The students are angry. For the first half of the first week of the second semester, there were barely any teachers in school. The only teacher to actually conduct class every day was the new White Man from America.
The teachers are angry. They hate that in order to receive their monthly paycheck they have to pay money to travel an hour away by uncomfortable taxi to reach the bank. The bank only processes 50 checks per day and the teller queue can take several hours. It can take most of a week, then for all of the country’s government workers to get paid. The teachers are also upset that the ministry was late paying them this month, further delaying the process. It forced them to miss most of the first week of school.
Everyone is angry that the school has no electricity or science laboratory.
The problems are severe and many, but the anger is a good sign. Unlike in Tonga, where the broken system was plenty good enough for everyone and brought no complaints, Liberians would love to tell you all the things wrong with their system. They are not complacent. They want solutions. They want a better school system.
Unfortunately there aren’t any easy solutions right now. The country is rebuilding from twenty years of civil war, and the government must tackle basic issues like constructing a national power grid and promoting peaceful elections before it worries about building science labs.
The solutions may be far far away, but the will is there to fix them, and that makes me optimistic for my service in the Liberian secondary school system.
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