Joe in Democratic Republic of Congo

by Rewrite the Future Communications Manager, Joe Hall

Read other blogs by Joe 

So many smiles and a sickening knot

HOW LONG MUST YOU WAIT FOR IT?

In Congo I have never seen as many smiles as in the schools.

The campaign I work on is about getting education for children in places affected by conflict, like Congo. I've met children in other countries before and seen how children light up when they talk about education and what it means to them.

But it's easy to forget that it really is a massive thing for these children. So I took the boat down beautiful Lake Kivu to Bukavu, and drove out into the hills of Walungu to meet children and teachers for myself.

Mulume, 16, with Rita, one of our education workers, in a school we support in Walungu in South Kivu

This is just one boy we spoke to. Mulume said his education was worth a choice, the choice not just to be a farmer but to do something else with his life if he wanted to. In Mulume's case, he wanted to be the President of the country! Will he get there? I don't know, but if he gets anywhere near halfway he'll have achieved a lot. And what I like most of all is that he has a choice.

This is the headmaster of Mulume's school in Walungu who I spoke to too. I was a little amazed to hear he knew all about the Millennium Development Goals (lots of my friends back home don't). So we squeezed into his little office with a bunch of the teachers and talked about what needed to happen to meet the education goal in Congo - primary school for all children by 2015.

"Pay the teachers and get rid of school fees" was the pretty unanimous answer. Not paying teachers seemed like a pretty alien notion to me (my Dad is a teacher back home and as far as I know he gets a paycheck every month), but not here - some teachers haven't been paid since January (six months!) or longer. So because of that, and the low salaries generally, they have to ask children for money - even the poorest children.

How long will you pay for it?

So I was intrigued to know how much education costs here, and we drove on to Burhale school the same afternoon to find out. When I knew, I didn't want to - because it was so shockingly little. One dollar a month here. There are nine months in the school year, which means $9 for a child's education for a whole year. My stomach curled up into a tight, sickening knot: all I could think about was dinner the night before, which cost me $13. That's 1 ½ children's education. For an entire year.

Here we are supporting catch-up lessons for children who've missed out on school because of the war. I was proud that we were helping them get education and get over the $1/month barrier.

But I was also angry. Angry that $1 even could be a barrier to being allowed into school in the 21st century. Also angry that the funding we had received for this project was only a year. Can you educate a child in a year? Were you or I educated in a year? Of course not. It takes years to give a child a proper education.

When you don't know if your education will be free next year, at ten or twelve years old, you have to ask your parents if they can pay for it next year. Of the two children in the picture on the right, the boy on the right's parents thought they could afford to keep him in school. The girl on the left's parents can't. She'll be out in the fields next year, working long hours and learning nothing, unless we get more funding. She's smiling in this photo but her face fell when she talked about her giving up going to school. It was heartbreaking.

What a crazy reality here. Why wouldn't you give support for the six years it takes a child to get through primary school?