For our 7 weeks at Vinjeru school, we are helping out with everyday school jobs. Recently, we have been spending the mornings sorting out a storgae container filled with literally thousands of books. Most homes here don’t own any books, meaning that no-one practices reading at home. The selection here will give the school one of the best libraries around.

The netball girls

In the afternoon though, the fun begins. School lessons here finishes at 13:30 (we start at 07:30), and after lessons end there is a compulsory 30 minutes of cleaning for everyone. No need for Cleaners here – the children even clean the toilets. After this, they get to do activities. They have one P.E session a week, one computer studies, one afternoon of clubs and one afternoon of maintenance followed by experiments. The clubs on offer are running, football, netball, recorders or debating. We generally help out with some sports, but last week Graham and I were asked to judge the debating clubs first public debate.

The topic was ‘This house believes that children should be given their school reports, not parents’. There were two teams of 3 pupils, and we were asked to judge them on their appearence, clarity, how many points they made, whether they had arguments to back up their points and the interjections they made.

Each person was given one minute to make their arguments. However, it seems to be a Zambian tradition to start by acknowledging and thanking everyone in the room, from the judges, to the timekeeper, the ‘bouncer’, the audience, their own team and the oposition. They usually think of a witty or original way to do this, and often thank the oposing team for coming but apologise that they are going to lose, and tell their own team to relax as victory is theirs! By the time all of this is done, they are lucky if there is 30 seconds left to make their point.

This particular topic was an eye opening experience for us. The points made by the pupils defending the motion included that you may not have any parents and your guardians may not be as interested, your parents may live far away, your parents may be drunkards or they may not be able to read the report. These points were made from the pupils own experiences. To put this in context, children born within the last 5 years in Zambia can expect an average life expectancy of 46 years. There is also a divide in the population: in general people are either thought to be tee-total or ‘beer drinkers’.

Anyway, the debate progressed and both sides made lots of valid points. The total scores for the team were very close but in the end the opposition won. I think we learnt far more from the experience than the pupils though, which is becoming a theme of our time here!

On one afternoon a week we teach PE. Recently, we have been playing Ultimate Frisbee, or as Graham likes to call it ‘The Best Game in the World’. African children seem to be very well coordinated, and after a couple of throws each, and a brief review of the rules, we launched into games. It went amazingly well and the kids loved it! They have asked about starting an official team. I was very encouraging of the idea, but quickly realised they would have no-one to play against. Perhaps we can set up the national team…Cool Runnings version 2!

The other afternoons are spent doing science experiments. We started with the cabbage water pH experiment, which went surprisingly well. This week we made straw towers, which had to support an egg for ten seconds. The group with the tallest, strong tower won a packet of biscuits. The approach here was very different to that I have previously seen in the UK. They sketched their ideas first, and actually stuck to them when they were building. They worked very, very, very slowly and used an unbelievable amount of selotape. But the towers were successful 🙂 I think they learnt that tall, strong towers should have a wide base, and a narrow top, symmetry is desireable and triangles are good for adding strength. However their homework would suggest that they mainly learnt that a tall tower gets you free biscuits. Ah well….