The Schools

On Friday, all the country groups did presentations on their trip. There seemed to be a common theme of things not going the way they were expected, many lessons learned, and cultural experiences. I noticed afterward though, that our group went to one of the most (if not the most) "underdeveloped" country.

The Indian teams talked about the crazy traffic. Where we were, people hardly had bikes, never mind cars. We were usually the only car on the road. The roads were bad and getting around was a difficult. Most people had to walk hours to get into town or the market. We didn't have to worry about dark, smelly latrines because many of the places we went didn't have toilets anywhere. We showed a picture of one of our schools that must have looked really bad to the class. But in reality, this school is one of the better schools in terms of structure. Out of the six schools we worked with, only two of them had walls. The others were just sticks. Even benches for schools were hard to come by. Many kids carried benches from their homes to school and carried them back at the end of the day.

Here's a picture of one of the better schools. When the school was constructed, they didn't have enough money to have a roof for the left part of the school. The rains took away some of the blocks.

Another school. The blue thing is a tarp. So basically very thin plastic.

Sticks and thatched roof for a school.