.

Despite the late arrival of the students, I am enjoying teaching them. They are thrilled to have a strange white man for a teacher, and so far (fingers crossed), they have been very responsive and well-behaved in class. They are certainly much easier to teach, in terms of behavior, than I was in high school. This is the view of the school from my front door with the block in the foreground containing the Form 3 and 4 classrooms. Behind that (out of site) is the teacher's office building. To the right is the block containing the Form 1 and 2 classrooms.

This is the beach I was hanging out at during my aforementioned Christmas vacation at the lake:


While looking back at my previous posts, I realized that I failed to put up any pics of the outside of my house. Well, here they are:



The first shows the front of Home Sweet Home. As you can see I have a nice little porch, which the goats like to relieve themselves on. Secondly, we have my back door and yard. The little shack off to the right contains my kitchen and bafa (bathing room). In the foreground you can see my two little garden beds. I planted some vegetables, beans, squash, and peanuts. Some of the plants are growing nicely, but a lot of them were destroyed one day while I was at school. The neighbor's chickens flew over the fence and had a feast on a bunch of the seeds and seedlings I had planted. I discussed the incident with my neighbor, and we decided that she should clip the wings of the chickens. Since then, I haven't been raided by any poultry pests.

I think I'll wrap things up here. For the most part, things are going well, and I am settling in nicely. It's raining a lot this time of year, but 75 F with rain in Malawi beats a 40 below wind chill in Minnesota any day.