Hope Primary School Kampala, Uganda Jacques Bwira arrived in Uganda in 2000, having fled the violent conflict in his native country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Though he had trained and worked as a teacher in Congo, he feared that speaking only French would prevent him from making a living in his new home. The police officer who interrogated Jacques on arrival in the capital city of Kampala took him to a flat rented by a Catholic priest who often hosted refugees. Jacques agreed to begin teaching the children of other refugees in his native French in exchange for a place to live. Emerging from a small operation serving a handful of neighbors, the Hope Primary School, of which Jacques is the founding director, now serves 217 refugee and Ugandan national children. Through hard work, advocacy, and community support, Jacques and the staff of Hope Primary School have been able to purchase land and build a permanent school the only Ugandan school for refugees located outside a refugee camp. In this interview, editors from the Harvard Educational Review spoke with Jacques about the school s development, the community it serves, and its struggles and accomplishments. Please tell us about the children who attend Hope Primary School and how the school developed. We started with the eleven families living with me in the same flat. When others started coming, they were from neighboring families. Many of them were coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The war was almost everywhere, but most were from eastern Congo, the part that neighbors Rwanda and Uganda. A few were from Uganda, and a few others from Burundi. The children s situations were totally different. Some of them were living with their families, others were living with foster families that they had followed out of their home countries, and some were purely orphans. Then national Ugandans from the neighborhood started coming. For example, there is a family at Hope Primary School that is composed of people from different families. When the war broke out, some children left Harvard Educational Review Vol. 79 No. 1 Spring 2009 Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College 141
Harvard Educational Review their mothers and fathers and ran away in a group. A lady also left with her children in that group. As she was moving, she thought that she was holding the hands of her children, but unfortunately it was the hands of other children. On reaching somewhere very far away, she realized that she no longer had her children; the children she was holding were different children. But since she also sympathized with them, she did not drop them. So she lost her own children, and the children she is living with also lost their parents in the war. They live together like a family simply because of the circumstances. There is another family that traveled for over fifty-two days, from one village to another, until they got to the border camp where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) assembles refugees who are running from Congo. They made their way to Kampala, where they live in a house that was abandoned and is not secure. The only thing that they can afford is the education of their children, because it is free at Hope Primary School. 1 The stories are very many and very sad to hear. As the number of children grew, it was hard to handle them. Because the kids were between four and fourteen years old, having them all in one place was complicated, because their needs and prior schooling were different. I found that there was a need to have other volunteer teachers, but I had no money to convince somebody to come and help. I talked to some parents who were teachers in Congo, who could come once or twice a week. I tried to convince them that this was for the good of our community, and some of them were listening. Three young men volunteered for one year, working in the morning and caring for their own families in the afternoon. When we started, we were teaching the students in French, because I was from a French-speaking country and the majority of the children were also Francophone, from Congo, Rwanda, or Burundi. There was no formal curriculum, and we had no books or materials, so I was looking to families to find learning materials. I used to prepare the lessons by remembering what I learned at school and what I taught in Congo and writing it down. The curriculum was not consistent at the time, but we were consistently offering them an education. Now we follow the national curriculum, and they study English, science, social studies, and mathematics. The head teacher and the staff are Ugandans, and only a few are refugees. Today the students are learning like any other Ugandan pupils. Every day comes with a new challenge. Children come to school, for example, without books. When the children living in the abandoned house first came to the school, the school provided exercise books, pens, pencils, and I gave them uniforms that had been used for my own children so that they would feel welcome. The school helps the family in that when the children go to school, the parents are free to go and find jobs. Then they all meet at home in the evening to eat something and sleep, and the next day the same life continues. 142
Children sometimes come to school complaining that they didn t eat at home. We encourage parents to pack some food for the children, but unfortunately, in many instances, even the parents don t have enough to eat for the next day. It is a very serious problem and in many instances affects the way that refugees can learn. We don t have any organization or assistance to try to address that problem. The children feel like the school is a home. Most of them wish that we had a boarding school, a place where they could eat and sleep. This is impossible now, but the first help that they receive in Kampala is from the school. Some of them come to school from a legal aid clinic where they spend nights under a tree near the clinic office. It is very hard for these children to concentrate in class because of the conditions that they live in sleeping outside, having no shoes, no proper clothing. And with the war continuing in Congo, there are more refugees coming to Uganda. The children in your school are both native Ugandans and refugees from conflictaffected countries around Uganda. How do the children relate to one another? Because our school is mainly formed by two different societies refugees who come from other countries and locals we have a program that tries to address these issues. For example, every Friday, from 3:00 to 5:00, we have a debate time. During those debates, we select topics related to cohabitation that the children can talk about in a positive way. They debate issues relating to selfesteem, how to overcome barriers, what to do if you come to school hungry or if there is no food at home, or how to react if you are living with someone who does not speak the same language. We introduce the topic and the children talk about those issues along with a teacher who is prepared to guide the discussion. These debates have helped us reduce the instances of children fighting because of differences in background, such as language or being a refugee. This does not come naturally to the children. Some local people think that the refugees are here to take their land and the social advantages they think should be theirs. So this is a very delicate issue that arises among the children at school. Children fight because, for example, one said something and his classmate did not understand it. And when they are quarreling, you hear them say things like, You come from Rwanda, or You come from Congo. This is not your land. Sometimes those issues come up among the parents, and we try to talk about them. Although the main work is to educate the children, the school is also working to reconcile the adults the refugees and the nationals through meetings at school. For example, at the beginning of every term, we have a parents meeting about academic issues. We have a translator because many of the locals don t understand the language that is spoken by the refugee parents, and we talk about issues that come up at school. For example, say we have a child who 143
Harvard Educational Review fought another child, and the parents one a refugee family and the other a national family had to intervene: We talk about the incident and try to reconcile the families. We try to explain things some of them don t understand, for example, why someone is called a refugee or about the life of refugees. We tell them about children s rights, how all children have to be considered the same. We tell them that people have the right to live where they live and that the only way to achieve peace in our community is to accept each other. We try to encourage them not to go to the police or other local authorities with such issues but to come to school, where we can support them. We have had success so far in addressing these issues at the school. Can you tell us about your interactions with the government, United Nations agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to try to support the school? The biggest problem here in Uganda is that the public administration is really not open to refugee education. We have so many restrictions. Refugees are supposed to live here like any other citizen in Uganda, but, practically, we are not allowed to compete freely like any other person. 2 We have gotten some support from the government we got official authorization for our school to operate here in Uganda but the government does not allow UNHCR to intervene directly to aid refugees in Kampala. The government allows us to have the school but not to receive help from the NGOs that work with refugees. There are only a few NGOs that we have been able to work with. For example, there is an organization called the Refugee Law Project that has given us legal aid. They have explained what the law of Uganda stipulates regarding refugee activities in Uganda and precisely the case of our school. But their work is limited by the government of Uganda. Last year, after talking to the Jesuit Refugee Services, a Catholic NGO, every day about the need for facilitating a decent education for our children, we were able to get twelve desks for the pupils. Although UNHCR does not support us monetarily, we are very grateful that they recommended this project for a grant from the Social Development Fund of the French embassy in Uganda. Thanks to this funding, we have a permanent building. But the majority of other local NGOs say, No, you are working with refugees. You should be living in the camps. The government won t allow us to do anything with refugees who are not in the camps. My concern is that there are refugee children who cannot decide whether their entire family should go live in the camp or stay here in Kampala; they are suffering without aid because their parents decided to leave the camps. How does the school use the community as a resource to help provide the kind of education you want for students? One way that we are doing this is that the refugee community knows that the school belongs to them. When this project began, the school s refugee Parent Teacher Association (PTA) fixed a ten thousand Ugandan-shilling term contribution (about five dollars) per child. We don t call it a school fee, since 144
paying it does not determine whether the child will be enrolled. Many refugee children default because their parents are completely not able to afford it at that time, but they pay it the next term. Other parents, when they can, contribute far more than that due to their appreciation. And when we got funds from the French embassy to build the school, a lot of refugee parents came and volunteered to help build neighbors came to help put up the sign and move the bricks. The parents were very supportive. The parents of the nationals also pay for their children. With that money I am able to pay the teachers, although it is a very small salary. Many of the parents even volunteer to contribute more than the school requires them to. We have a lot of community support. Since we changed the name from Kampala Urban Refugee Children s Education Center to Hope Primary School, we have more national children than refugees. Now when locals see the school, they don t just see it as a refugee school; they see it as a school in the community. When the children come to school, even the refugees know it is a school that is in the community which uses the Ugandan curriculum. Now the refugee children know that they are pupils like any others at any school. And that has really helped us. We have had many struggles with the Ministry of Education. When the Ugandan government wanted to collect taxes from this school, it was the community that said, No, this is a school which is not charging as much money as other schools, so we think that they are not supposed to pay taxes. That showed me that we have gotten so much support from the community. What happens when the children leave the school? There are so many cases of girls getting prematurely married when they leave Hope Primary School 3 because there is no other alternative. Some meet men who take advantage of their vulnerability and drop them when they get pregnant or have children. Some of the children are used by their parents to contribute to the family finances, and that is where cases of prostitution happen. If parents don t find a way of feeding the children, they go and find any source of money. I have been trying to talk to some NGOs that might be able to help these girls, but there has been no help up to now. A few girls get help from some Catholic organizations, but all the boys and the rest of the girls that attended Hope are all on the streets of Kampala. The only thing that I can see to do is to expand the school to a secondary school, but this will be very complicated because of the lack of resources. It is the only way that I can think of to work on this situation. There are some opportunities for children to continue in school. For example, one of our students was able to attend a training school run by a local Catholic charity. There she happened to learn some skills in knitting, and that is what is sustaining her now. After dropping out of school, because we could not continue paying her school fees, she got married. But because of the little things she learned from the one-and-a-half years of training, she is able to con- 145
Harvard Educational Review tribute to her household financially. Secondary schools and training centers are there, but they cost more than the parents can afford. 4 The children would like to go, but there is nobody to sponsor them. What advice would you give to others who want to help educate refugee children? As a whole, Kampala is home to over 20,000 refugees, and more than 5,000 of them are children. But we are the only school for refugees outside the refugee camps, which are miles and miles away from here. I have very limited opportunities to talk to other educators working with refugees, to share my experience and learn from them. But I think that absolutely everywhere in the world what refugee parents hope for their children is that they can access education and maybe excel later on. That is the only way that they can secure a better future. When they come to asylum countries, completing secondary education and higher education is the only way to find a job and have a better future. From my experience, if someone wants to start a school for refugees, they first need to think of sacrificing themselves. In so many instances I ve had to take money that was meant to help my family and put it toward what I was doing to buy books, chalk, and other things that the school needed. If somebody wants to start a school, the first thing is that he should be willing to sacrifice his own money, time, and energy. You also have to be courageous, because discouragements for example, unfriendly policies or financial limitations will be very many. But someone has to be patient and ready to bear with them. But it is not all bad. When you do something and you re not expecting to be paid for it, when you know you are purely helping, you feel very good. Always remember that education surpasses any other material assistance, for it is a lifelong treasure. This work has impacted my life. When I came to Uganda, I was seeking resettlement to a different country. A number of my fellow refugees were resettled to the United States, Canada, and other Western countries. I realized that if I sought my own interests and the interests of my family, I could leave this project. But all the children who have benefited from this work would not have access to education. So I had to change my goals. This work has taught me how to sacrifice for the good of others. When I started, we didn t have any kind of curriculum, but we were able to fulfill the needs of the children. After all, the teacher knows something more than the children, even if the curriculum is not formal. Even when the circumstances don t allow, one should not deny children the right to come together and learn. What do you think is the most important lesson to be learned about children who have become refugees as a result of political conflict? What I think they need most especially the children who are refugees is love. They need people who care about them. What do I mean? For example, when volunteers from Soccer Without Borders came from San Francisco, they 146
said, We have come, because we knew you were here and wanted to come and see you and talk to you and let you know that we love you. It played a very big role in their education. Our students are doing very well. When we compare their performance to other students nationally, they are doing better than most students. When refugee children meet people who love them, it starts to level their past memories of the machetes, guns, and terror that they have seen in their home countries. I work to create for them an environment where they feel they are secure. Security and love are the most important things that these children need. Once they are here, of course, they are as needy as you can imagine for materials. But love is what they need first. Education is not viewed as a priority for refugees, because the donor organizations think that what refugee children need is immediate help. They think that all the refugees need is food, shelter, and maybe clothing. But, in my view, children who come from war-affected areas should receive education, because it plays so many roles. For example, if you are worried about the security of children, when they are at school they are safe from many things outside. These are children who don t have a country, who have lost everything, so the only thing that the international community can do to help these children have a future, to become useful citizens in their countries of origin or wherever they live, is to educate them. I ve seen so many children live in pain simply because of a lack of access to education. Even when peace returns to the child s home country, it may take five to ten years to recover. In my view, people who think that education is not a priority should change their minds. I think that with more information and outreach, maybe some decisionmakers, with time, will change their perspective and think a different way. Notes 1. With Universal Primary Education there are technically no school fees for any government school, but refugee children usually have to pay fees for school, especially in Kampala. 2. By law, refugees are only allowed to live in refugee camps, although many families do live and work in urban areas. As a result of this law, the Ugandan government prohibits refugee donor agencies from extending material assistance to such refugees. 3. Many girls leaving primary school are thirteen or fourteen years old. 4. Uganda announced Universal Secondary Education in 2007, but this program does not include refugee children. The editors would like to thank former editor Sarah Dryden-Peterson for her help in facilitating this interview. 147