Going to School

After the dam we head off to the main event of the trip – Abenea. This is a school that Scott had visited several months earlier. It will be the focus of the Born In September campaign. On September 7th they drilled this site and broadcasted daily updates. As the pattern goes, we turn off the main road onto a bumpy dirt track. We soon pass through a military base. The base consists of a few military trucks, a barracks, and a guard post made of rocks in a pile.



The countryside is absolutely beautiful. Our track climbs up the side of hills, crests, then climbs down the other side. At one point Scott climbs out his window and sits on the windowsill. I do the same and it’s great. We’re not going very fast, but it’s fast enough to get a nice breeze. We continue past another school which Scott had also visited on a prior trip. We pass by a health clinic. Everyone waves as we go by and children coming running across fields to wave and shout.
Scott is wondering whether REST will really be able to get a rig over this road during the rainy season, but I’m sure they’ve thought through that. After six miles we reach the site in a large plain surrounded by mountains. Just before the school is the biggest mud patch we’ve seen. It raises Scott’s anxiety about getting the rig in. We stop before the mud puddle and finish the walk on foot. We walk over to a corner of the school lot. There is a rock there that’s been placed there and painted to mark the spot where they will be drilling. We discuss why they chose this particular site. This will be a shallow borehole several hundred feet deep, so I think the site is more a matter of creating convenient access than of finding the easiest access to water. Scott also raises the issue of getting the drilling in through the road and they assure him that it won’t be a problem.

We then go to look at the school. They are on break for the rainy season, so there’s no kids there. The school itself is a series of long narrow buildings inside a rock wall. They are building some two additional classrooms outside the wall. We take a look at the latrine and it’s predictably disappointing – two pairs of squat holes. As part of our water project we will be building two latrine blocks with eight bench toilets each.

We peer into the classrooms and they are nothing special. In fact, they are pretty much nothing. They have dirt floors and no desks. One classroom does have desks which hold two or three children each. The most interesting aspect to me is that all of the exterior walls are painted with instructional information. The walls are, in essence, their textbooks. They have the alphabet, maps of the world, animals, etc. Most of it is in English. What strikes me is the range from things my five year-old is learning to the periodic table of elements. There are a couple that really strike me. The first is a diagram of the female reproductive system which accented the broad range of topics they teach. The second was a table showing how to pluralize words in English. One of the word pairs was “louse” and “lice” a reminder that these children probably face that issue with greater frequency. Finally, I like the two diagrams showing how to wire electric lights in series and in parallel. It seemed an ambitious subject in an area that has no electric service.

As walk back to the school we see dozens of people clustered around the mud hole in the track. The women are carrying rocks and the men are placing them into the mud hole. It seems that they have already started preparing for the rig to make it through. On the way out to the main road we sit up on the roof of the truck. We’re sitting way up and we climb up the edge of the hills giving the feeling of flying. It makes me feel like a kid. It was perfect.