An African school succeeds against the odds

Massive dropout rates
Even at Chiseka, headmaster Nkhoma acknowledges what the exam results don't show — the class of 40 graduating eighth-graders began the first grade with more than 350 students. Somewhere along the way, more than 300 failed or gave up.

About 400 students drop out every year, most because one or both parents have died and they must work. Others drop out after tribal initiation rites, which often lead to early marriages.

Linda Lute, 18, played with her 18-month-old daughter Ruth in the shade outside the tiny mud-brick hut in Chiseka she shares with her grandmother and six other adults. She dropped out of Chiseka two years ago. She was 16, still in the sixth grade and pregnant when her father ran away with another woman.

"The life was overwhelming. I wanted to stay in school but I thought it was not possible. I needed to work," she says. "Now I regret the decision because I still don't have what I thought I would have."

The only work she can find, and that is scarce, is part-time help on subsistence farms, earning about a dollar a day.

Nearby, Limbikani Maliseni, 21, proudly shows off row after row of dark brown, handmade mud bricks drying in the sun that he made to build his own house. He didn't go to school for years because his parents traveled to work on tobacco farms, and eventually went to learn basic English and counting.

But he dropped out of Chiseka five years ago, shortly after he began the first grade, when his mother died. He had to work and take care of his younger brothers.

"Had I stayed in school long enough I could have at least learned to speak English, which would have widened my chances for a job," he says in Chichewa. "But without English the only job open to me is on the farms."

Educational reforms too late?
For many in Malawi schools now, even those graduating from Chiseka, the rethinking of education comes too late. About a dozen of the better eighth-grade students picked by their teachers proudly tell visitors what they want to be when they grow up. The vast majority want to be lawyers. It is as if the dream alone could lift them out of poverty.

Only one, Ian Dick, a malnourished boy too short and thin for his 13 years, seems to harbor no illusions about where his education could lead.

"I want to be a soldier," he says. He is unaware that in at least 10 African countries, much younger boys with no chance to go to school already tote Kalashnikovs.

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