What is more Contagious, Apathy or Motivation?

As you know Jeremy and I teach in the mornings at the local public school in Dowa District. Jeremy teaches 7th grade Math and I teach 7th grade English. We have been teaching at the school non-stop for the last three and a half months (including 1 month when all but 3 other teachers were on holiday) and it is incredibly challenging. Relatively speaking, the school is not resource poor; the buildings are in good shape, there are plenty of teaching materials provided by Goods for Good and there is a well-stocked library.

So, why is it so challenging? Why do I kind of not want to go many mornings? There are a couple of issues that are quite upsetting and concerning, the common theme being apathy. The first is the issue of the feeding program at the school. Responding to the food insecurity in Malawi, an organization called Mary’s Meals runs feeding programs at public schools throughout the country, including St. Mathias. St. Mathias is provided with a kitchen, high capacity low energy cooking pots and nutritious porridge mix for all of the school children. All the community has to do is provide volunteers to add water and stir the boiling pots each morning. So why may you ask are the St. Matthias children often going hungry 3 days a week? The community cannot keep organized or motivated long enough to provide one full week of porridge for the students! So children come to school everyday with their little cups and go back home with empty bellies. This has been going on for the last three and a half months and frankly I am about to cook the porridge. Why don’t the communities seem to care enough to ensure their children have porridge?

The second issue is the attitude of the 5 teacher trainees working at St. Mathias. Our school has 8 full-time teachers for its 1,000 pupils. Fortunately for St. Mathias, and other schools who have even fewer teachers, the Teacher’s College sends trainees for a year of field work. We spoke to our Head Teacher the other day about the 5 at St. Mathias, and although the first 2/3 of the school year was considered a success, the final term has been an unmitigated disaster. The issues are too many to list here but they range from complaints that there aren’t enough materials (as opposed to making the most of what’s available as the excellent full-time teachers do) to treating the other teachers as if they were inferior because years of experience don’t match up to being enrolled at the teachers college. But what really sets us off is the attitude towards the students. These trainees seem to have little use for their pupils other than for using them to fetch water for their homes. Are these really the future teachers of Malawi? From what we’ve heard the teaching profession has become a career of last resort for many. There’s no question that teachers are underappreciated the world over, but for these schools, where is so much work to be done and so much possibility to change the lives of these kids, something has to be done to make education a priority again.

We don’t know why these things are the way they are. But we do know that there are many teachers and communities that are the exact opposite. What we hope to see is the positive work of these people spread to those people who don’t see the value. A big problem with our work is finding those who are already motivated.