Trek for school feeding part 1.

I recently returned from a trek for school feeding and school garden monitoring.  I left on Sunday with two men from the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education and one man from the WFP warehouse staff.   We spent the week visiting 29 schools, most of which were located deep in the bush.  If you saw my Meriama Kunda pictures, they are nothing like the upcountry bush communities.  In the bush the compounds are all located close together and a good percentage of the homes are mud block with thatched roofs.  I have heard that thatched roofs are cooler, but they also have other living tenants so dirt and other things drop out of the ceiling, such as rats and 500 earwigs (true story, but not mine thanks goodness).The homes have a door and maybe some smaller ventilation holes.

The roads themselves are an adventure.  In many places they are so narrow that the brush is touching the both sides of the car at once. They are also rutted and bumpy.  So all of the bush travel   i.e. most of the travel was spent bouncing up and down.  On the first school day we actually got a flat tire on a particularly rocky and rugged stretch.  All I could think was that OMG! we have 5 more days to go with no spare tire.  But the driver must have been having the same thoughts because we stopped at MRC, the British Medical Research Center, and prevailed upon them to help us.  It took awhile but we ended up with a functioning spare.  Side note:  There are at least 3 MRCs in The Gambia and more around the world.  They do research and have clinics  that treat Gambians and other assorted weirdoes, like me.  I had my post casting X-ray at MRC in Kombo, the area in which I live. The picture below is a fairly tame stretch.  But I could not keep asking them to stop and let me take pictures.

Part of the school feeding portion of the trip was to review the details of the last delivery -- they deliver the food once a term.  It was interesting to hear delivery details.  Many of the drivers did not bring the food all the way to the school, because of road conditions during the end of the rainy season.  In this case they are supposed to give the consignee money for further transportation to the school but in most cases they did not.  In many cases they left it with someone who was not a consignee.  This meant that the head master had to arrange for a donkey cart, a horse cart, an ox cart or a tractor to  haul it back to the school and ended up paying out o his own pocket.  This will not be reimbursed by the WFP.   This is one of the things we trained the heads on -- refuse to sign the paperwork if they don't give you the money.  The signed paperwork means the driver is off the hook.  We need to have Con-Way come in and show them how it's done.  Note the ox cart in the background below.

The teaching staff and the head are all national employees.  They are posted in a position and go where they are sent., and often far from their homes.  Because of this most of the schools have teacher quarters, right on school grounds.  It may be a short commute, but I don't think I would like it.  Since the teachers are national rather than local, there tends to be a constant shuttling of teachers, especially in the least  desirable locations.  Of course local teachers are not really an option since the villages are small  and spread widely over the countryside -- not to mention that few go beyond 5th or 9th grade, much less finish secondary school.

An interesting fact is the enrollment of girls.  The Gambia is working hard to ensure that girls enroll in school -- education for all.  As a result of this many of the schools we surveyed had more girls than boys, one even had 100 more in a school of less than 400 students.  One of the heads explained this to me by saying that girls attend for free, but boys have to pay.  (I don't know how much, but any amount to these people is a lot)

I also reviewed the school gardens with the Garden Masters.  The school gardens are supposed to supplement the rice and oil and come up with a more nutritious meal.  Unfortunately the majority of the schools had not even started theirs.  But I did take some pictures of one that was doing a good job.  One of the problems with school gardens is water.  The worst case scenario was a school that was getting their money from a windmill pump.  It was owned by a man and everyone had to pay him for the water.  Then when there is no wind there is no water.  Life is tough in the Gambia.