My book is still on sale, but d <<...>> <<...>> difficult to find in an ordinary bookshop it seems.

For Teacher’s friend, there is a totally new version coming out. Please contact me for it.

 

Recently I was asked by someone over the internet what size primary school desks should be. I was rather bemused by this, as the obvious question is What size are the children who are going to sit on them?


When I started work in Southern Sudan in 1982, we were running a secondary school in a school built to be a primary school. Not only that but almost all the students were older than average and adult. And they were mainly Dinkas or Nuers who are taller on average and have longer legs in ratio to their bodies than most of the rest of us. You and a Dinka may be same size sitting, but you stand up he or she will tower over you. Sudanese bicyles are standardised at 28" rather than 26".

Imagine our problem then when we found that not only was it a primary school, but all the furniture was for primary children. 2 m tall on a chair meant for a 6 year old! The human body does fold in strange ways.

The reluctance to solve a problem on the spot by simply measuring has often surprised me. From steps in a staircase which all have different pitches (common in Sudan) to toilets that were put at angles or sizes that resemble no existing human species. In Uganda once I asked for a toilet in the refugee camp to be built up from the 'squatter' to something I could sit on. The person who did it made it taper upwards to a point, like an inverted funnel.

Going wider afield, you have shower rooms with no hooks to hand your clothes on and (noted before) hotel bedroom lights that require you to get out of bed to put them off.

Occasionally common sense deserts the best of us, as several attempts to trace out a big roundabout in a resource centre showed. No one seemed to remember that you just need a long string fixed at the centre and then walk around it.

But that is part of the total disconnect between school maths and the real world which I have often written about before.

Seen on Reliefweb, immediately following an advertisement for a job in researching people trafficking:

Procurement Specialist, South Africa

International Centre for Migration Policy Development

I wonder which meaning of procurement they actually mean …

Presidents and planes

Recently during the Commonwealth summit it was noted that many of the ‘smaller’ heads of states (Caribbean islands etc) actually came on commercial flights.

Earlier this year I was on a Kenya Airways flight to Bujumbura when we were held up by the red carpet treatment given o the president of Burundi who was to travel in our first class.  Longer delays occurred at the other end as the plane had to first take him to the official area where the bands and soldiers and ministers were lined up.

I was not the only one on the plane to be worried about this situation.  In the table of security hazards having a Burundian president on board ones plane must rank very high.  At least one has already been assassinated by shooting down his plane (in 1994).

Barry Sesnan

What I wrote once ...

I am civil society

‘Civil society’ as a phrase has an honourable ancestry in politics. One phase of the evolution of countries post-independence and of the evolution-in-parallel of NGOS and UN bodies has been the gradual emergence of the idea of ‘Civil Society’ as opposed to uncivil society? To military society? To ecclesiastical society? …. Well, that is another question.

This is just to celebrate the enterprising man who not only declared in a coordination meeting that he represented ALL of civil society, but that his NGO was called Civil Society.  Like the Church of God which appears in its name to have monopolised all religious possibilities at least for monotheists, Mr Civil Society presented himself as the unique interlocutor. His only reward though, was to be ignored by everyone.

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com

UNICEF desks and chairs

AUNICEF has sent delightful individual desks and chairs for our primary catch up project.

This is very nice, but the problem is in the word ‘individual’. Nice as they are for the children, they are a nightmare for the school management as they are so easy to lose after being borrowed for wedding funerals and the other innumerable ceremonies that take place in villages.   This decision taken unilaterally by UNICEF presumably related to some child-friendly policy is typical of how donors may sometimes completely control the agenda even when the reality we have to live is different.

It could be that they are trying to force schools to provide a seat for every child, but a double bench can provide room for three in a crush whereas a chair cannot.

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com
barrysesnan.site.voila.fr

Voluntarism

Spurred by a UNHCR remark some years ago that: Payment can destroy the sense of responsibility that refugees feel for their welfare.  I wrote the following

I actually have a fairly jaded attitude to voluntarism in Africa just now, not about work-camps, joint seminars etc. but trying to get labour for free as we often do in refugee camps. It is complex and coloured by various experiences, including in some work I am doing in Congo just now, where the international NGO pays almost nothing for teachers getting training in the afternoons on the grounds that ‘that is the government’s job’.  Since the government doesn’t even get round to paying them a salary, displacing themselves to be trained (with no guarantee of promotion at the end of it – also the government’s job) involves the teachers in significant costs (not able to farm, fish etc on those days).  

Why, firstly, asking mostly poor Africans to volunteer when they have no job, no ‘cushion’, no alternative is dubious I feel.  In refugee camps teachers and young people are asked to volunteer to get the schools going, and that is fine …. For a year. Then they also have the right to earn some money for their work.  Secondly, there is a world of difference between the first world volunteer and the third world volunteer. 

In another aspect of the same thing, when I was doing HIV/AIDS prevention work in Congo in UNICEF one of our partner NGOs (In this case the partnership was like that I have with my small dog who hangs around the table wagging his tale waiting for me to throw him something) rightly identified the bicycle taxi boys as good carriers of the prevention message to youth (like hairdressers and rap singers, for example) and told them to come for five afternoons’ training.

They refused on the grounds that

a) they were being given nothing to compensate for the income they would lose and

b) the NGO was full of fat people who were obviously getting ‘something’ from UNICEF which they were not passing on. 

They were right of course.

(I told them to make themselves into a suitable partner we could deal with directly! Thus indirectly encouraging that proliferation of NGOs that is so difficult to handle).

Barry Sesnan

barrysbook.blogspot.com  ..     ebrealitycheck.blogspot.com
barrysesnan.site.voila.fr