Blog for Carys (All please read)

Hello Carys, its Aunty Peanut sending you a message all the way from Africa – I’m sure your Mammy will read it to you…. I know that your school is teaching you about Africa at the moment so I thought you would like to know all about my visit to a school in Zambia yesterday.


Nearly 600 children go to the school called Nadalisika Community School; the youngest children are a little bit older than you at 7 years and the oldest is 19 years. The school is in a part of Chipata away from the town centre, the surrounding area looks very much like where you live in Wales; there are beautiful green mountains all around. There is a big ‘play yard’ which has lots of room for the children to run around, because it is the rainy season, there are lots of muddy paths running through patches of grass. There are only three classrooms in the whole school so the Head Teacher has to split the school-day into three sessions; the oldest children go to school 7am - 10am, the middle children go 10am - 1pm and the youngest go at 1pm - 4pm. This means that each child has only three hours of schooling each day and there are over 50 children in every class.

The classrooms are much too small for the number of pupils and don’t have enough desks for every child and the teachers work very hard to give the children a good education but without any equipment it is very difficult for them. The only learning aids are on the walls of the classroom. The teacher had made signs and posters which he had put up on the walls to help the children. I made a note of these for you…

Literacy Corner:  The alphabet was listed

Numeracy Corner: Roman numerals were listed

English Corner: Punctuation marks were described on a sheet of paper

Integrated Science Corner: Hand drawing detailing the structure of skin

SOS Corner: List of Human Rights and a hand drawn map of Africa
Many of the children at the school are orphans, which means they don’t have a Mammy or Daddy to look after them, instead they are looked after by their grand parents or aunties. Some of the children don’t have any grown up relatives to look after them so the oldest child in their family has to look after the younger ones. This is very difficult because they don’t have any money. Also the grown-up relatives of the children are very poor so the children do not have any toys or other nice things …in many cases they don’t have shoes on their feet. Lots of the children are poorly, they have a disease called HIV/Aids which is a very big problem in this part of Africa. The saddest part is that most of the children don’t know that they have this nasty disease so they are not taking medicine to help keep them healthy.
The nice people that I am working with in Africa are called YDF (Youth Development Foundation), we were at the school to deliver their ‘Taking Power’ programme to the children. YDF is made up of young people, most are volunteers, who think that by telling the children about the nasty disease and teaching the little boys that they should treat the girls fairly (gender based violence), when the children grow up, they will have a much better life. You would have loved it Carys, all the children were singing African songs and playing games at the beginning, then they spent some time learning before ending with more singing. The children enjoyed the session very much and took part in the games and the discussions very enthusiastically – I think they enjoyed it so much because it was being taught by young people in a friendly way. I was very impressed by YDF …they are amazing!

I was thinking of you Carys while I was at the school and it made me feel very sad to think that these little children, who are every bit as precious as you are, have to live such poor lives.