A Pencil Against a Billion Dollars
Days ago, in the village of Miumba, in the historic municipality of Cahama (Cunene Province), I witnessed the raw portrait of education in Angola. A class of children sat under a tree for their Mathematics lesson on geometry. The teacher drew houses on a board and asked the children to color them. But there were no colored pencils. Many didn’t even have a regular pencil. The few that existed were nothing but worn stubs, so short that scratching a line on paper seemed like wasting gold. Three classes meet this way; each gathered beneath the largest trees in the community. Circles of stones mark where the children must sit. These children, the sons and daughters of pastoralist families, live in an Angola that has yet to arrive for them. Every stroke of the pencil was an act of resistance, every mark on a notebook a silent cry against abandonment. To […]
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