ITURI FOREST PEOPLES FUND

A chance to go to school

It's still dark when Alika leaves home with her younger brother to walk the 9km along the muddy, potholed, dirt road to the school in Andisengi. Tema has his precious pencil and notebook wrapped in an old plastic bag to protect it when he invariably slips and falls on the way to school. Seven years ago Alika and Tema's parents helped other families to collect the materials from the forest and build the first schoolroom of the primary school, that has now grown to 8 classrooms - grades 1-6 in the main school and grades 1-2 in the satellite school. The Andisengi primary school is the only school in the 11,000 km2 area of the Ituri forest that is the homeland of the Lese-Dese farmers and the Efe hunter-gatherers. Tema spent the first two years at the satellite school located a short walk from home but since he passed his second grade tests now walks with his sister to the main school.

As Tema and his sister trek down the road to school they are joined by other Efe and Lese children, some are carrying hoes to weed their school field (sale of the crops is used to make money for supplies, others bring leaves to repair leaks in the thatch roofs of the classrooms. Alika tells her brother to meet her school as she stops at the community primary care clinic to pay for the last day's dose of her grandmother's course of antibiotics. The nurse dabs gentian violet on a tropical ulcer that has erupted on Alika's ankle, and reminds her that her grandmother must eat something before she takes her pills.