It is 11:20am and 14-year-old Alifunsi Mukwaya is mixing mortar to plaster a latrine for Kiziika-Katuugo primary school.
While some of his contemporaries are in class studying, this P6 pupil and others are busy in this role, as their school has not had a latrine since the start of the 2015 second term. The school in question is in Kitumbi sub-county, Mubende district.
“I was in class and the teacher told me to bring out construction tools and I ended up remaining here to help,” Mukwaya says.
He speaks as he plasters the walls of the two-door pit latrine with mud. The latrine will later be shared by both pupils and the staff. “I’m given time to go to class but we are also asked to come and build.”
One teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told us that the pupils’ involvement in this construction is due to the absence of funds to pay a qualified person who could do the job. The school’s deputy head teacher, Francis Mande, says his predecessor requested for latrines from the district, when the only latrine collapsed in the middle of last year.
“He sent a letter and also went there physically but was reportedly told there were no funds at the district,” Mande says. “We engaged parents and they keep contributing.”
Besides the latrines, the school has classrooms with no walls.
FORGOTTEN SCHOOL
Clearly, someone at Mubende district headquarters has forgotten about this school. The structures are only a glaring danger to the children who attend classes from there. The learners wake up everyday to study at a school with a tattered iron sheet roof, supported by logs, most of which have been destroyed by moths.
Unable to bear the situation, some parents have had to relocate their children to other schools. Those still here are from families that cannot afford to go anywhere else.
Mande tells us that the school population has dropped from 600 pupils in 2013 to 150, due to the absence of necessary facilities, including textbooks. Interestingly, the dilapidated classrooms were constructed by parents.
“The problem is that our schools are not inspected because of their location. And even when they [inspectors] come, they do nothing,” Mande explains.
TEACHER RESIDES IN OFFICE
But nothing speaks about the school’s neglect like the story of a teacher, who resides in the head teacher’s office, since 2015 when he was posted here.
Innocent Mutaremwa, the class teacher for P4, says on arrival there, he was told there were no staff quarters.
“The head teacher told me that I should rent somewhere using my salary,” Mutaremwa says. “When I failed to get money for rent, I decided to stay in his office.”
For now, the head teacher shares office space with his deputy, before it reverts to Mutaremwa’s living room after office hours, since the way to his bedroom is through this office.
This office is on the three-room permanent block which was constructed by the government in 2008. Unfortunately, none of the teachers we found at the school could tell when the entire school was constructed.
In a telephone interview, the district inspector of schools, Hajj Abdul Sekabila Lukooya, said the construction of classroom blocks and latrines should not be entirely left to the government. However, he also condemned the use of pupils in constructing latrines and promised to meet the school management over this.
“That was wrong. If a block collapses, there is a school management committee to meet and discuss on how to construct a new one. It should be the parents to participate in the construction, and not the pupils,” he said, adding that an emergency latrine should have been constructed when the one the school had collapsed.
About whether the school would ever get classroom blocks, he said: “There is hope because this year the school was promised two classroom blocks.”
Lukooya also maintained that parents ought to appreciate the schools belong to the community, and are only “government-aided” since “government has limited funds”.
And as Mukwaya and his friends were plastering the latrines, other pupils were using the nearby bushes to ease themselves, while teachers were using a neighbour’s pit latrine!