"We Break Up! We Break Down!"

“We break up! We break down!
We don’t care if the school falls down…”

We used to sing this at my primary school on the last day of term. Not hugely applicable to a quaint little school in Oxfordshire, but definitely appropriate to some of the schools I’ve encountered here.

Saturday was International Youth Day, and I hosted a competition between local schools. The schools were delighted to be involved and promised full cooperation and participation. What follows is my experience with one of the schools on the morning of the event.

I passed through the dramatic red gates of the school. There was a woman in the centre of the marshy playground. She called to a skinny man wandering around wearing only a hand towel, all I picked up was ‘onyotsha’ (white person in Yoruba). She then turned her glare in my direction and beckoned. I squelched across the ground, was this wild hair and low swinging boobs the same fiery Proprietress I had met a few months ago? ‘Do you remember me?’ she barked. I breathed deep. We sat down. To my alarm the man in the handtowel approached, interested in our conversation. ‘What did that other teacher say to you?’….. ‘er……’

I had zoomed in to rectify my situation (that of looming event start time and absent students) and was not about to be drawn into the management-staff battles going on behind the scenes. The issues however were rather interlinked. It appears that staff have not been paid for a while, and while the school administrator has been there for 13years (the proprietress refers to her as ‘my daughter because she is a nice person’) she remains totally incompetent.

So now, at the school site – instead of meeting with the agreed 40 students complete with banners, placards and songs of HIV messages, I met with an angry braless proprietress, a half naked teacher, no students in sight and my contact teacher quivering outside after being banished by the proprietress.

I managed to hold it together somehow, despite wanting to rip all their heads off, and eventually, around 2 hours later, the students from the school were arriving to the event complete with songs banners and placards, and ended up coming 3rd overall.

Out of 3.