ORPHANS' EDUCATION
The fatality of this
epidemic is most profoundly manifested by the extent to which it saps, not only
the energy of the victim, but the intrinsic mechanisms that propel a society to
progress. Education is such a vital ingredient of a country’s development
recipe, as it is known to furnish the tools with which children and young people
carve out their lives, and is a lifelong source of comfort, renewal and
strength. Children’s school attendance and enrolment have been severely
battered by AIDS, to such an extent that countries like The Central African
Republic and Swaziland have reported a drop in school enrolment and attendance
of 20%-36%,
attributed to AIDS and orphan hood.
Uganda has moved a step in
the right direction by embracing Free Primary Education for all since 1997.
Despite this, studies have uncovered glaring gaps in the quality of teaching and
an astronomical increase in the number of dropouts, decreasing enrolment
notwithstanding. This, they say, is a function of implicit costs like building
fee, feeding, uniforms, books and pens and other scholastic materials, plus the
incidence of AIDS, as children are required to stay home to cater for terminally
ill relatives coupled, with the shrink in the total house hold resource base, as
medical care, funeral costs, labour loss and the like take their toll.
STAO realized that it was
her duty to plug this gap in helping non-school going children access formal
education through the provision of the stringent scholastic requirements
necessary. STAO does this by pursuing a double-pronged approach:
a)
Cognizant that AIDS robes children of their parents, we trace the next of kin to
them and place them there, so as to keep that unique semblance of parental
attachment going. In the absence of these, we identify families with the
capacity to absorb one or two extra souls, and then place them there. These
families are expected to treat the orphans as though they are their own
children, by providing them with whatever their families would: food, shelter,
medical care, education, clothing, but above all, love without peripheral
qualifications. STAO now visits these homes twice every month to supervise and
ascertain compliance to STAO’s minimum set standards.
The thirst of education: A roll call session of one of the classes
b)
To ease the burden of looking for requisite materials necessary for
schooling, we developed a primary school with capacity for accommodating the
educational needs of close to 500 children. AGAPE INTEGRATED SCHOOL runs
from kindergarten to year four of primary education, with intention to move
up a class every year, should resources for construction and sustainability
of day-to-day activities become available. The school is largely crippled
by the sporadic financial inflow, most of it from staff volunteers and a
handful of well-wishers. The challenge is now to curtail the spontaneity
associated with this facility, so that we can have sustainability and thus,
predictability in the programs. STAO believes that this is the only way we
can keep our heads high and claim to be doing anything in improving the
plight of the parentless and the suffering young Ugandans.
Pupils standing next to the Agape
Integrated School classroom block
Ever since the founding of STAO it has been our dream
to start our own school for AIDS orphans and children of AIDS widows, In
2002 our dream with the support and efforts of Miss Karen Hynes became a
reality when we opened Agape Integrated School. We were fortunate to receive
donations for this purpose. It was decided to open with 3 classes,
pre-school, 1st year and second year Elementary School and to enroll up to
nearly 500 local children in total.
Pr Nelson with kids in a sunday school session