Amuru's negative attitude towards education

PIC: Pupils cleaning up the school compound as a punishment for reporting to school late. Photos by Titus Kakembo

The motives are not known for unscrupulous people, in Amuru District, who go to the classes of Lacaro Primary school and defecate on the tables. They have done it for more than seven times which has made the administration suspicious about their motives.

"Before we could get to know their intentions of the act," narrates the headmaster Willy Nokrach. "Another unknown suspect came deep in the night and hurled a big stone on the window of a newly built house that accommodates the headmaster and his deputy."

Irritated pupils declined to use the soiled desk after washing the soiled tables "disinfecting" them under the sunshine for three days. The disturbed headmaster says there is a negative attitude towards education in the district.

"Parents feel education is a waste of time as the children would be more economically beneficial to their families by tilling the land, planting, weeding or grazing goats," said Nokrach. "It is such a hard task filling up all the seven classes that we have here with pupils."

Willy Nokrach, the headmaster of Lacaro Primary school says Parents feel education is a waste of time as the children would be more economically beneficial to their families by tilling the land, planting, weeding or grazing goats.

Nokrach says since the community is fresh from the bitter Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) civil strife, most residents are mentally disturbed. And in the compound were pupils slashing and digging as a punishment for going to school late, refusing to use the soiled furniture and other offences.

"Amuru which had more than 90 internally displaced persons camps has 174, 340 people, according to Uganda National Bureau of standards, who are short tempered and still very unpredictable," confided Nokrach.  "Most of them do not know even where their ancestral homes were. Family, morals and discipline are alien to them."

A tour of the school was a revelation of crammed up class rooms that were poorly lit and furnished. There were no learning aides on the walls. Most of the pupils in Primary Seven could not express themselves in English the communication language they are due to be examined in.

Talk about the staff quarters and the headmaster pointed at huts with thread bare beddings drying on the thatch.