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Published: March 21st 2013
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I have now visited all of the seven Chiefdoms that border Gola Rainforest National Park. I have driven through countless villages, have discovered that all of the roads are a varying degree of terrible, and have met hundreds of students who have all been very excited to see a white person turning up at their school.
Each of the 34 schools that we are working with has a teacher who attended the training workshop who will run the Nature Club using a Teacher’s Guide which we have produced. One school from each Chiefdom has also been provided with 20 Student Workbooks, these schools are our pilot schools and if successful all the Nature Clubs will get the Workbooks next year. Eddie and I have now visited two schools in each Chiefdoms – one pilot school and one comparison school. At each school we asked five students from the Nature Club to complete a questionnaire which will provide baseline data to assess how much impact the Nature Clubs have had in a year’s time.
The first day of our travels took us to Malema which is the furthest north of the chiefdoms. The journey to the
first school took about two hours and we travelled along a road that was better than most as they’re currently doing a lot of improvement works. This meant that we weren’t rocked side to side as we weaved our way through and round potholes, it meant the road wasn’t littered with big rocks or very steep slopes, but also meant that we drove faster and the road was still bumpy so I felt like a well shaken cocktail when we arrived. The schools are all in picturesque settings (to the eye of a tourist) surrounded by giant trees, small villages, and sloping hills. As our car pulled in towards the school building hundreds of eyes turned our way and a cry of ‘pumoi pumoi’ echoed all around. The teachers were all very willing to help us and got the students together from what ever classes may have been taking place to complete our questionnaire. The teachers were interested in what we were doing and a few came to help explain the questions to the students as although they are taught in English it is still a second language and so difficult for them to read and understand. This meant the
remaining students were mostly left to entertain themselves for a little while and many of them came crowding around the ‘windows’ (gaps to let light in through the brick walls) to watch what was going on. When we reached the second school the building was all closed up with no students around. After a few enquiries in the village we found out that the students were all up the road at another school preparing for an interschool sports day. We were able to find them easily enough and completed another lot of questionnaires.
The following day we set off with a plan to spend a night out in the community and to visit Barri, Makpele and Tunkia over two days. Every school was welcoming and we found quite a wide range in the ability of the students. Some understood English very well and already know quite a lot about the environment, others couldn’t even answer the questions when they were explained to them in Mende. Schools here run from about 8.30am-1.30/2pm, meaning that by early afternoon all of the students have gone home, which was the case when we reached our second school in Barri. Thankfully as
all of the teachers and students come from the surrounding village we were still able to find our contact teacher and he got together enough students for us.
I spent the night in the guesthouse in Zimmi again and this time we arrived in the early evening so it was still light. Shortly after we arrived dark clouds started to roll across the sky and within a matter of minutes it was pouring with rain which lasted for about an hour leaving small rivers running through the courtyard and down the street. The rain cleared the air and it felt lovely and fresh so I headed out to walk through the puddles and explore Zimmi. The journey back was more of the same, schools, questionnaires, rough driving, hot and humid conditions, and lots of friendly people. By this point I was getting a little tired of explaining the same questions again and again so I was glad that we had a few days off before the next trip.
Our final journey again included a night out in the community and we visited Koya, Gaura and Nomo. This time we spent the night in Faama
in Nomo which is a Chiefdom Headquarter town like Zimmi but much smaller. About 3 miles before we reach Faama we came to a ‘bridge’ which we couldn’t cross in the car. A bridge here is taken for its most simple meaning, a crossing. Most of the bridges on the roads that we drive in the communities are thick logs laid side by side over a gap in the road, normally with a stream running below. On this occasion the bridge consisted of only three logs, the outside two were set too far apart for our tires (they’re suitable for the heavy goods vehicles that come to collect timber), and the middle log was too rotten to take the weight. We drove a couple of miles back to the nearest village, left the car and the driver there for the night and continued to Faama by motorbike. Faama feels very rural and remote with the majority of the buildings being mud huts and a complete wall of forest seeming to encircle the houses. Within 10 minutes of arriving at the guesthouse the contact teacher for the primary school had noticed we were there and came over to greet us. He was on his way to the school football field with a group of boys ready for a match and they invited me to come and watch. After the match Eddie and I had dinner which was an African dish of rice (if the meal doesn’t contain rice then it’s not real food) and a sauce made from potato leaf with fish in. I then sat out on the veranda watching the light fade from the sky and the people and animals going about their daily routine. It seemed for a while like another storm was going to break and lightening flashed regularly over the distant trees. There was also a strong wind whipping the dust up into a frenzy and I think the rain was blown away to a different area. In the morning I had a refreshing bucket shower in a little outside wash room, an African breakfast of rice and beef, and then we hit the road again to visit our final three schools.
All of the questionnaires have now been completed and most of them have been marked and inputted into a database. I’ve kept a few back which I will use to show Eddie how I’ve been marking them and how to input the information into the database that I’ve created as next year when the questionnaire is completed I won’t be here to help anymore. This is the first time that GRNP have tried to monitor the impact of a project so I hope that the results are positive and it can be used as evidence to drive the education work forward further.
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