Prague, Nov 12 (CTK) – Children in the Central African Republic learn to read using primers and reading-books created with the help of Czechs, members and aides of the SIRIRI NGO that also stages courses for teachers and pushes for lessons to be taught in sango, a tongue local kids comprehend, Jana Karasova has told CTK.
“The primer and the reading-book look like Czech textbooks, but they describe conditions and situation in Central Africa,” Karasova, who helped SIRIRI in the remote country, said.
In creating the textbooks, SIRIRI cooperated with local teachers and artists, as well as Czech illustrators.
“In Central Africa, children have no chance of seeing trains or aircraft. The textbooks present situations the children know…such as a story on a mum going shopping on a marketplace, or on fish catching,” she said.
The reading-book also presents issues linked to morals and hygiene. Furthermore, there is a story about a girl who is disabled and her village has been attacked by armed rebels, and another story about a blind man, Karasova said.
As a result, lecturing teachers can also touch on complex and serious issues which the children often directly face themselves.
“The situation there makes the chance of an armed conflict or violence as probable as the chance of someone going shopping,” Karasova said.
In Central Africa, the official language is French, but sango is spoken by people in their everyday lives.
“Children often do not command French. If school lessons are taught in French, the kids only learn to memorise things they actually do not understand,” Karasova said.
Lessons in sango are one of the five principles of the School by Play method Czech and French volunteers have been promoting within courses that SIRIRI stages for Central African teachers.
More than 300 local teachers attended the courses in the past three years.
The volunteers instruct the them to base their lessons on practical experience, to let children try things, cooperate on solving tasks and proceed from simple issues to complex ones.
“An emphasis has been put on that the teachers really apply the School by Play method, being the children’s guides and creating conditions for them to look forward to having lessons,” Karasova said.
Central African classes differ from Czech mainly by the number of pupils in them, which may be up to 120 in one class.
“Of course, it is not usual for all of them to turn up on the same day,” Karasova said, adding that in small village schools, a class has about 20 members.
In lower-grade classes, the number of boys and girls is about the same. However, the problem is that girls tend not to complete their elementary school attendance, either because they are caring for younger siblings or they get pregnant themselves, Karasova said.
Subsidised by the Czech Foreign Ministry, SIRIRI provides, apart from educational projects, humanitarian aid to victims of armed conflicts in the Central African Republic.
In early October, when new violent conflicts between ethnic and religious groups broke out in the country, the ministry earmarked an extra one million crowns for SIRIRI to secure help to local internally displaced people.
