Angola

Real lives

Ínes finds fortitude and a new future in the classroom

20 July 2002, LUANDA - The noise of the barrio pervades the classroom in Father Simon Tocao School in the Barrio Popular in a Luandan slum. The open-air classroom reeks of the sweet-sour perfume of feces, heavily fried food and gritty fossil fuels.

The classroom is clean, neat and sparse. The children sit on wooden benches at wooden desks, and write in a steady flow on notebooks, apparently impervious to the distracting environment. They are neatly dressed and clean and quiet, and they carry a respect for their teachers who arrive each morning, bringing the certainty of routine to their young charges' precarious lives.

To an observer, 15 year-old Ínes and many of her classmates seem like fragile sailboats negotiating the insolent seas that lie beyond the walls. When asked if she likes to study, she says she likes mathematics in particular because she finds it difficult to understand, but is rewarded by her discovery of solutions.

"Mathematics and language are fundamental for the future, the basis of a strong society," says Ínes, who aspires to be a doctor.

Her hopes are clear, orderly and pragmatic because they were rescued from an oblique chaos she finds difficult to recall. She remembers the fighting that engulfed her village when she was ten years old. She recalls with her soft voice that there were burning buildings, the sounds of war, men shouting and women screaming, people running in confused terror. Her family abandoned all possessions and fled to the bush where they went hungry and lived in fear.

When Ínes came to Luanda she felt free and alive. "I thought that it was so big, that there were so many houses, that there could never possibly be war here. How could there be war in Luanda?" she laughs. While other refugees felt ashamed and shunned, provincials in the rat race, Ínes felt her spirits soar, and it seemed that anything was possible for her.

Registering at this UNICEF-supported church school, one of many such schools teaching in effective parallel to a government system that has often withered because of the war, was the antithesis of her life as a child scurrying from battle, and opened the door to an entirely new future.

When she is not at school, Ínes cleans the apartment where she lives with an aunt and uncle, cooks and studies for the next day's lessons. Her family is poor, and in keeping with African family tradition, there are many obligations to the extended clan that might potentially interrupt her schooling, perhaps forever: A funeral, an emerging financial obligation, or an accident that requires compensation.

The vast majority of Angolan children today have not had the opportunity of regular schooling. Ínes has been fortunate and is rare among the poor: she has been attending the same school for four years. So she is very certain of the good sense of studying, of why she comes every day, of the necessity of her family's sacrifice to keep her in school. As long as the school functions with the discipline of teachers who come to regularly to work, and who teach, Ínes will attend. It is a simple equation, but it is one that works for this young Angolan and can work for thousands of others like her.