Education

We're going to build a school

Marian Pallister

Dreams did not all die as the 21st-century began to unroll – or should that be unravel? Perhaps that is because not all dreams have been UK-centric, Euro-centric or even centred upon the wealthy northern hemisphere. Kenneth Roy's splendid dream (SR 269) to nurture the creativity of young people in Scotland has its counterpart in the south where my dream has been cooking slowly.
     When Kenneth was writing those first 500 letters, I was being far less constructive. I was following through on an assignment in Zambia – I was still a full-time journalist then – that had brought me face to face with many facts that were hard to assimilate.
     The assignment was to cover a major AIDS conference in Lusaka. I travelled with (these days we'd say 'was embedded with') the charity Christian Aid. If I had covered the event alone, I would never have had access to the places and people shared with me. I stayed in a traditional hut in the grounds of St Frances Hospital in Katete where people who'd travelled 40 kilometres on a bike queued hours for treatment, where premature babies were kept in incubators best described as rabbit hutches with naked lightbulbs for warmth, where children with malaria lay five to a bed (the 'wrong' way on), and a little boy came to my door every night to say: 'School fees, madam'.
     'School fees, madam'.
     It was a phrase that haunted me when I came home. Children in Zambia had to pay school fees because Zambia was a highly indebted country and free education wasn't on the budget.

As the millennium dawned and Kenneth wrote his letters, I was going back and back and back again to Zambia – not officially as a journalist, although I wrote many pieces about life there, assisted by a youngster called Terence who now writes for The Post, hopefully inspired by my ferreting around the markets and compounds, the government ministries and health clinics.
     Gradually I became involved with two projects – a school run by missionaries with volunteer teachers for the children orphaned by HIV and Aids, and then a residential centre for street kids. When I told people in the UK about the work that was being done to give children a chance, there were gifts of cash, books, toys – my suitcase once contained 70 knitted teddies, 14 footballs and a wedding dress bought from the Oxfam wedding shop in Aberdeen for the bride of Terence. Not much room for my T-shirts and clean smalls.
     So much slower than Kenneth's dream, mine evolved. I set up a charity. We raise funds to pay for the education of the youngsters at the Mthunzi Centre (primary education is now 'free' but uniforms and books and other prohibitive fees have to be found), buy text books, provide financial help for the school in Lilanda, support girls in the community – and now we are sending some to college.
     With grants from such bodies as the Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council, Awards for All, SCIAF, and individuals like the artist John Lowrie Morrison, we have organised a number of visits by the Mthunzi Culture Group to Scotland and, as they have worked with young musicians and singers here, that has become a year-about exchange with young Scots going out to share time, music and drama with the youngsters at the Mthunzi Centre.

My dream has been rather like one of those your colleague tells you about over lunch – the one so long and complicated that you lose the will to live. Now, however, I'm starting a new decade with an extension of my millennium dream. We're going to build a school.
     There are few secondary schools in Zambia and the affordable ones are in the bush. Our boys go to about half a dozen different schools scattered around the country. They board (no – we're not talking Glenalmond College) in huge dormitories, sometimes windowless, sometimes without electricity, always without storage space so that their meagre belongings block the access to bunk beds shared by two or three students. They survive on a diet of beans, beans and beans. The teaching is not always what it should be. Science blocks lack equipment.
     So I suggested we build one at the Mthunzi Centre. There are plenty of families from the surrounding community who would pay willingly to send their youngsters to a day school – it is the boarding fees that make secondary school so costly. Our own boys will go free.
     At Christmas, the dynamic programmes director at Mthunzi, Malama Mazaba, and I spent a lot of time with people from the ministry of education and the local authority education department. We have the building plans. We have a site. All we need now is £40,000 and we'll have a shiny new school. The annual fundraising we do after that will be to provide the best teachers and equipment, to add a music school, and to provide agricultural training.
     £40,000. It seems such a cheap dream compared with Kenneth's grandiose £200,000 – but even 10 years down the line, money goes further in Africa.
     When the Mthunzi Culture Group arrives at the end of July, we'll launch the campaign. Ten years on from the launch of Kenneth's dream, I can use our website – http://www.mthunzi.org – to seek funds although I'm sure he'll be dismayed that courteous letters like his will not form the basis of making my dream happen.

Marian Pallister is an author, lecturer and founder of the Mthunzi and Lilanda Initiative