This is the third post about our travels in Africa in 1999 en route to Tanzania.
Although we did not plan our trip thoroughly enough, one thing that we decided to do, was to visit schools, as this is, according to us, the mirror to a country's future.
But we did not want to get there empty-handed, so we took dozens of pens with us (those familiar yellow big ballpoint pens).
Every time we saw a school with some visible activity, we stopped, walked closer and ask to see the headmaster. We then explained to him that we would like to meet one class and hand over some pens to the children. In all cases, we were welcomed with open arms and were treated like kings! In most cases, we spent at least one or two hours at a school as the childer were very happy to see foreigners and normally had to put up some impromptu performance for us.
The photos of this specific school stuck in my mind. The school consisted of three classrooms. The classrooms had no glass windows, but rather "see-through" bricks as windows. The classrooms were huge, and they were filled to the brim, my guess is, at least 100 children per classroom. They had so many children, that they had to keep one group outside under a large thorn tree.
The children were not allowed to take the books home, not even the books in which they did their exercises. It was kept in large bins, including their pencils. They handed out the books at the start of a session and took it in again at the end of the session. We handed our pens over to this "outside" classroom. And, although we gave one pen for each child, I guess those pens also went into the bins at the end of the day.