When we had been visited by Steve and Alex (see photos 8-10 of the Steve and Alex page) we has seen and visited Katemo School and we met the headmaster and various other class teachers. The school is in a stunning location, but has been badly neglected by the Department of Education and the local community. It is at the end of a long, difficult, bumpy, wet road and no one visits the school and few know of its bad state of repair. The floors in the schoolrooms were mostly badly cracked (usually from the roots of trees growing nearby and crossing under the floors), the walls were dirty and unpainted, and there were only a half a dozen desks in each classroom and these had to serve classes of 60 to 70 pupils. Most of the pupils normally sit on the floor and write their notes on their knees.
Oh dear! How could I help??? It seemed impossible without the investment of a lot of money.
What could I do without a lot of money?? I could steal a couple of bags of cement from the Clinic Project and use the cement to repair the floors. I could buy a few bags of lime wash (about £4 a 25kg bag) and paint the rooms, and I could get the local village sawyers and carpenters organised to make some new desks (see the photos 15-17 of the sawyers on this page). So out we went to Katemo March 24-27 to get the work started. Johnny had to see some Safari Association patients (ostensibly two people both with broken legs, but in fact with little more than scratches) on Saturday afternoon, so Grant went by himself - well not quite as you'll see from Photo 01.
We repaired the floors in two classrooms and painted two others. We plan to go out again to do some more. A couple of days after our visit we heard that the villagers had had a meeting, that they thought the muzungu was good and that the sawyers should each provide 2 planks (about 100 planks of wood total!).
Watch this space!!
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