The rigth to education

“Education is the best weapon to change the world” - Nelson Mandela. 

“Learn as you were going to live for ever, live as you were going to die tomorrow” - Mahatma Gandhi.

When I was a child, I was one of these children who doesn't like going to school, who fights mum when is sent to study or to do the homework. Definitly I did not value the education I was receiving. Nowadays, I can see how lucky I was to have access to a free education, and quite good education. 

My project in Uganda with MONDO is mainly in a school in a rural community. Here, the most of the families can't afford paying for the education of their children. Or there are others who don't realized yet how important is it, and they prefer to keep the children at home, helping with the daily works. But to have access to an education makes a great difference in the future possibilities for a person, and, as social animals we are, the community.

That's why any initiative that provides and ensures acces to education for any child in the world deserves my full respect. And I want to highlight one word in that sentence: “EDUCATION”. 

The Child Right International Declaration says that every child must have access to EDUCATION, because that's what we need. I focus in this word, because in so many cases it is mixed with SCHOOL. 

School is a building, it can have one or thirty rooms, it can have dusty floor or digital blackboards... But because a child goes to school, it doesn't mean this child receives education. There has to be  other conditions for the proccess teaching-learning to happen. One child can't learn when having fever, or when having headache because didn't eat since yesterday. He/she can't learn when is afraid of the teacher, because if he/she says something wrong, they are going to be beaten. When the theacher is not motivated because herself/himself can't pay for the food of her/his own child...

Children don't deserve to go to school, deserve to be toucht to think by themselves, to have somebody helping them to develop their skills, to be able to find solutions to problems, and if they don't find them, to learn how to create them. Children deserve to build their own sociability, to create their own role in the society. 

So, let's make sure all the children have access to education, not only to school. 

In my project at Kikooba Infant and Primary School, we are trying to go for that, supporting the teachers how to improve their resources in order to provide with the best education to our children. We have attended so far two workshops. The first workshop focused on the concept of education, where they were trying to identify which are the activities they do or they can do, in order to help all the children to reach the child they want to become, focusing in all their skills, through love, and paying attention to diversity. The second workshop was leaded by the National Library of Uganda, and in addition to a donation of books to the school's library, during all the morning, the librarians were sharing with the teachers different strategics, activities and games to promote reading among the children. 

It's a great pleasure see the teachers working all together all the morning willing to improve the education their children receive.