More on St. Thomas Moore

At last I have some down time to do some processing of the week and to catch up on blogging about the day we spent at St. Thomas Moore School (STMS).

We arrived at the school around 10:00 am and I was surprised to find no one to meet us at the turn in and accompany us down the road to the school. This was the first time that happened. In all previous times we were either escorted by students or by women in the adult learning program by singing and welcoming us as we arrived. I learned a little later that the school has just returned from school break and they only had four days to prepare for our arrival. In addition, S-1, roughly speaking the ninth grade, was not there because they don’t return until this coming Monday.

The picture is of Alex, Patty MacDonald of WVUS, and myself.

As I mentioned in the previous blog on the school, it is amazing how different it looks physically from when I first visited it in 2008. All the original buildings are still standing—four of them—except for the kitchen that was torn down after we provided the ovens and a new kitchen was built. In a way they are like scars that remind you of what happened to you in the past.  The building where Alex’s office was located now houses the generator, which in and of itself is amazing.  Until last year the school had no electricity, but now some of the buildings have solar panels the government provided and the generator. So instead of three dilapidated buildings and a wretched kitchen, there is a girls and boys dorm, three classroom buildings (each building houses two classrooms, an examination building that functions as an auditorium, and administration building where Alex now has his office, a new kitchen with two stoves, two laboratory buildings (funded by the World Bank) and five duplex houses for teachers. electricity, and computers, and several new latrines that replaced the dilapidated ones.

I am sitting in on a physics class in the new laboratory building. I was impressed with the lecture.

When we began our partnership with STMS, there were 47 students, only eight of which were girls. As of this visit, there are 154 girls of which 115 live in the girls dorm (which was originally supposed to house 60 but bunk beds work wonders) with a total of 402 students. There were originally three teachers and now there are 23 teachers. Helen, the deputy head teacher who has been there as long as Alex, said with a laugh that when she arrived at the school she felt like she was being punished and tried to transfer to another school.

For me personally, the most moving part of our time there was hearing two graduates of STMS, Robina and James share their stories. They graduated in 2010 and have recently been hired as teachers at STMS!! Robina told us and the students that she wasn’t much of a student and might have dropped out, but when the girls dorm was built, it totally changed her attitude and allowed her to stay in school and graduate. I got a little teary when I heard that. James shared how the changes in the school had also had a positive effect on him. (I was hoping to include a picture of them on the blog, but the only picture I have of them is too dark.)