Heathlands School: Supporting Deaf children in the Gambia

If anyone would like to make a donation to the bus fundraising campaign, please contact admin@heathlands.herts.sch.uk for details or if you would like to know more about sponsoring a child in The Gambia visit the Helping Charity website: www.helping-gambia.org.uk

Deaf children in the UK often face an uphill struggle to receive the support and education they need to achieve their full potential and Teachers of the Deaf often complain about the lack of understanding within the wider community of the needs of the children in their care.

However, this is nothing compared to the plight of the many deaf children in countries in Africa and other developing nations of the world.

The Gambia is a relatively small country on the west coast of Africa, completely surrounded by Senegal, with the border never more than 15km away from the river Gambia in both directions.

Britain has long had links with The Gambia, dating back to Elizabethan times and was a British colony until independence in 1965. It remains a member of the commonwealth and has English as its official language which is widely spoken although there are five main local languages such as Mandinka, Wolof and Fula which are spoken within the communities.

Links between The Gambia and Britain continue to this day with huge numbers of tourists visiting for the beautiful Atlantic beaches and perfect weather in the dry season which provide a valuable source of income and employment for a small number of Gambians, but the majority of the population are living below the international poverty line trying to eke out a living from the often poor soils and increasingly dry climate.

There is a wealth of British charities such as Kadect and Helping working in The Gambia to improve the futures of the children, and in particular deaf children, in a country where 45% of the population is under the age of 25.

Mohammed Akhtar, the founder of the Kadect Charity, first came to the attention of Heathlands School when some staff and students visited his charity shop in St Albans.

Mohammed, who has a deaf daughter himself and had already set up deaf units in Kashmir, decided to turn his attention to The Gambia following a holiday to the country.

He opened a second charity shop in St Albans to raise money for a unit for deaf children on the relatively underdeveloped northern bank.

Mohammed’s principal aim is to provide funding for deaf units to be set up initially and run for up to three years before being formally taken over by the government in the longer term. The unit he established at Essau is one of only 3 units in the whole of the country catering for deaf students.

Having invited Mohammed into school following an exchange of letters between the students, staff at Heathlands were inspired to get more involved in this worthwhile cause.

Long discussions with Mohammed about what was most needed, who kept saying ‘they need everything’ and ‘you need to see it for yourselves to truly understand’, left us eager to visit.

However, we were loath to lose the momentum we had generated and wanted to set an achievable goal that would, we hoped, be of benefit to the students no matter what stage the unit was at.

We finally decided to start a fund raising campaign to provide a bus for those living further away to attend the unit.

This was something close to our hearts with the majority of our students being taxied in from all over the south of England and even from South Wales.

Regular activities involving staff, students and parents, such as cake stalls and quiz nights mean that we are half way to reaching our total and hope that a bus will be ready to make its way across the Sahara in time for the new school year this autumn.

However, if we are to truly support students in a meaningful and long term way it was important that we witnessed firsthand the issues facing the teachers, students and charity workers on the ground as recommended by Mohammed.

This February half term (2019) five staff: the Head teacher, two specialist teachers of the deaf (primary and secondary), a member of our support staff and the finance manager, self- funded an eagerly anticipated trip to The Gambia.

We managed to secure extra luggage weight for the flight over in order to carry all the donations from each class for the individual students as well as a range of items donated from local businesses and individuals for the unit and school as a whole.

Education in The Gambia is not free and often families who barely have enough money to cover their basic needs are unable to send their children to school.

Alternatively, they have to choose which one will be lucky enough to be sent to school with the hope that this one child will be able to support the remaining family in the future once they secure a job.

In addition, the wearing of a uniform is compulsory as well as providing any equipment and books for lessons which all adds to the expense of sending a child to school.

In this climate of selective education, deaf children, and indeed others with disabilities or additional learning needs, are regularly left at home with no hope of going to school or of a productive future.

Deaf children, with no means of communicating with their family or their community, are isolated and live a very lonely and frustrating life.

Thanks to the work of Kadect and the area SENCO, more and more students are being identified and brought to the unit in Essau but the unit is no longer big enough for the current students, let alone any more.

Students who live far away from the school are unable to travel to the school daily and there is currently no residential provision. Even those who live relatively close to the school are expected to walk for miles on their own from the age of 5 in order to access their right to education.

After the school visit on the first day we were able to offer a lift to one of the youngest in the class as she lives close to the Lodge where we were staying, but even then she was dropped at a busy crossroads and expected to walk the remaining ‘short distance’ to her home.

Our mouths dropped as we strained to see out of the back window of the jeep that she was safely home and no one was trying to steal her newly acquired goodie bag.

The main teacher at the unit currently offers his home to three of the students during the week in order for them to attend the school – something that would be deeply frowned upon in our culture of safeguarding and appropriate boundaries between teachers and students, but is accepted as a fact of life in the Gambia.

The seventeen deaf children currently in the base range from ages 5 to 22. The wide range of ages is due to the fact that students may start their education later and so continue their education into their twenties.

In addition, due to the assessment system, students may not be able to progress each year and, therefore, be held back until they ‘pass’ the end of stage exams. When we visited, all the students were being taught in one classroom by two teachers.

The majority of students faced the blackboard on one wall and were taught by one teacher, while a small group of the youngest children, faced the other wall and were being taught by a second teacher who was deaf herself.

This is proving to be extremely difficult to manage for both teachers and students and is impacting on the education of all the children.

The students were really pleased to see us and so proud of their work and wanted to share their learning.

Gambian sign language is different to BSL, but similar enough for us all to muddle through and understand each other. The students, I think, were just pleased and probably shocked, that these strange people from a foreign land were able to communicate with them in their chosen mode of communication.

We were taken aback at how basic the equipment and resources were and even more worried to see one girl with a razor blade on her desk – she was using it as a pencil sharpener.

The students were sitting on chairs without backs and in the ‘resources corner’ were weighing scales made from tin cans and string alongside a few plastic bottles!

It made us all realise that all the extras we ‘need’ to teach are a luxury and we should not take anything for granted. In all the training for Teachers of the Deaf, visual and hands on learning is made a priority, but how do you do this when you have nothing apart from a blackboard and some old kitchen containers?

After spending time getting to know each child, we eventually opened the cases to give out the student bags (made for them by each class at Heathlands), which included water bottles, wind up torches and toothbrushes.

All the adults were keen to get a look inside and we were a little worried that they might have relocated all the supplies destined for the unit for use elsewhere in the school. The students, by contrast, sat patiently in their seats for their bags to be handed to them. Some still didn’t open them, preferring to wait until they got home.

Not much board learning took place for the rest of the morning, but we all learned a lot from each other and have a better idea of what’s needed: “everything” as Mohammed would say!

At the end of our visit we went to inspect the new building which has been funded by Kadect and supported by Helping Charity to house the deaf unit.

This was close to being finished and has since been officially opened on 14th March 2019.

The building has three separate classrooms and an office, and although very basic compared to what we are used to, it has the potential to make a huge difference to the education of these students and the many more deaf youngsters in the local area that are currently not able to attend due to lack of space.

The question of who would make use of the third classroom, with only two teachers currently trained to teach deaf students, was hotly debated in the Head teacher’s office.

The area SENCO was keen to use it for the many other students with disabilities under his remit, most notably those who are blind, but it was made clear that the building was for the use of deaf students only.

However, there is little point in a room standing empty, out of principle, with a new teacher for the deaf students needing to be trained up; something that takes 3 months of only very basic training in the capital.

The following day we returned to support the children and staff using some of the resources we had brought with us.

Upon arrival we were shown straight into the classroom and it was lovely to see that some of the students had brought in their water bottles and were using them, and even more pleasing to see the razor blade had disappeared and the student was now using their gift of a pencil sharpener.

One boy had brought in his flannel and was using it to sit on to make the chair a little more comfortable!

Within 10 minutes we had all the bags of Lego out and each pair of students were making up the different models or just building things from the pieces. It was clear that the students and most probably the adults had never seen Lego before. Our driver and escort also got involved, and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves!

We left the school with so many ideas and thoughts in our heads and came back to school wondering if our bus campaign was really the best use of our fund raising efforts.

However, now the new unit is open, there is more space for more students and they will need to be transported from further and further away, so a new bus would actually be of great benefit.

What we would really like to do is organise some teacher exchanges with staff from Heathlands going back out, but for much longer periods of time to support in the training of staff but also to invite teachers over to the UK. There are very strict visa restrictions which may mean that more of the work needs to take place in The Gambia, but we need to investigate this further.

Our fund raising efforts continue, and with the memories of the children’s joy, it won’t be hard to donate those few extra pounds at our next event.

The more artistic members of the group have already been making bags, books and hair scrunchies from the swathes of material they bought which have already been snapped up by staff in school.

A Gambia Day to share our experiences with the children at Heathlands is planned for the end of March where lower school pupils will get to try their hand at balancing baskets on their heads while wearing traditional Gambian dress, creating sand art and learning some Gambian sign language, as well as many other activities.

We made full use of our free time with visits to Senegal to go on safari (where we saw giraffes) and a nature reserve full of monkeys and waving crabs, touching crocodiles, visiting the local deaf restaurant and buying enough traditionally patterned fabric to support The Gambian economy for a few months.

We also had time to recharge our batteries in the warmth of the Gambian sun ready for another busy half term at school. We could not have done all the amazing things we packed in to the week without the support of the staff at Helping Lodge who looked after us and managed to arrange all our trips and visits.

All five of us had a truly wonderful and inspiring week and would recommend the experience to anyone. There is already a list of staff wanting to go on the next visit, which may even coincide with the delivery of the bus!

If anyone would like to make a donation to the bus fundraising campaign, please contact admin@heathlands.herts.sch.uk for details or if you would like to know more about sponsoring a child in The Gambia visit the Helping Charity website: www.helping-gambia.org.uk

By Nicola Jackson, Deborah Jones-Stevens, Sally Roberts, Carol Bush and Louise Weaver