Getting the Go Around

By Mark Freedman

The wall of planets that is no more

–“O my body, make of me a man who always questions” –Frantz Fanon
I found the above quote to be quite fitting to the theme of the past couple days. After visiting a couple schools, we seem to be getting the ‘go around’, as in there are no direct answers or we are not being given direct answers after asking a question for the first time and as such we have to continuously question. For example, the teachers here are standing in solidarity together on strike because they are missing payments from the government, totally understandable, but we only found out they were on strike a couple days before going to the schools when we asked them if they were ready for us to visit, and as we continue to visit the schools and ask the teachers questions, the story keeps getting more and more complex and the answers vary across the table. It’s good experience if I ever wanted to become a detective. Sadly, however, I’m not on path to be a detective. I joined the teaching profession to be able to work in great teams and collaborate. Although, another side of the profession is to engage in tough conversations, as I believe is the case here. These constant questions are getting us the real answers to our questions, but it is not without hard work. Dialogue is tough and exhausting, mentally and physically, but it is an essential tool to the alleviation of the colonized mindset. The ideas of Paulo Freire on dialogue and collaboration look like the starting point to the fundamentals of decolonizing the minds of the historically colonized; after all, Malawi has only been an independent nation for about 70 years. It is based on these ideals, of great educational writers like Freire, that I can remain grounded in this endeavor of collaboration and knowledge transfer, because some of the conversations and realizations of being in a country with so much poverty and historically colonized is indeed, tough.
One such tough realization came to me upon visiting the primary school in Chilanga yesterday, where last year the wall in the main courtyard was painted with all the planets (as you can see in the picture). However this year, the same wall is now covered in blue paint with a small advertisement for tablets in the corner. A little backstory: a number of tablets were donated to the school for interactive learning
for the children and they are being used for standard one and two. The extent to which they are used and for what skills has yet to be determined…a little more detective work to go! Anyway, the point is that a beautiful wall with all the planets painted on it had been replaced with an advertisement this past year…. at a primary school…one can make inferences of where priorities lie.
At the same school, I saw their library in construction last year and it was really great seeing that it had since been finished.  They just need to put the chairs around the room so learners can sit at the desks to read, and put computers in the spots sectioned off for them, though there is no telling when they will get said computers. Currently, while the teachers are on strike, I was told that learners aren’t using the library…hopefully this strike ends soon.
Every school that we have visited so far, which is all three of the partner schools working with TPM, have had children there because this week all of them are getting vaccinated for measles, which means one less illness that causes so much death. Just like our work here with TPM, the vaccine is anther drop in the bucket that will one day add up to a full bucket of drinking water for everyone to rejoice in, metaphorically speaking.

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