Unforgettable disaster. 106 dead. 172 missing. 230,000 displaced. 1.1 million affected. The figures are speaking for themselves. The devastating floods in 2015 which hit hard the Lower Shire districts of Nsanje and Chikwawa attracted global attention. Three years later, some children are still stuck in the floods of hopelessness courtesy of the natural disaster which is slowly being forgotten. WHYTONE KAPASULE reports on how the government and development partners are paying a blind eye to the education plight of little survivors of the floods.
She is in her teens. She is the survivor of the floods that hit East Bank in Nsanje in January 2015 and it seems she has a gift of longsuffering. She is one of the two girls that have attained ripe age of 17 but still sit under trees and tents to learn. Lack of classrooms and desks at the school has forced many girls of her age to drop from school as they could not cope up with sitting on the floor and get inconvenienced with the stand-up-and-sit-down exercise, a common phenomenon in any learning process. No child has been selected to secondary in the three years that they had been learning under trees and tents, after floods relocated them into this hopeless sight. And yet she presses on, letting nothing obscure her vision of becoming a nurse.
Malita Makoko is a standard seven learner at Namiyala primary School in Fatima, Nsanje. The yard on the upland ground on which the school is situated is dotted by classes being conducted under trees due to lack of proper classrooms. They brave heat in the humid air pressure in the Lower Shure Valley where temperatures on this day reached 45 degrees Celsius. As she indicated, learning under trees and tents, in such blistering sun is no venture for the feeble minded. The steaming temperatures are not only a constant disruption in learning but also damage to their eyes.
“Our problems are shared: Skin burn and splitting headache due to the heavy sun. This also affects our eyes as we try to force look onto the chalk boards which is a recipe for a common eye disease here – trachoma. We can’t keep complaining. It’s a case of endurance for the resolute or withdrawal for frail minded,” she said.
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| Malita and her friend running away from whirl wind that shook the tent |
This is the sorry spectacle that we witnessed when we visited Namiyala Primary School, just after Fatima in late November, 2017 before the closure of the third term. From a distant junction where the road to Usiyana branches off from the Fatima-Bangula road, we could hear classroom noise. From such noises, one could assume that all is well. But alas! This was the age of innocence. In the blistering sun of the Lower Shire where temperatures can go as high as 50 degrees Celsius, we found children braving steaming, humid heat in one of the few classroom tents that are still standing which houses standard three learners. This is worsened by the fact that there are 260 pupils in the class, clearly too large a population for the tent.
The sad situation of children still learning under trees and tents, three years after their school was relocated, was heart renting. These are tents that government and its partners erected upland to be used as classrooms, in response to the 2015 floods. But at this point, most of them have been blown away or run down by winds such that most classes are being conducted under trees.
The numbers of pupils used not to be like this in its original location. But the relocation into other communities has seen the pupil population more than doubling, hence the 260 learners in this class. Their teacher, Thomas Banda, is braving even the worst impacts. He said classroom management becomes a problem.
“It becomes hard to mark all 260 assignments within a lesson period. The allocated classroom time does not match with the number of exercise books to be marked. I just mark those that I can manage within the period,” said Banda.
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| Hopeless kids, stuck in ruins for three years while hope vanishes in thin air. |
This irony cannot be more pronounced. Children are given a raw deal. Head teacher of the school Bright Chipojola, could not miss his frustration when we asked him to shape a picture of the situation. He indicated that he is under no illusion at all that in its current state, the schools prospects are not bright anymore. For him, the floods came, washed away their school and washed away the schools impressive performance in Primary School Leaving Certificate Examinations such that they have never produced a single student to a national secondary school since the school was relocated in January 2015. This is due to the problems that get compounded at the school with each passing day.
It is hard to imagine that the school has conducted lessons for only 4 days in the two weeks since schools were opened on January 8, 2018. In a telephone interview on January 18, 2018, Chipojola singled out rains as a constant disturbance in the teaching and learning process which results in dismissal of classes for lack of conducive environment in this rainy season.
Since the floods hit the area three years ago, there have been various interventions intended to ease the plight of those that were affected. While the rest of the responses have been way inadequate, not one of them has had anything to do with construction of classroom blocks at the relocated school. Namiyala Primary School is in the area of Village Headman Chabe who singled out the Malawi Red Cross Society as having constructed decent houses for some of those that were affected, leaving out the schools.
But Malawi Red Cross Society’s Public Relation Manager, Felix Washon said, out of the many sectors that were created by government to coordinate the floods response, his organisation responded to the sector they were allocated to by government – housing and health. The education sector was given to other partners.
Seeing there is no help coming, parents and guardians of the children at Namiyala primary school took up the task of constructing at least a class block themselves. Each family contributed K650 per month for the moulding of bricks. It was a slow process this one, without question, but it materialized as the bricks were used to construct the only block standing on the site. But misfortunes never come singly! The contractor that Nsanje District council hired to construct the block abandoned the site in October, 2017, leaving the block at window level.
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| Abandoned! The only initiative started at Namiyala since 2015. |
Nsanje District Education Manager, Towela Masoka Banda said the class block at Namiyala is being constructed with Local Development Funds and is at window level. She further said the intervention has reached to another school in Usiyana, Chikonje, which suffered the same fate.
Chairperson for Nsanje District Council, Mavuto Kamba said the council is doing its utmost within the available resources while waiting for interventions from other partners to sponsor the other remaining class blocks for the school to be complete. He however, could not comment on the disappearance of the contractor from the site and asked for time to gather information from the council.
Paradoxically, Director of disaster responsible for recovery in the Department of Disaster and Risk Management, Paul Kalilombe, said the fate of the school could be a result of failure by the council to include the schools in the Malawi Floods Emergency recovery project.
“Districts had to identify schools to be rehabilitated under the project. But since it’s an ongoing project, may be the schools will be rehabilitated. But the council should have more information,” said Kalilombe.
And so the story goes in Nsanje East Bank: of a community that was hit worse by floods in January 2015 and had many houses destroyed, property washed away and social institutions collapsed including four primary schools that had to be relocated, in the force of the floods. This is the story that triggered the nightmare of primary school education in this part of the district. And it is a story that is getting worse and worse as the years go by while help seems to have vanished into thin air.
It is a tale of children stuck in floods of hopelessness and remain invisible. A story that gets fresh in 2018 as floods now have started ravaging communities in Lilongwe and Mzuzu, sending shivers down the spines of many in the disaster prone district of Nsanje. A story that gets raw now as the learners have clocked three years under tents and trees. It is a tale of a failed promise of how children become invisible and forgotten once the story of disasters dies down.
This article came out in the Nation Newspaper on 22 February, 2018.
