From the Field: "BY THE NUMBERS"

Janis Rapchuk, CW4WAfghan Director/Secretary and Lauryn Oates, Project Director, are in Kabul this month. Janis reports the follwing obervations during a recent visit to some of our projects:

Yesterday, we visited some of the schools where we have teacher training sessions going on.  The students are out of school on winter holidays.  The first two schools were in Bagrami, district 5.  At the first school, there were two separate sessions going on.  Just try and imagine 40 teachers sitting in classrooms with no heat and no glass in some of the windows and its -10 degrees Celsius outside.  They were all bundled up and trying to write with gloves on, but they were so eager to take the training that they were there.  One of them even had to bring her 5 year old daughter who was patiently sitting beside her crowded three to a bench.  This is one time when having to wear a headscarf comes in handy as many were wearing brightly coloured wool ones. 

The few men also in attendance were wearing a variety of headgear although generally of the traditional type, wool with a rolled up brim called a pakol and a brown shawl thrown around their shoulders.  There were large banners in one classroom stating that these training sessions were brought to them by CW4WAfghan, too bad we couldn’t have brought them heaters as well.   There are 6000 students in this school coming in three different time slots throughout the day.  The average class size is 60 students per class.  These villages are in northern Kabul province right at the foot of the Parman Mountains and the mountains were covered in snow, apparently back in the 70’s before the war they were a popular skiing destination.  Outside, workers were busy throwing out old steel desks into a big pile, all the workers were women, the men were sitting against the school wall sunning themselves, I wanted to take a photo, but they shook their heads no, maybe they were ashamed they weren’t working.

The next school was a little better off as they had sawdust heaters in each classroom, which certainly helped take the chill off the air.  There was no electricity at this school though and unbelievably although the yard was a construction zone because they are building a new 30 classroom building there is no provision being made to install electricity.  This school has a student population of 9300, again attending in three different shifts.  Here we watched the first session on how to teach children geography using jigsaw-like pieces of paper representing each province of Afghanistan. In the second session they were using flip charts and each group listed different methods of teaching, given it was all in Dari I have no idea what these lists said, but there was lots of discussion.  At this school the teachers were not afraid to ask for more training and longer training, and visual aids for the walls of the classrooms (right now the walls are only chipped and water stained plaster).  In spite of all this, the teachers are just so enthusiastic and positive; it is good to know we are on the right track with our project.

In the afternoon we attended a training session being given at an institute, this was in a different village and here the teachers were predominantly male. Looking at the numbers, though, is daunting. In this area there are 34 schools with 33,000 students and each year another 5,000 to 6,000 begin school. One high school has 4500 students and only 8 classrooms.  Once again the requests are the same: "we like the training, we need the training, is it possible to have more teachers involved, more subject material, longer sessions".

Lauryn told each group that day how they are the most important part of the new Afghanistan, how education is the key to a better future and teachers are so important to that future.