The heart is a very unfathomable machine I must say. Falling in love requires no permission even from the other organs of the body. The heart gets addicted and the mind plays tricks by offering sanity and endorsement. The love that broke my heart recently was the love I felt and still feels for a girl. No, do not get me wrong, I am not a lesbian. I am just a teacher who loves seeing her students do well, especially, her female students. It is a fact that many villages in the North have people who have funny mentalities; that the girl is someone else’s future property. Ultimately ‘why would they waste precious money on such beings’ become their questions so they ignore their female children. The few who are a bit educated and send their female wards to school lose hope when those children become pregnant.
Many people do not respect the teaching profession. But it is a very noble profession which requires a person to be humane, patient, observant, approachable, loving and caring and most importantly have the ability to listen. When you are a teacher and you give your all to your profession, you do not only get to love your job, but you fall in love with your students. A kind of motherly love that makes you want to protect them against all the hurdles they may encounter if possible. If you have ever had a child, then the love I am talking about is not new to you. That kind of motherly or fatherly love. That is why you get a severe broken heart when a child has to drop out of school because she got pregnant in a developing world like ours. You think about the future of the child and the hurdles she would have to bridge.
As a house mistress, you feel worse! As though everyone has seen that you did not do your work of protecting the child who was left under your care. I experienced it recently and it was not a good experience. It is that horrible feeling that you have to experience before knowing its intensity.
There has been a lot of publicity for years on end about the need to send the girl child to school, but what are we doing to keep them in schools? What are we doing to make sure that mortality rate among teens who fall victim to abortions due to fear of their parents and societal castigations cease? What are we doing to help these girls complete their education without pregnancy drama? Is getting them into the classroom all it will take for them to be responsible adults? To tell you the truth, I stayed in bed for three days after sending off one of my girls because she got herself pregnant. Yes, I stayed in bed, feeling lost, dejected and horrible. I knew broken heart not through being jilted by a man, but by the thought that I was not able to protect someone who was left under my care.
Now some suggestions are coming up as to how it should be dealt with, I hear the male students who get their peers pregnant will be shown the exit with them. But what about those who get pregnant by men and not students? How do we stop our girls from being lured into sexual intimacies with little things like fried rice and chicken or soft drinks? What can we do when the students’ population cannot be managed by inadequate staff? What can we do to stop the imagination of our girls from running wild in this technological age?
I feel like year in and year out, we have more stubborn children coming through the school system. They get more difficult to handle by the year. What are we going to do about the headache of deteriorating discipline and hard work among the younger youth? It saddens my heart to know that much attention is not given to tending to the girls from all backgrounds to sail through the educational system smoothly after getting them there.
If you had the time to read this, take a moment to ponder over this issue and stop a girl from a senior or junior high school whenever you meet her, and give her some words of advice and encouragement or think about how you can make her world of education a better place. Thank you.
Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia © 2014.
Initial picture taken from Age Africa.
Mum Cee 