The Ugly Side of Peace Corps

I’m sitting here in my office at 9:00 am on a Tuesday morning. It’s the second day of classes. None of the teachers are here. The Head Teacher is not here. The Deputy Head Teacher is not here. We have maybe 10% of the student body present on this second day.

The school’s organization as a whole lies in shambles. We were supposed to have a meeting last Friday to hammer out the details. It never happened. No excuse as to why it didn’t happened. My Head Teacher left for Kampala the Thursday before and didn’t give a second thought as to who would organize the meeting. Naively, I showed up at my school at 10:00 am ready to help establish our plan for the term. No one was there.

The Friday before classes begin is already too late to start planning for the term. But I had still hoped it would happen. I sit here in my office on this cool Tuesday morning filled with frustration, depression, and hopelessness. We are two days into the term and we do not have a timetable established and there is no action planned in the future to do so. I tried to call some of my colleagues this morning to initiate some kind of meeting. Their phones are off or out of battery due to no power or out of network coverage due to shitty reception throughout the country. No one can be reached. No one seems to care. Why am I here?

How do you coach this disaster? This isn’t coachable! In this microcosm of rural education culture created by years of poverty and oppression, what can I do?

Yesterday, eight teachers showed up throughout the day. Which lasted until about 1:30 pm. Eight teachers! Out of 22 assigned teaching staff. Not a lesson was taught. We had a school assembly at noon in which I counted 56 students out of an estimated student body of well over 600.

Every teacher spoke. I was first. My message was short, positive, and spoken with as much energy as I could summon in that moment. Then the rest of the teachers spoke. Their messages were negative and belittling. They blamed the students as the reason they were not teaching. “If you come to school, we will teach you,” they say. Bull shit! I say. If all the students showed up at 8:00 am on this day, it would be a waste of their time. At 8:00 am on this day, when school is supposed to begin, there was no staff.

I say, the teachers are paid, via direct deposit, by the Ministry of Education, the national bureaucracy responsible for Ugandan education. The teachers are administered by the local primary or secondary school for which they work. So if you have an administration that doesn’t care whether its teachers show up, there are absolutely no repercussions for not teaching. And who would want to work for money if they didn’t have to, and still get paid. That sense of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay is somehow lost, a partial result of a check the box mentality versus rewarding someone for one’s true and innate ability and performance. It’s not always pervasive, but the problem still persists in some manifestation (big or small) throughout each day I’m here. Today is a big day.

My Head Teacher is retiring in 90 days. Something he decided to tell me just yesterday. He has already checked out mentally, something I feel like he did a long time ago. Maybe I can fill his position. I tried to contact my Peace Corps education director this morning to ask for her permission, but I couldn’t reach her too.

The school is quiet now, either the students have left or there is some semblance of organization happening. I’m going to step out and see if any more staff members have arrived. Maybe we can get something ironed out. And my feeling of hopelessness may begin to recede.