A Day in the life of Teachers and Pupils in Malindi Secondary School by Jim Lovett

A Day in the life of Teachers and Pupils at Suji Malindi Secondary School by Jim Lovett.

Saturday morning 6:30 and am still in bed – lying in on me new

mattress, luxury – thought I might try to describe a typical day in

the school here.

You will hear the kids start to arrive at 05:45 or so

and by 06:00 there is a general air of excitement outside the house

and around the school. Some of them will already have done 2 hours

work by this time – they will sometimes nod off as a result, or so I’m

told … i.e. it doesn’t happen in my class - . They will be given some

brooms and a general clean up goes on, then there’s assembly and

singing a few songs (1) the national anthem (2) a Pare, the local

district, song and finally the school song – will sing these ta ya

when I get home, all followed by some words of encouragement by one of

the teachers.  

School proper then starts at 07:40. This has never

happened. The best you could hope for is about 08:00.

Classes are forty minutes which is not enough time as getting them

settled takes at least ten minutes when there can be up to seventy

children in a class. The ages of the kids varies greatly, the fourth

form should have kids of around 15/16 years but there will also be one

or two as old as 23 who ‘must’ have an education, and all ages in

between.    The subjects are; Swahili, English, Geography, History,

Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Civics, Religion in it’s any guises here

– more later on this – and last but not least Mathematics, the

standard here is very low as there is no consistency and any half

decent teacher is ‘head hunted’ away to some private school where they

will be fairly paid.  The state schools pay little or nothing; I won’t

go into it … politics. So what they really require is some stability

in their teachers to bring them from first year to fifth year in one

consistent batch.

There is a small break around 10:00 and the big break for lunch

arrives at 12:40 theoretically but this all depends on the water

situation and more but not here, o.k. so the whole school must be fed,

this for the students means maize and beans, always!! Now the beans

take about five hours to cook on an outdoor fire, logs like – the

logs/ wood are/is brought in by the students daily with a great forage

going on once every two weeks, when all head off into the local

forest for a day, more later – this cooking requires massive amounts

of water, which is scarce at the moment, and so proceedings can be

delayed for any … any … any length of time … God.

This is mostly carelessness as there is a perfectly adequate supply

for the schools needs but the relevant authorities don’t care enough,

as they have other businesses to administer. Also this is Africa.

All these disruptions make teaching difficult, but the kids themselves

are very bright, and some, like anywhere else are eager to learn.

On a lighter note, last Thursday we the Malindi teachers joined the Suji –

well paid – teachers and took on a bunch of fourth formers at soccer, promptly –

we were told, punctual is the word they used - at 15:00 hundred hours,

well you can imagine what happened next, we closed up the school a

little early, so innocent, and were on the pitch at 14:55 where we

waited for an hour and a half for the other teachers to turn up, then

another half hour for the students. I was exhausted in the little kick

about and as a result we lost – it was something more than 1-0.