Mashabo School

The room was alive with laughing voices, crinkling paper, and the sound of desks being scraped across the floor. Children squeezed two or three to a desk hunched over their books copying their lessons while others chased each other or sat chatting and eating bright orange ajuara fruits. The room was divided into sections by movable chalk boards and the voice of a teacher could be heard from the far end of the room. How anyone could accomplish something in a school that loud was an amazing feat.

Due to teacher shortages, Mashabo Primary School has only three teachers for seven classes. The teachers divide their time between the classes, with 20 minute sessions followed by hour long periods of independent copying of lessons. In total the children get less than 2 hours of teacher student interaction each day.

Walking through the third grade classroom the children shyly peaked out at me from behind their books. “Can I see what your doing?” I asked. Eagerly they brought me their notebooks where they’d scribbled out an assignment about air and sound for science class. “What did you write?” I asked. “We don’t know,” they replied, “we just copied the part we’re supposed to.

I noticed that many of the children had no spacing between the words they’d written and others had not only misspelled things, but had switched sentences midline. “Do you know what the assignment is about?” “No, we haven’t talked about it yet,” was their answer.

“Can you read,” I asked Deborah, the little girl whose paper I held. “No, not really.” “Can you?” I asked another child. Once again the answer was “No.” One by one I asked each child and from each the answer was the same “No, I don’t know how to read.”

Throughout the week I continued my investigation and to my dismay I learned that not only could none of the first, second, or third graders read, but neither could the rest of the children through grade six. With the exception of two children…TWO! It seemed unfathomable that nearly 90 children who had been attending school since they were 4 years old could still not read.

That week I spent two days teaching the 3rd graders. We talked about phonics, science, art, and math. We did experiments, skits, and colored (something they had rarely done as none of them owned crayons). They loved it all.

Nearly three weeks have passed since then and I’ve often thought about the children of Mashabo. And so, when spring break ends next Monday and the children return to school, they’ll be returning to find one more teacher. And hopefully, with a lot of patient effort on my part as well as a lot of prayer, all thirteen 3rd graders in Mashabo will be reading by June.

*Anyone wishing to contribute to purchasing phonics materials and other school supplies here in Guyana for the Mashabo children, e-mail: alexisacs@hotmail.com.