School is Beginning…

After spending the day in the library here at Njala University (free wireless internet all day Monday through Friday in a room with ceiling fans…it’s heavenly), I headed home but first went to check out a small market at the edge of town.  The local school was just letting out and the stream of boys and girls in their blue and white uniforms was impossible to pass up for a quick snap shot.  You can’t see the building itself in the background but it is about one mile from where I’m standing.  Many of these kids will walk at least another mile to arrive at home.

It reminded me of one of Laurie Halse Anderson’s early picture books called NDITO RUNS about a little girl who joyfully runs many miles each day to attend school in her native country of Kenya.  It’s much the same here.

Sadly, school is available to all children in this country but they can attend only if they pay for it out of their own pockets and for most that is prohibitive.  The markets and villages are filled with milling children who will never attend school.  I was told there is movement toward governmental support of universal education.  In this election year here in Sierra Leone the incumbent President has listed it as one of his highest priorities yet it would appear to be nothing more than a vacant campaign promise with a long way to go before it is realized not to mention acted on.

At the university level, the same holds true as far as funding issues are concerned.  I’m told it is rare for scholarships to be awarded and loans are not available so each year students need to gather the money needed to attend college.  Again, for most that is impossible.  Those who do attend university trickle in for weeks after the semester begins attending only when they can pay their tuition.

One bright star in this glum outlook comes from one of my fellow lecturers, neighbor, and new friend who posed his doctoral thesis topic to me yesterday.  He has completed his first three chapters of what looks to be a full-blown dissertation and I was thrilled at the thought of working on it with him.  His topic is “Folk Literature: Social Commentary on the Temne of Northern Sierra Leone.”  The Temne are one of the two largest tribes in Sierra Leone and Philip wants to look at how oral and folk literature has declined in the native villages in recent years and hopefully he wants to reignite its popularity.  His goal is to take the lessons taught and learned through folk literature to help guide the Temne back to their roots.

Speaking of the university, I received my workload assignments for this first term and get this, I’ll be teaching five different courses (none of which I’ve ever taught before…but we won’t get into that right now).  They are: “American/Sierra Leonean Prose”, Euro-Western Literature Seminar”, “Cross-Cultural Literary Studies”, as well as “English Language 101”, and “English Language 201”.  The latter two courses will have around 150 students per section so my total teaching population will be around 400 folks.  APSCUF must be representing this faculty, too!