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Abdulaziz Dino Gidreta
School buildings, are not adequate compared to the minimum required in-school ser-
vices. Most of the rooms agglomerate the maximum number of students that floors can
cover. This already threatens the quality of teaching-learning by directly failing classroom
management, the minimum level learning comforts and further health conditions of the
students. Surely, part of the burden lies on teachers as they are required to scream, as
they have to attain some level of silence and control over hundred students in a single
classroom. After all, there is no way the students can achieve the required concentration,
due mainly to the fact that they share a single old bench for five or six. This in turn cata-
lyzes the transfer of various viral and bacterial diseases such as TB and common cold.
Some buildings are on the verge of collapse. Floors and walls are not constructed by
cement, as a result the walls start to get ruined, grounds to get cracked. Of the three
schools, the problems of primary school seem more dangerous, in the absence of any in-
terventions. Classrooms are threatening the physical wellbeing of students (HOARCM14,
23/04/11). They are so disintegrating that students disrupt neighboring rooms through
wider wall-hole (HOARCM31, 23/04/11). The grounds also become sources of dangerous
insects biting the children’s feet and revoking various diseases. In this regard, there have
been attempts by Dobba primary school to apply indigenous mechanisms; covering the
ground with cattle by-products (HOARCM31, 23/04/11). Nonetheless, this mechanism
could not be a permanent solution as it demands an impossibly continuous labor and
time. The following reflections also highlight the depth of the hardships.
The major complications are absence of, student and staff rest-rooms, any library
and staff residence. And over 50 students sit in narrow classrooms and five stu-
dents sit on a single narrow bench (HOARCM21, 26/04/11).
The lack of desks, books, library, residence and classrooms are common to all the
five schools which are under my supervision; I mean Sadika, Dobba, Shumoro,
Bortena (HOARCM28, 26/04/11).
Though the schools tended to solve the earlier travel sufferings, still there are kids coming
from remote villages. Regrettably, at the age of six and seven, the students have no op-
tion but to walk an hour or more, indeed threatening their future physical strength. As all
the primary schools run only grades one to four, the children are then obliged to run two
or more hours a day so as to attend 5
th
grade at Meger Woyra Junior Secondary school.
The students are too young for some of them to cope with daily journeys. And most
seriously, they walk on bare feet already carrying the complete learning material, mainly
books and exercise books (HOARCM4, 26/04/11). And the problems get worth when the
students are instructed to carry construction materials for school development periods
almost every week.
HOARCM35 tells, “I am 11 years old sixth grade student. I attend
Meger Woyra school which is forty-five minutes away from here. I do not have shoes. I
always walk by barefoot as my parents failed to afford to buy” (25/04/11). HOARCM 7 also
narrates, “I am a grade-two student. Every morning we run on bare-foot for one hour to
arrive at Meger Woyra school” (23/04/ 11).
