"Educating of girls is a wastage of money"

This afternoon I phoned my old school's chemistry department to ask if they have any old equipment that they would be able to send over to the school. The staff all seemed very positive about the idea so hopefully they'll look into it! A school in Cheltenham recently closed down and merged with another so they've been getting rid of a lot of stuff, so the staff from my school are going to see if any of that is left and send it over. The school has a charity committee who raise funds for various causes so maybe some of that will be put towards postage. In a bit I'm going to try calling someone in Cambridge as well.

Carrying on in the tradition of asking me to do things very shortly before I have to do them, this afternoon I was asked at 2pm to teach the 2pm chemistry lesson. It was only about balancing equations, and the students are quite good at it already, so we just worked through a set of examples. It was good fun and I'm amazed how confident I am at standing up in front of a class even after only doing it for a couple of days. The girls who sit in the front row are SO keen, they remind me of me at school, haha. I had to explain to them halfway through the lesson that I want to pick different people to answer each question, not just the ones who have their hands highest in the air!

The final session on Wednesdays is a debate for S1 and S2. This week the S3s joined in too because their biology teacher didn't turn up. How are students expected to learn if their teachers don't even come to school?! And they're short of staff anyway, it's not like they can just call up a substitute at a minute's notice. Anyway, the debate was on the motion "Educating of girls is a wastage of money" and it was very educational for me in many ways. Although obviously I strongly oppose the motion, I ended up agreeing and disagreeing with points on both sides. For example, points for the proposition included:

• Educated women don't show respect to their elders (i.e. kneeling in front of older women)
• Educated girls go to night discos and leave their homes because they think they can live by themselves (an interesting point of rebuttal to this one, from a boy, was "Surely that's a good thing because then I can land more chicks!")
• Girls often get pregnant before finishing their education and they have to drop out, so all the education before that was a waste of money.
• Girls in mixed schools seduce boys.

And for the opposition:

• Marriages where both the man and the woman are educated are stronger, and the family gets more respect
• The standard of living goes up when girls are educated
• Girls often have more practical skills than boys - when this is combined with education the result is a very skilled person
• Education for girls improves communication between men and women, both through speaking and writing
• Men cannot make decisions for women as well as women can
• God created men and women together and told them both to look after the planet, and women must be educated in order to play their part in this
• Many businesses have been mismanaged by men - they need women as well
• Education for women can prevent prostitution
• Having girls in schools reduces homosexuality (this one made me cringe a lot)
• Educated women can educate their children

At the end they asked me to stand up and give my points. I got a lot of cheers! It always feels a bit strange to be treated like a celebrity. I made three points in general - firstly, countries which treat men and women more equally and educate women well have a higher rate of development, so if Uganda wants to develop as a nation they need to make education of women a priority. Secondly, I said to the girls that being educated is no reason to be disrespectful, and that everyone (boys and girls) should be respectful to their elders. I told them that they should be as respectful as possible, and then nobody will be able to use that objection to their education. Finally I talked about girls getting pregnant/ seducing boys etc. I pointed out that girls can't get pregnant on their own (this got a lot of laughter) and that boys have to take an equal responsibility for this and not go about getting girls pregnant! And everybody laughed, but I hope they took the point seriously. I wish I'd had more time to prepare things to say, but surprise surprise, they just pointed at me and said "Madam Mzungu, what will you say about this motion?".

At the end of the debate I was chatting to a student called Muhoozi (or Ronald, but he prefers his Luganda name). He said he enjoyed chemistry in S1 but because he moved to Rwanda for S2 and now back to Uganda for S3 he's fallen behind in it and now he has no passion for it. So I'm meeting him tomorrow to tutor him. He wants to be a doctor or an engineer but he knows he can't do either of those if he's not good at chemistry. After we'd talked for a while he gave me a Luganda name - Bilungi, which means beautiful and great. Yay!