A Classroom Under the Mango Tree

The storm took the roof off two classrooms overnight. By the time the head teacher arrived the next morning, the sheeting was in a neighbouring field and the exercise books that had been left on the desks were pulp.

School resumed at eight o'clock. Under a mango tree, on the ground, with one blackboard propped against the trunk.

Nobody waited for permission

What we find striking about this is not the improvisation — teachers improvise constantly — but the speed. No meeting was held. No request was submitted. Three parents turned up with machetes to clear the ground, somebody's uncle produced a tarpaulin, and the lessons carried on.

Our role in the weeks that followed was narrow and specific: replacement roofing, new exercise books, and a set of benches so the younger children were not sitting in the dirt through the rainy season. The school had already solved the hard part.

What support should look like

It is tempting, seeing a school with a missing roof, to arrive with a plan. To assess, to design, to build something better than what was there. Sometimes that is right. Far more often the community has already decided what it needs, and what it lacks is only the specific material it cannot buy.

• We asked what was needed rather than proposing what we could provide.
• The school's parent committee managed the repair and held the receipts.
• Local artisans did the work, so the money stayed in the community.
• The tarpaulin stayed up afterwards, because the roof will come off again eventually.

The part that is harder to fix

A roof is a solvable problem. What is less solvable is that this school has forty-eight children in its largest class, one trained teacher for every two classes, and a catchment where many families cannot cover the cost of a uniform.

Those are the things our education work actually concentrates on — teacher development, access support arranged quietly so no child is singled out, and reading clubs for children who have fallen behind. The roof was the visible emergency. The rest is the work.