by Jenny Elphick
8 September 2011

At the end of a long, challenging and fun-packed day of training, teachers and principals sat around discussing what they had achieved. One principal said, ‘We have the heart, but we just don’t have the hands. Thank you, sis Jenny, for helping us to help our children to learn.’

Will and I arrived in Liberia in November 2010. He was the new SIM Liberia Director, and I was to work with Christian schools through training, provision of resources and school building. The last 14 years of brutal civil war had destroyed 80% of the schools, and a generation of young people had completely missed out on an education.

Today teachers in Liberia with any qualifications are hard to find. However the compassion, commitment and dedication I’ve seen in those I have met is noteworthy. Many of them are volunteers; there is little money to pay salaries.

Rev. Zinnah Charlie is pastor to his church and principal to the school that meets there. The rural community has little, but their enterprise has built up a thriving little school farm of pineapples, pawpaw (papaya), cassava, and rice. Little pigs and goats scuttle about with the children at break time. The pastor has enrolled his whole family in teaching at the school and their vision and passion shine through. They have now made by hand 3,000 blocks of the 6,000 needed for their new school building, but roofing costs will hit them hard.

I also work with the Evangelical Christian Academy (ECA), a school at Rock Hill. As the name suggests, it’s built on a hillside of solid rock. All water has to be carried to the school from far away. The church is building this school, classroom by classroom. Each year they add another very simple construction. Teachers work all morning in class, and all afternoon they break the hard rock with a chisel and hammer to sell it for road building. In this way they can make enough money to feed their families.

Progress is ‘small small’

In my first few months in Liberia, I collected a large number of cardboard boxes, thinking they may someday be useful in a classroom. I took them all into a school for the children to make constructions or play with. A cardboard obstacle course was built and, to my surprise, the first to go through it were not the children but the teachers. Teachers even came out of the older classes so that they could have a go!

The principal explained to me that the war had brought a premature end to the childhood of many of these teachers. It was fun to watch the senior teacher on his hands and knees, crawling through the boxes while all the children watched and cheered him on. The children did finally get their turn.

The approach to school here is mostly theory through chalk and talk, a lot of reciting facts and testing. One girl, Elizabeth, was proud to tell me recently that she had just got 40 out of 40 in her maths test on measurement. When I asked her what she could measure, she looked blank. In a six-week project on measurement she had never held a ruler! We are moving in the direction of a more practical and applied learning approach but, as we say in Liberia, progress is ‘small, small’.

The funds contributed to ‘Christian Education and Teacher Training in Liberia’ (project 95402) have been a blessing. I’ve used them to fund transport up country to rural schools, to buy essential reading and maths resources (it costs £3 to buy the reading books needed for a child to learn to read for one year) and to run a number of training events.

Although the Government is working hard to improve the education situation, we face big challenges. The climate is hot and sticky, the infrastructure is in the process of being rebuilt following the war and there are the normal issues common to any developing country.

It’s clear that the teachers we are working with have the ‘heart’. It’s our job to give them the ‘hands’ too.