Dominic Asquith

Where children grow up young

I went out for the morning to visit a school in Saqqara, about 45 minutes south of Cairo. It was one of nearly 80 in the Governorate run under the Girls Education Initiative, and over 1000 in the whole of Egypt. Coming off the road that runs beside the Mariotiya canal, we passed a smart Country Club with bougainvillea cascading over its clean white walls. The tarmac abruptly ended and we turned down a dusty road, a smaller, dirtier canal on one side and humble houses and small grocery shops on the other. We arrived at a small building. It was neat, well built, brightly painted and well maintained. I sensed that those who worked and studied there were proud of it.

Inside, there was just one classroom. This is the pattern for all the schools under this intiative, with the community donating land and needing to be involved in maintaining and sustaining the school. About 30 girls aged between 6 and 13 were studying under the care of two teachers. Not every girl manages to turn up for the whole school day every day. The reality is that they have jobs to do also. This is the point of the school - to provide educational opportunities to girls who don't get the chance, for whatever reason, to attend the state school, which in this case was just the other side of a wall.

Meeting school children in Saqqara, 

Ehsan, the class leader for the day, organised her classmates, some older than her, into a circle to greet me. Her face was shining with excitement but also a calm authority and a determination to get the welcome word perfect. Better than I could have managed at that age, I thought.

The girls then went to work in their "classes", at tables arranged in each of the four corners of the room: reading, science, mathematics and art. They followed the national curriculum, but this wasn't education drilled in by a teacher standing in front of them. The pupils themselves were active in learning the skills of each discipline, absorbed in games they had helped make which taught them the letters and words or made them use the mathematical rules of multiplication. There was a busy concentration from her classmates as one child from each class explained to me the rules. At the beginning of the day, the girls had sat down in the middle of the room with the teachers and agreed what they were going to study that day. A couple of the girls wanted to show me how they used the internet on the computer to help with their work. But the connection was proving uncooperative that day.

I told them they were rightly proud of what they had achieved. Education opened the mind and an open mind was the key to the world. Those who were sponsoring them also should be proud. The sponsors included dedicated Egyptians who were determined that these girls must have the opportunity to learn, a foreign company and the Maadi British International School, of which I am a proud Patron. Four pupils from the British school were also there for the day. Sometimes the Saqqara girls went to Maadi in exchange. There was a strong sense of a community at work, trying to build a relationship between a local community and government. I heard how a boy, at another school under similar initiative, had gone home one day and succeeded in persuading his father not to make his sister go through Female Genital Mutilation. Brave lad, I thought, to tackle such a sensitive issue, and what persuasive powers he must have. Must be a budding diplomat.

As we drove back to the main road, I watched very young children hanging around the groceries, ready to run errands, and cleaning up rubbish along the street, putting it into sacks. I thought back to Ehsan's calm authority in the classroom. Children grow up so young here.

Posted at 13:58 14 May 2009 by Dominic Asquith  |  Comments[1]