The Promise of a New School Year

By Patricia Glogowsi
CRS Volunteer, The Gambia

As a school teacher for 35 years, preparing a room for a class of children had always been an exciting time of anticipation for me for the new school year.

Dusting off the desks and arranging them in a freshly waxed, sparkly clean room brought a sense of fun to this time of year.

While serving a CRS partner in Basse, The Gambia, the new school year allowed me to go through the same familiar steps of preparation, but with circumstances that puts one's imagination to the test.

On the first day of school at St. Albert's Mission Nursery School, I went into a classroom housed in a long cement building with the typical metal roof and a space of about a one-foot opening at the top of the wall where the roof was perched. This was the extent of a dim light which "illuminated" the narrow area.

About 120 children ages three through seven years old were seated at long wooden tables and benches with no backs, and all eyes were fixed on a child pointing to the letters on a chart reciting the ABCs. The students in their green and white checkered shirts and green shorts or skirts all sat quietly and attentive to the teacher.

So many children were placed in this one room because the other classroom was being used to store a bounty of 150 pound bags of rice, 110 pound bags of lentils, and cases of oil provided by USAID for people living with HIV and for orphaned and vulnerable children.

Now on this day the permanent storage room was finally completed and all had to be moved out of the classroom via a walkway and down a few steps to the little building about 50 feet away. Sr. Alexis, the school principal, asked for our help, and Theresa Glaser, a CRS volunteer colleague, and I together transferred the boxes of oil to the building, with another colleague, Almedu, carrying the 60-pound case on his own.

Another colleague, Sister Emerence, made some phone calls and five young men came to the rescue slinging the heavy bags of rice and lentils over their shoulders or atop their heads. They labored nonstop and emptied the room of thousands of pounds of food.

When looking at the neatly stacked boxes of oil and the sacks of rice and lentils piled one on each other, I was thankful for all the good done in this world to "feed the hungry." Now back to the empty classroom. Left in this room were a few square wooden tables, several benches, a teacher's table in the front of the room covered with charts, and a small stand with articles. Everything was covered with sand, dust and cobwebs of the most intricate designs woven everywhere imaginable. The floor was full of sand and dirt, and suspended from the ceiling were last year's loop chains made from pages of the children's written schoolwork colored over with crayon. This is the classroom for the seven year olds.

There were no stacks of text books for reading, writing and arithmetic, no number 2 pencils to be sharpened, no yellow lined tablets and no new boxes of crayons. The teacher was not to be welcomed back with rolls of Scotch tape, nor masking tape, magic markers, chalk sticks, nor Post-it notes.

I looked at the room thinking about the possibilities which were here for the teacher and the students for the coming year. We asked Sister Marie Celine if we could clean it so it would be all ready for the next day. Sister Marie Celine sighed, "Oh, my," and took me to a little room where she found a bucket, a cleaning clothe, and two "whisk" brooms with long husks.

Theresa and I swept the sandy floor, wiped down the ceiling of cobwebs, scrubbed the dust-covered tables and benches, and arranged all in place as Sister Marie Celine directed.

It was early evening now and even in the dimness of the twilight, the classroom gleamed with freshness.

I was filled with the same sense of pride that I had when I prepared my classroom back home, and I could not help but anticipate that same excitement the teacher and the class of about 50-plus seven year olds would experience the next morning as they entered their very own room.

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. We alleviate suffering and provide assistance to people in need in nearly 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality.