Catching Up
on Phil Bradfield (The Gambia), 23/Jul/2010 12:24, 34 days ago
(Written 20/07/2010 17:45, My House, Janjanbureh)I really feel like I’m a bit behind on the blog at the moment. The President’s visit was a week ago now, and yet I only finished my posts about it earlier today! I have to admit that’s partly a perfectionism thing though; I went through several versions of those posts, the first one especially, before I was happywith them. I hope you all think the effort was worth it!We’re now into the first week of the summer holidays, and the major activity in the office right now is postings. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, in this country teachers don’t choose their schools; rather they are posted to whichever school the government pleases. Every summer, the regional offices, together with the HR office in Banjul, have to work out which teachers, head teachers and cluster monitors to put where for the next academic year. Together with the director, our HR man (with occasional assistance from yours truly) has been working stupid hours staring at an Excel spreadsheet (yes, the chosen tool for this massively complex endeavour is a not-particularly-helpful Excel template) to get our regional postings sorted out. The next step is that all the regional directorates travel to Banjul, where each has to justify their decisions about where to post the head teachers and senior teachers. To put that task into perspective, our region alone has 110 schools, and the HR officer has to be know all the senior staff at every single one of them. It’s no surprise that he’s not in a hurry to go!Understandably, all the teachers are on tenterhooks as to where they will be next year, and someare trying to enlist the help of the director or the HR officer in getting the move they’ve asked for, with degrees of success varying from a curt nod of the head and an “OK, OK” to an hour-long chewing out for not following procedure. The postings will be completed and announced in late August, about two weeks before term starts, but apparently last year they were still moving teachers around in November, because often teachers who don’t like their placement will simply not turn up, necessitating more changes to cover the gaps.And you thought the British education system had problems!The other notable thing to have happened recently was at the weekend. On Saturday night, I travelled to the village of Karantaba, thirty kilometres from JJB, to attend the leaving party, or“program”, for a VSO who’d been living there. Until she left, Fiona was VSO The Gambia’s longest-serving volunteer, with five years under her belt, and it was very obvious that over that time she’d built up incredibly strong bonds with the people of Karantaba. I can’t imagine what it’dbe like to leave after that amount of time, but... suffice it to say that the look on Fiona’s face as we drove off in the gelli in the morning, me bound for JJB, her for Kombos, was quite simply one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen.