South Sudan pupils crowd schools after peace

Nov 24, 2005 (JUBA) — Vis Wani is 20 and can barely read and write. But after years as a refugee fleeing fighting he is finally in school in southern Sudan, a region the U.N. says has the worst school enrolment rate in the world.

Wani, in the Basic 5 class aimed at students half his age, spent his youth watching villagers being killed and running away from a civil war that engulfed the region for more than two decades and claimed 2 million lives.

Copying an English text about evaporation, Wani could hardly read back the words he had written let alone explain how the scientific process worked.

“Life at home was tough. I’d see the fighting, people being killed and often we’d have to run away when it got bad,” the thin young man said in a voice so soft it was impossible to hear over the racket of the other pupils at the Buluk school.

“I could not regularly go to school there.”

Since a January peace deal ending Sudan’s civil war, southern Sudanese are sending their children to the closest available schools, often in the major urban centres.

Almost all the 1,250 Buluk students are refugees who fled either to other areas within Sudan or to camps across the borders. But with eight classrooms, often 100 students are crammed into a lesson.

“One teacher asked us for a megaphone because there were so many kids in the class the ones at the back could not hear him,” said Abdul Kadir Musse, an employee of the U.N.’s children’s fund UNICEF.

Senior U.N. official in Juba David Cressly said schools and education would be a priority for the United Nations to work with the newly formed government of southern Sudan.

“This is not really an issue of reconstruction; we are trying to build on what never existed before,” he said.

“Southern Sudan has the worst level of school enrolment at primary level and levels beyond that (in the world).”

Cressly said fewer than 1 percent of girls in the region graduate from primary school.

The southern civil war broadly pitted the Islamist northern government against mostly Christian and animist rebels, complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology. It forced more than 4 million people to flee their homes in Sudan and 500,000 to run to refugee camps in neighbouring countries.

Buluk school in the southern capital Juba could epitomise Sudan’s war. Juba was a garrison town for the northern government and the school was forced to change its curriculum from English to Arabic and away from Christian education during the war, teachers said.

That change has created a major challenge for educators. English is the language of teaching in the south under the terms of the peace deal while the lingua franca is still Arabic.

Buluk’s students greet their teachers in perfect unison with “Good morning Madame,” but they can say little else in English.

The government hopes to make the changeover in five years, but some say it could take an entire generation before the transition is complete.

Meanwhile, students like 15-year-old Eunice Koko are content with just having a school with books and teachers.

“In Juba conditions are tough as my family’s not here, but the school is much better than at home because it has books,” she said.

(Reuters)