Food at Cornerstone

The food at Cornerstone is fascinating to watch being prepared, but less interesting to eat.  While Brenda and her family were here they got to a point where they started to prepare food for themselves.

Cooking in the children's home kitchen

The kitchen facilities consist of a wooden shack with corrugated iron roof, open at the sides except for rattan strips.  There are no work surfaces.  Food preparation is done outside as a communal activity.  Cooking is done on a mud-built stove, fed by firewood.  As the kitchen is open to the elements, if it rains the cook gets wet and sometimes the fire is extinguished. 

A few days ago I watched the stove being re-lit following a downpour.  A girl went to fetch a piece of white hot charcoal from another kitchen.  She then tore some of the rattan wall down and used it to make a fire.  The burning rattan was then put into the stove as kindling.

Typical meal of bean stew and posho

For breakfast we have ‘bread’ which are really small doughnuts.  For other meals the local staple is called Posho.  It is a type of thick porridge made out of maize (sweetcorn) flour.  The consistency is similar to thick mashed potato.  It is almost tasteless and is never salted.  Sometimes we have rice instead.  Usually the posho is accompanied by a bean stew.  It is also sometimes served with a glutinous vegetable dish.  Sometimes we also have either fresh or dried fish.  If we are really lucky, there is a beef stew or grilled chicken.  The beef and fresh fish are delicious.  The chicken is caught in the compound and has had an extremely free-range existence, hence very tough.  There is a complete absence of fresh fruit in the children’s home diet, although these are easily obtainable at the local market. 

Food is bought at the local market, very close to the children’s home.  The market is a joy to wander in. Below are some photos.

Onion sellers

Market stalls

Main road into the market

Tomato seller

Main road into the market

Assessments

Just before school.

Over Eid, several of the resident children have come to me for a bit of extra English.  I have found again and again that they have a total absence of knowledge of phonics.  The children are completely unable to read aloud even the most basic words, such as ‘a’, ‘is’, ‘here’.  In spite of this they are able to communicate orally because of their exposure to live-in American visitors.  The school children don’t have this advantage. 

School children just before school.

To keep tabs on individual levels I have been keeping a spreadsheet of all my pupils including comments on their homework.  Unfortunately many do not do the homework, and I suspected that this is because of a lack of understanding.  So, yesterday and today, I took the bull by the horns and started to take my Primary 4 students out of their lessons for individual assessments while the others had a comprehension task.  I have started with those who have never submitted any homework to me and will expand gradually.

I thought the children would be very nervous of being singled out and taken out of class by me.  In fact it has caused great excitement.  They are all unexpectedly eager for a bit of one-to-one attention, regardless of their lack of English.  Each one of them is desperate to be the next on the list.  I think this is most probably because of being part of such huge classes where there is no individual attention.  Also, at home, older children are expected to play very responsible roles in doing chores and looking after younger ones and get little individual attention.  Tellingly, I noticed that some snuggled right up to me during the testing.  Ages vary, but many students in Primary 4 are 13 – 14 years old.

Shoes and socks

I have mentioned before that the school approach to discipline can be unreasonable.  In no case more so than last week, when the headmistress decided to clampdown on shoddy school uniform.  Uniform is often ragged and very big for them, presumably to make it last a long time.  Many students come to school with bare feet or flip flops.  Without any notice, the school suddenly decided to send students home if they did not have socks and black shoes.  This included the children from the children’s home.  Suddenly I found a lot of children hanging around the children’s home unable to attend school.  To make up for this I started to give them lessons during my spare time.

On day two of this hard-line policy, four Americans, two of whom are members of Fulaa, the charity that funds Cornerstone Children’s Home, arrived. As mentioned in a previous post, they came complete with lots of clothes for the orphans.  Unfortunately this did not include socks and shoes.  However, they had brought a lump sum of money from Fulaa for any other necessities.  As soon as they saw the situation, they headed for the local market and found a shoe stall-holder who was willing to make a trip to Uganda to buy a large quantity of shoes.

Here are some photos of the delighted children with their new footwear.  

More on my teaching experience

School is out

In the short time since I last wrote about teaching in the school, things have changed.  Primary 4 are gradually becoming accustomed to my ways and are therefore easier to teach.  We still have times when they are noisy, but not to the same extent.  Brenda has passed on her Primary 5 class to me as she is about to leave, so my workload has doubled.  Primary 5 were more used to having a western teacher to begin with and are therefore not nearly so excitable.  For both classes I am following the textbook but with modifications to make life more interesting and challenging.  I hope to boost their general understanding of English as well as following the curriculum.

Here is a sample of what my more successful lessons look like:

Primary 4 were due for a spelling session.  I dictated a single word to the class, and asked for volunteers to try to write it on the blackboard.  I think asking them to write on the board was key.  It made them feel important.  The lesson was intended to teach not only the spellings, but also about phonics.  They have never learnt phonics so this is a real struggle for them.  However, they persevered in spite of their difficulties.  Afterwards I asked them to write all the words down and learn them.  The very next day I repeated the procedure and found that they were far more accurate, and just as excited about writing on the board.

Primary 4 textbook (sponsored by
the UK government)

Primary 5 were due to learn about hard and soft ‘g’s and revise hard and soft ‘c’s, e.g. give and giraffe, cake and celebrate.  I divided the class into two teams, girls and boys.  I drew girl and boy columns on the blackboard.  Then I asked the teams to come to the board to write as many g and c words as possible in their columns.  At the end the boys were the clear winners.  We then worked on pronunciation and spotted the soft and hard letters.  I taught them the ‘rules’.  Then, as there was still time, I read to them from a story book which Brenda had started previously.

This is all very different from my teaching experience in Sudan, where I was moving from class to class the whole time and therefore didn’t get a chance to give continuity and work with the same pupils over a longer time.  The methods I am using are the same and continue to work well, because I am still coping with the same lack of resources.

I now have a short break from teaching as Monday and Tuesday next week is the Eid holiday (the Muslim celebration of the sacrifice of Abraham). 

Diary of the past few days

A couple of weeks ago I had visited the parish priest of St Patricks Church, Father John, to suggest starting a Saturday class for children whose parents can’t afford school fees and therefore have no schooling.  The priest said he would discuss it with the parish council.  I heard no more and was on the verge of reminding him. On Thursday evening I went to Mass.  Afterwards I was walking back home when a man came running after me from the church. Father John had told him about my suggestion and he is keen to help get it organised.  We agreed to discuss practicalities further on Sunday.  We need to consider how we get exercise books, pens, chalk and a blackboard.  We will need more volunteers to teach as there are a huge number of children unable to go to school here.  One of my ideas is to ask local missions for their help.  Brenda is friends with an American missionary couple who live locally.  She has agreed to introduce me before she leaves.

A couple of days ago a large quantity of donated clothes and other goodies arrived at Cornerstone from the U.S. along with some American members of Fulaa who are staying a couple of weeks.  The gifts were distributed to the resident children.  The focus was particularly on those with U.S sponsors, who needed to be photographed and write thank you letters for their presents.  Amid the excitement was a little girl whose elder sister is a resident.  This little girl is staying briefly while her relatives are away.  There was nothing for her even though she is just as poor and comes from the same orphaned background.  She has never had the chance to go to school because her relatives have no money for school fees.  I took her into my room and started to teach her to read.  I also taught her to write a, b, c and her name.  She was so excited when she realised she was writing her name, that her face lit up with joy.  It was a most rewarding experience for me.

Children at Loa are given their presents.
The school kitchens and a burnt out dormitory are in the background

Science lab at Loa

Today the American visitors and I took a taxi to a boarding secondary school at a place called Loa.  It is attended by six of the oldest Cornerstone children who had yet to receive their presents from their sponsors.  It was a lovely drive through the national park, along mountain passes, past beautiful traditional villages and then along a very rutted track which the driver took very cautiously.  The school was founded by Catholic missionaries.  It suffered badly during the civil war, when the Arabs bombed both the school buildings and the church.  Fortunately, although some buildings are just shells, both the church and the majority of school buildings have been renovated and are back in use.  After seeing their gifts and writing thank you letters to their sponsors, the children took us on a tour of the grounds.  The school is far better resourced than Cornerstone.  The students have individual chairs with built in writing surfaces.  There is a very new looking science laboratory, a library and lovely grounds with avenues of trees for shade.  

The children take us to see the church at Loa

The church at Loa was built in the 1920s and is back in use.  While we were there, they were preparing for the Feast of St Daniel Comboni, the missionary who first brought Catholicism to Sudan.  There were women preparing vegetables for the celebration.  When we went to introduce ourselves to them, they recognised me and greeted me very enthusiastically.  It turned out that they were the Legion of Mary from St Patricks, the church I attend in Nimule.  

Teaching at Cornerstone

School buildings with the nursery (left) and primary classrooms on the right.

Cornerstone School is one of many primary schools in the Nimule area, but has the highest reputation.  However it is still very definitely a third world school.  Most of the teachers are state employees and reliant on their wages being paid by the government.  They are frequently not paid, and as a result do not always attend, leaving the children untaught.  The school caters for the resident children and also for other local families who pay school fees.  The age range is from nursery to primary 5.  After primary 5 the children go to another school, about half an hour’s walk away.

There are wide differences in standard in the classes from completely uneducated to reasonably literate.  The classes are usually about 50 children, crammed into small huts on benches.  There are no desks.  Even the nursery children have no toys or activities apart from occasionally singing.  The school timetable has many gaps in which the children have no teacher and nothing to do but sit in their classrooms, supposedly revising but usually messing around.  For children who are used to a very open-air, active life, this is clearly even more difficult than it would be in the UK.  It also causes disruption for the other classes because of the uncontrolled noise levels from the surrounding huts.

My classroom

In some ways the experience is similar to my teaching experiences in Sudanese schools.  Like Sudan, there is a lack of resources, poverty leading to absenteeism both of staff and pupils, large multi-level classes and the use of corporal punishment.  The talk and chalk approach to teaching is also the same, leading to pupils who have no idea how to put a sentence together by themselves, let alone write a story or understand what I am saying.  They are used to being spoon-fed rather than doing their own work.  I find that they copy everything that is written on the board and are completely unused to constructing their own sentences either orally or in writing.  As a result more western methods of teaching, such as eliciting and group work, cause bewilderment.  But there the resemblance ends. 

In Sudan the children behave well which makes it relatively easy to explain new concepts and get them started.  At Cornerstone, they do not.  They are very noisy and do not listen.  Even taking the register for 50 plus students is a feat of endurance for the teacher and uses up an unacceptable amount of time in a 40 minute lesson. 

Classroom at the end of the school day.

After my first couple of weeks of teaching, I am realising just how little knowledge of English my class has.  They are in their fourth year of learning English, but this is not evident.  For example, according to the textbook, the students are due to start learning about adverbs.  I thought I’d path the way by contrasting adverbs with adjectives.  It turned out that the class had no remembrance of adjectives, nouns or verbs.  Total amnesia about all previous grammar lessons in fact.  Much as I can’t blame them for this, I am going to need to take several steps back rather than soldiering through the textbook regardless.  In one lesson I attempted a miming lesson for learning adjectives.  The students were self-conscious and found the lesson very funny.  I felt that the lesson had achieved very little and doubt that they really understood about adjectives by the end.  However afterwards I heard that it was popular.  Hopefully I can build on that to get more spontaneous responses and more interesting lessons, eventually.

Apart from the learning problems, the major issue is behaviour and noise levels.  The school approach to discipline is usually the cane or hoeing the grass, but sometimes bizarre punishments such as being made to do leapfrog over a long distance.  The punishments always involve the students missing school time which is detrimental to their learning.  Most western teachers are averse to corporal punishment and the students have realised that they are less likely to get into trouble for their behaviour when a volunteer is teaching.  This makes it very difficult to keep order in the class. 

This is the harsh reality of teaching here, which I think it is important for volunteer teachers to be aware of.  There is a high turnover of staff, both volunteers and local teachers, which must cause a lot of disruption as classes test their teachers (as all children do).  I have asked to stay in the longer term, so hopefully I will get past this hurdle and be able to teach more effectively once we have settled into a routine.  I find it some comfort that my fellow volunteer, Brenda, is a far more experienced teacher than me, but has exactly the same problems.

Settling in

I am starting to get to know some of the children at the children’s home.  They range from teenagers down to toddlers.  Some are members of large families, all resident at the home.  The older ones are often here because of losing parents in the civil war, but many are here because their families are unable to look after them due to extreme poverty, or numerous other reasons.  For example, one little girl has been placed here following the divorce of her parents and the mother’s remarriage to a Dinka (member of a nomadic tribe).  Traditionally Dinka families will kill offspring from a previous marriage, so this is for her child’s safety.  Another girl had her leg amputated due to cancer and has been discarded by her family.

I brought a stock of 20 recorders with me and am giving recorder lessons to some very keen children.  They are fast learners.  When I mentioned this to one of the pastors, he was keen for recorders to be used for religious services too.  It will be a while before their standard is high enough, but this is certainly something to aim for. 

Entrance sign to the children's home, church and school

One of the staff plays the guitar.  He is teaching a teenage boy at the home.  One day I brought my viola along and we played some hymns together.  The hymns are all new to me and mainly in Madi (the local language), but are easy to pick up and improvise harmonies to.  Again, I have been asked if I will play at some services.

The religious ethos at Cornerstone is highly evangelical, with a distinctly African flavour.  Services are very loud.  During services everyone shouts their individual prayers, in a complete babble of sound, accompanied by violent hand gestures.  To me it is a very strange way of worship and I find it hard to understand.  There is a general belief and fear of witchcraft and demons even among the pastors.  For example, I was told an extraordinary story by one of the pastors about a woman who was maliciously turned into a snake.  The pastor was outraged by the abuse of her human rights in being turned into a snake against her will!

Every morning at 6am there are ‘devotions’, which is the quietest service, although even in this one individual prayers are as described above.  Devotions are compulsory for all the children in the home.  However many choose not to come and are expected to hoe the grass as a punishment.  Several children have told me that they enjoy hoeing, so this can hardly be seen as a deterrent.  On Friday evenings there is an all-night service from about 7pm to 6am.  It is extremely loud with plenty of microphones and equally loud prayer. This (fortunately) is not compulsory and people are free to wander in and out.  This is one of those occasions when I am very glad of my deaf ear as the sound can be clearly heard from my room.

On Tuesday afternoons there is a voluntary Bible study session mainly attended by adults.  The first time I attended we read the story of Cain and Abel and then analysed it.  It was a very good experience and I learnt a lot that I had never noticed before in this story.  I had always seen the rejection of Cain’s sacrifice as very unjust.  After much discussion of why God rejected Cain’s sacrifice, a conclusion was reached that Abel had been the first, spontaneously making his sacrifice of a valuable animal.  Cain made his sacrifice afterwards, most probably copying Abel rather than from truly pious motives.  Therefore God’s judgement was on the spirit in which the sacrifice was made rather than the nature of the sacrifice.  The passage on Abel’s blood crying out to God was seen as highly relevant to all present due to the atrocities committed in South Sudan, and the need for reconciliation rather than human revenge.  The message was that only God has the right to judge and take life.

First weekend in the children's home

The children's home, photo taken from the school.
My bedroom is on the far right.

I woke, much refreshed at about 6am on my first full day in South Sudan.  People were already getting up, doing their teeth at the water pump, and generally getting ready for the day.  I ate breakfast with Brenda, my fellow volunteer and her daughter and was joined by pastors Richard and Juma.  We ate some samosas, papaya and doughnuts with tea. I discussed the practical aspects of my stay with Juma and explained that my money situation was poor.  Juma told me that they have two types of volunteer, those who stay a short time and pay for their keep, and those who are long term and don’t pay.  I will definitely be the second sort.  Juma’s worry, based on past experience, is that westerners can’t cope with the local living conditions without extras.  I assured him that I am a very flexible person and was capable of fitting in, as I did in Sudan.

Children fill containers with water at the bore hole.
The cow waits for surplus water.

It was a peaceful day as it was Saturday.  The children did their chores such as water pumping, farming, minding smaller children, but have a lot of time to themselves as well for play.  They are expected to be very responsible from a tiny age.  Even three year olds wash their own clothes, although I notice that sometimes they are later re-washed!  Goats and a beautiful African cow with a calf wander the grounds. 

I was keen to go to the local Catholic church for Mass and asked Pastor Richard the day before about Mass times and for directions to the church.  He told me it was a long way away and I would need to take a ‘boda boda’ (motorbike taxi on which customers ride pillion).  The second Mass of the day was at 8am, which seemed early enough for me.  He agreed to help me get there.  On the day, Pastor Richard flagged down a boda boda and paid him to take me to the church.  

The church is called St Patrick’s.  It was packed inside and lots of people were outside as well. Somebody brought me a plastic chair.  Mass hadn’t started, but the choir was already singing and there were about twenty little girls, dressed alike who danced in unison with the music.  Both music and dancing were a very high standard.  The congregation joined in with enthusiasm, doing actions to the music and singing in harmony.  The music went on for about half an hour, and then the priest gave a short speech and everyone came outside.  As the priest walked out I introduced myself and he explained that the bishop was coming at short notice and they were going to have an outside Mass with him.  A temporary altar, lecterns and microphones were set up under a canopy.  The pews were taken out of the church and put under the trees.  It was much nicer outside under the trees where it wasn’t so crowded and everyone had a good view.  As before, the choir, dancers and musicians played while we waited for the bishop to arrive.  I was very interested in the musical instruments, which are different from anything I have seen.  There were several local wooden harps of various sizes.  Like modern western harps they have sound boxes and are a similar shape.  They have fewer strings and are all of a portable size ranging from 2 – 4 foot long.  There was a metal shaker for rhythm which was played very expertly.

Mass itself was tri-lingual as the Mass was substituted for two which used different languages.  The languages were Madi, Juba Arabic and English.  This was very good for me, as I was able to understand the readings and the sermon.  It did make a very long Mass though, especially as the sermon was about an hour long.  Everyone sitting near me was very welcoming, shaking my hand and smiling at me. 

After Mass I very rapidly found a boda boda and went back to the orphanage.  Agnes, the matron, had been very worried about me as I had taken so long and was thinking of going to look for me when I arrived. 

After lunch (bean stew and rice) Brenda took me to see the local market, where I exchanged some of my US dollars for local currency and bought some mobile credit.  This was much needed as I had exhausted my first mobile top up card (scratch card) on day one, texting the UK and Sudan to let people know I was safely arrived.  It is going to be easy to exchange money here as there is a supermarket which acts as a bureau de change within minutes of the orphanage.  Scratch cards can be bought everywhere.

The rest of Sunday followed a similar pattern to Saturday.

I arrive in South Sudan

After a very difficult few months in the UK trying to go back to Sudan independently and failing to get a visa, I was back to the drawing board.  After a search on the internet, and several enquiries to educational charities working in South Sudan, I received an email out of the blue from a South Sudanese pastor called Samuel Juma, currently living in the US, who has founded a US based charity called Fulaa Lifeline International to support an orphanage and school in his home town of Nimule in South Sudan.  He was very eager for me to go as soon as possible and pulled out all the stops to get my visa processed quickly and efficiently.  The day-to-day running of the school is done by his brother, a pastor called John Juma, aka Juma John and another pastor called Richard.  I arrived at Juba Airport on 20^th September.  

It was sunny with light clouds and very humid.  The airport is very small and the visa and passport sections are in the same place as the baggage area.  People can walk in casually. A man with an ID badge came up to me as I was queuing to show my passport and hand in my entry form.  He said he would get my baggage for me while I queued.  Possibly rather trustingly (my mind was asleep after the flight) I said ‘yes please’ and off he went.  I spent the next ten minutes having severe misgivings and worrying that he could have been an opportunist thief from the outside street and I would never see my luggage again.  Thankfully my fears were misplaced and he came back complete with luggage within ten minutes. 

Then, also while I was standing in the queue, a very smartly dressed man came up to me, bearing a piece of paper with my name on it.  He turned out to be Juma John, the director of the orphanage.  As soon as I had finished queuing, we took all my baggage and headed for the car, a taxi from Nimule.  My first impressions of Juba were of a town very like those I had seen in the north, the only difference being an absence of rickshaws and donkeys and that the signs were in English.  Also, nobody was wearing Islamic dress.  We passed a market very reminiscent of the market in Atbara.  We stopped briefly to buy me a SIM card, some credit and a few bottles of water. 

The road from Juba to Nimule is tarmacked and largely empty, so we had no hold-ups.  The road is used by large lorries bringing goods from Uganda.  Every so often we would pass one of these lorries overturned by the road, or the wreck of crashed and burnt out cars.  Juma told me that there are buses from Uganda which it is possible to take to Juba but that all transport stops after 6pm because of the risk of bandits. I saw frequent villages with traditional African round thatched huts beside the road and occasional small buildings with corrugated iron roofs.  The landscape looked very natural, with low trees and long grasses.  Although it looked uncultivated, this is clearly not the case as people subsist on the land.  Again there were no donkeys, but plenty of goats, often in the middle of the road.  The road was slightly elevated so that there were excellent views much of the way, with mountains in the distance. 

Village huts next to the road

Towards the end of the journey, the road went through the Nimule National Park.  The only real difference I could see to the rest of the countryside was the absence of villages.  According to my internet research, a herd of 100 elephants migrate between this park and Uganda.  I look forward to seeing them.  To our left was a range of mountains which forms a border with Uganda.  The road went up into the mountains and then I saw Nimule for the first time.  It is on the lower slopes with views of the Nile.

We arrived and I met a bewildering number of people both adult and child.  It will take me ages to sort them all out.  I also met the outgoing volunteer teacher, Brenda, and her two teenage children, who she has been home educating while here.  They leave in October, so I will get time to have a handover with her.

A lot of trouble had been taken to make western volunteers comfortable.  I have the luxury of my own room with a key.  There are lovely views for miles around as we are on the slopes of the mountain above the town.  There is an electric point in the room which is operational for a few hours when the generator runs at night.  Clothes hangers are provided along with toilet tissue.  They have even provided a new pair of flip flops and a basin and soap for my own use.  A mosquito net and bedding were also set up ready for me. 

We had supper in the staff dining room.  This was my first South Sudanese meal.  It was very good.  The staple is a type of mash made from sweetcorn flour (maize) called posha.  The other dishes were fish and chicken drumsticks and fried sliced potato. 

View of the school from the children's home

Water is pumped a from a bore hole a short distance from the building.  When I want to shower I take my basin to the pump to get water, then carry it to the shower room, so I can douche myself.  The toilet is next door to the shower.  Again water must be carried into the toilet to flush it.  The water is drunk as it is by the locals, but Juma warned that I might need to buy bottled water.  To save on expense I am using my purification tablets.  Hopefully I will acclimatise gradually and no longer need them after a while.

After supper I had a shower before going to bed early, exhausted after the long journey from London.  I was warned that the evening service in the on-site church would be very noisy and keep me awake, but in fact I slept well, only waking briefly in need of a drink of water, which I had close to hand.