AIM International - Europe - Bridget's Bunia Blog 64

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Bridget's Bunia Blog 64 | FIGHTING CONTINUES IN BUNIA

Bridget's Bunia Blog 64 | FIGHTING CONTINUES IN BUNIA

I don't know the specifics of the fight: who fights, how they fight, where and when. I suppose the NGOs are responsible for organising the particulars since the banners bear their insignia. (The stencilling of the banners itself is a fight - against unemployment.) I seem to be out of the loop. I just carry on my fight against bad English!

However, this week I'm much more engaged by a fight.

This week the teachers are fighting for their rights. For one reason or another, salaries haven't been forthcoming from the government for the last two months. Following a union meeting, the secondary and primary school teachers decided to protest by closing the schools. It's not true of all the government-paid teachers and the private schools aren't affected, but the majority of schools are closed and Bunia is remarkably quiet in the mornings and devoid of the blue-and-white-clad pupils making their way to various centres of learning. When I asked one little lad who was intent on catching the flying ants which had appeared with the rain if he was going to school, he answered me in street Swahili: Masomo hapana. No school.

The strike doesn't affect ISP salaries because we are privately funded from the students' fees. But it affects most of the ISP third year students who are doing teaching practice this second semester. It affects the second year students who spend one morning a week in school. It affects me because I don't have supervisions, observations and visits to do; I have much more free time.

Parents are worried because the exam period begins in June and nothing has been communicated to them. How this fight will end, I don't know. Who will call the truce and produce the peace treaty, I don't know. The teachers at Catholic schools went on strike at the beginning of the academic year claiming higher salaries but after a few weeks they returned to the classroom. Maybe this will be short-lived. But this is one fight that we can do without. Please pray for a satisfactory resolution

.. the Scripture says, "Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain," and "The worker deserves his wages." 1 Tim 5:18

Blessings,

Bridget

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About Bridget Howard

Bridget Howard’s first recollection of Africa is being shown slides of termite hills in the Belgian Congo during a Sunday school class. “From a young age I had a sense of purpose from God that I would one day teach in Africa”.

Bridget is not one to freely give out her age but it occasionally does slip out that she first went to Congo to work 26 years ago when the country was still called Zaïre. Her first assignment was as a teacher at Rethy Academy, the Mission’s school for children of its members. Her next assignment was as a school inspector in Zandeland where, as she puts it, she: “cycled around inspecting teachers and outside toilets of the church schools!”

Following evacuation from Congo as a result of the fighting that errupted around the Great Lakes in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, Bridget worked at Aim’s International Office in Bristol. She returned to Congo in 2005 to teach English at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique in Bunia. The ISP exists to prepare students to teach at secondary schools run by the CECA-20, Aim’s partner church in Congo.

Since her return Bridget has been sending her ‘blog’. She admits that ‘composition’ was not a favourite lesson when at secondary school but writing has become less of a chore as she told friends back in the UK of her daily experiences of life in Africa. “Maybe it’s an exalted sense of my own importance as being ‘From Our Own Correspondent-like’ I can pretend to be Aim’s very own Kate Adie!”