(Editor’s note: Brian Dunn, formerly of Rushville, is serving with the Peace Corps in Uganda.)

“Who can calculate the area of this shape? Giftee?” As Gift goes to the board the teacher uses a piece off a foam mattress to erase another section of the blackboard. “In 1/2 h(a x b), what is h, class?” A few students blurt out the answer. “Ah, ah…” the teacher says then mumbles something in the local language to the extent of, “You should raise your hands instead of speaking out of turn.”

A while back I decided to visit one of the area primary schools here in Uganda. It’s approximately four miles from the Compassion center where I work. They have 746 students and 15 teachers (a 50:1 students/teacher ratio.) There are 12 classrooms for the eight grades. The school is free for the students, the government pays the teachers salaries, but parents are asked to pay 8,000 Ush per year ($4) for additional projects, such as the new construction.

I began my visit with the seventh graders (P7 students). These are the oldest students in the school. They can be anywhere from 11 to 19 years old. The students all stand upon my entering. They are all wearing their school uniforms: pink shirts with navy blue shorts or skirts. The head teacher is teaching and they are doing a section on graphing. No text books and the teacher is teaching in English. There are just under 60 students in a smaller than normal (by U.S. standards) sized classroom. The students sit three to a desk A blackboard is in the front of the class with a large piece of paper taped to the board with an x & y axis and grid. The students are learning coordinates (3, -2). Most of the kids have shoes on here, which is a general indication of both their age and poverty level.

“Who can name the shape?”

“A triangle,” a student replies.

“It is a special shape. What shape is eeet?”

Class, in perfect unison, “A right angled triangle.”

There is no ceiling in this classroom, only an aluminum roof which means when it rains it’ll be almost impossible to teach due to the noise. Even a light rain creates a great deal of noise on a metal roof! The students take meticulous notes in small notebooks. They use newspaper to create covers for their notebooks for decoration and protection.

I then shift to the P4 classroom. I can smell the multitude of kids upon entering. It’s a musty smell of mud huts, feet and bodies. It’s a smell I’m accustomed to from living here As I enter, the kids again stand and I’m greeted to the all too familiar: clap clap clap-clap-clap, Clap! I immediately notice several of our Compassion kids. I’m seated again in the back of the classroom next to Immaculate Harriet, one of my favorite little girls from Compassion. She has severe burns over 90 percent of her body from a house fire where she hid under the bed while the house burned. Despite her disfigurement she has one of the most beautiful smiles of any child I’ve seen in Africa and she’s a good athlete as well. Her little hands are misshapen and her fingers curl up. She has to hold her pen in a special way between her fingers just to write, but she’s worked hard to overcome her limitations.

This room has around 80 students in it and is a little bigger than the previous classroom. Far less shoes here. I greet the class and tell them I’m happy to visit them.

“Reproduction in baads. Reproduction in what? Baads (birds). How do we call a male baad?” the teacher begins.

Class, “A cock.”

“And a female baad?”

“A hen.”