If you can put your kids through school and they can do well on the exams then they can get a well-paid job and, in the future, take care of you and the rest of the family. Without that, it is very difficult to get out of the poverty cycle in Malawi. This is why students often take school very seriously and will go to school on the weekends, go early at 6am, or even pay teachers to tutor them outside of class. Many students will even spend the 2 week break in between terms back at school.
At my school, the school fees are 35,000 MWK for each term, which is equivalent to about $10 USD. These fees are vital to the school’s ability to run and so the school has to be very strict on only allowing students who have paid to enter the school. At around the third week into the term, they will check anyone that has not paid and send them home until they can pay. For me that means going from classes of about 60 students to sometimes as low as 10 students. Although that $10 might not seem like a lot, it can take a family months to save up that much extra money. That means many families will have to choose which of their children to pay fees for. The other ones will work at home or in their families’ fields. This means that sometimes students take years off before going into the next grade. You can have a student in Standard 8 that is 17, a student that is in Form 1 that is 12, or even a student in Form 4 that is 21 or 22. This is especially the case at my school, where the students come from some of the poorer areas of Lilongwe and thus often can’t afford an education every year.
As you may remember from previous weeks, many of my students only eat one real meal a day: supper.
