Being a teacher is no easy task with all the beaurocracy, administration, numerous restrictions, ever-increasing violence in schools, it is no wonder that teachers need the long breaks to recuperate. Being a teacher in Zambia is challenging to say the least, though for entirely different reasons. If you have trained in Lusaka and lived in a house with electricity and plumbing, being sent to a remote rural village is a real shock to the system. When Zambian teachers qualify they have no choice as to where they will be located.
Malima Community School House
Schools such as Mukuni Basic and High rely upon trained government teachers and with a catchment in excess of twelve hundred pupils a considerable number are required. Sadly the government cannot provide adequate housing for these teachers and it is left to the school to meet the shortfall. Since building Mukuni High School, which opened in 2007, we have encountered all kinds of problems. Although The Butterfly Tree has build some houses many more are needed in both Mukuni and Ngandu Villages. Several teachers who are residing in Livingstone, some distance from Mukuni, do not attend classes every day due to the cost of transport. Others have requested a transfer.
The Butterfly Tree Teacher’s House for Siamasimbi Basic School
When we upgraded Ngandu School in 2009 the community built two mud hut constructions to help ease the situation. This was fine until an elephant sniffed out grain in one of the teacher’s kitchens and uplifted the roof, as aresult the teacher refused to return to her home. Ngandu, one of the oldest basic schools in Zambia, built back in the nineteen forties has over 500 pupils and feeds into Mukuni High School. Like Mukuni there are a considerable number of orphans and many of them are on our orphan sponsorship programme.
Teachers’s kitchen destroyed by an elephant – Ngandu Basic School
Today starts an appeal to invite anyone to donate just £5 to help these teachers who in turn can help the orphans who desperately need an education.
