Education Tangle

The human knot game begins with everyone standing in a circle and grabbing the hands of people across from you. The result is a tangle of linked hands in the center; the challenge is untangling the mess without letting go of anyone.

The second school we visited this session was the Gogo village Full Primary School (FPS), which is about an hour and a half out of Lilongwe by bus. As always, our highly skilled and fearless driver, Dennis, delivered us safely—although maybe a little jumbled.

Stepping off the bus, the view of Gogo FPS includes four brick classrooms, a small office, and a well-kept courtyard. The school sits on a slope overlooking scenic rolling hills with terraced crop fields. Right next-door is an active health clinic staffed with nurses and counselors, which, on our first day, had lines of women keenly watching us as they waited to have their babies weighed and checked. During this week another volunteer, Leigh, and I acted as Teacher Facilitators. As we shuffled into the courtyard that first day the headmaster and a few of the teachers eagerly shook our hands.

Gogo FPS has a total of seven teachers to teach the over seven hundred students, but we rarely got to meet with more than four at a time. On our third day at Gogo, Leigh and I strolled around the rec field with some of the teachers, including Edward and Horace, who quietly observed the kids playing games.

The games we play on the third morning of our program are geared towards building communication and problem-solving skills as well as trust among the students. In one of the games, the trust walk, one person closes their eyes and is led around by a trusted friend. In another, two kids sit back-to-back with arms linked and have to stand up together, which requires a coordinated push to get off the ground. The teachers stood at a distance observing and often letting out a laugh, watching some of the kids trying to stand up. But, when they got to the human knot game, Edward and Horace couldn’t just be quiet observers.

After hearing how the game works, Horace got closer and closer to one of the class’ knots and tried to instruct the children on how to detangle themselves—he eventually put in his hands to work out the knot himself while the kids maintained their twisted state and laughed. Edward, a young and particularly eager teacher, actually joined a knot to try to solve the labyrinth of bodies from the inside.

After morning games, we headed back to the office for some serious discussions on the challenges facing Gogo. “Malawi needs to educate its people,” Edward emphatically declared as we sat in the tiny teachers office. Edward, who spent two years in college before he ran out of money to attend, has only worked at Gogo for less than a year. But, he quickly became aware that the Dowa school district, which includes Gogo, suffers from corruption and poor management. Proposals to fund basic education resources—like teachers—and extracurricular activities, including clubs like HIV/AIDS support groups in the village, are denied by the District Education Management office despite funding specifically set aside for such proposals.

Horace, a reserved but engaging teacher who has worked at Gogo the longest, calmly told us about the schools effort to improve the education programs. In past years, they set up new programs and curriculums, like support groups for girls and re-forestation projects. But, despite their warm reception in the village, each effort fizzled out from lack of resources and poor management.

Edward, who takes a bus every weekend to Lilongwe to attend classes in finances, energetically describes how funding should be evenly distributed in the district. “I want to solve problems by monitoring finances” in the district, he says optimistically.

Dowa includes a cluster of primary schools that all feed into one secondary school, which allows 50 new spots per year for incoming students. One of the other primary schools in the district is next to a military base, which somehow gets the lion’s share of spaces in the secondary school—nearly 80% says Horace. Last year, of the nearly 40 students that graduated from Gogo, only nine were offered spots in the secondary school. “That’s not good,” Edward says. Nine spots aren’t enough.

Of the tangle of problems that Gogo faces, Horace names teacher shortages as next on his list of concerns for the school—particularly after seeing its affects first-hand. When he received his teaching certificate in 2004, he worked in his village’s school—a rural primary school that had difficulty recruiting new teachers due to its remote location. When he left, he knew no one would replace him. With over a hundred kids in some classes, Horace says, it’s hard to make sure they’re all following along and getting the help they need.

But so far, the teachers of Gogo are working things out, despite the kinks. Edward boasts that the Gogo students who do go to secondary school are always at the top of their class even when they’re among students from more privileged schools. “The great thing about our school,” Edward says, “is that we always work together.

After a lot of head scratching and frustrated ‘humphs,’ the human knots worked their way out. It took Edward’s knot a couple tries to solve it successfully. Horace, along with one of the volunteers, Meghan, finally solved another after a good ten minutes that ended with a relieved sigh and some high-fives.



Submitted by B. Mole