A Day in the Life of an Inhamussua Student

Ohhh, high school. Those were the days. Finally driving a car with the freedom you could have only dreamed of. Weekend parties and sporting events. This is a similar tale of such a life. So just sit back and put on some of that good old rock n' roll, the kind that takes you back...way back...

Ding, ding, ding goes the bell. The sun is nowhere near the horizon but that damned brown-nosing student is banging on a big piece of steel with an even bigger piece of steel. The time is hardly 4:40 am and he won't stop until all bunks are stirring. It's time to wake and cook a quick breakfast before reporting to work at 5:00 am.



Roughly an hour and a half of work is over and it is time to squeeze in a quick bath and porridge before classes at 7:30 am. Of course the water is ice cold and the temperature is no African dreamland temperature. A brisk 45 degrees Fahrenheit.


Off to the classroom for five classes in a row ranging from disciplines like math and biology to less demanding subjects such as chemistry and physics. Fortunately, there is a two hour break from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm, just enough time to wash our clothes


Then it is back to the classroom for Portuguese, history, irrigation, fertilization, mechanization (?) or English class. In total, there are nine classes a day. Of course, every other day we have the afternoons off to work in the fields at the end of a hoe or ox. Nothing like hands on practice.


At 5:00 pm we finish with classes and attend our duties in a certain site of the school we are responsible for. This lasts an hour and a half and is usually something like watering an entire field with one watering can.


Time for another bath, but fortunately the water will be an appropriate temperature considering the temperature has increased to 90+ while the students are in the fields. After that, dinner will be served; same as lunch boiled corn flour with a mashed up leaf on top, they tell me it's very nutritious. After dinner we will enter the classroom again for obligatory study sessions that will last until nine when if we don't hit the sack tomorrow will be a pain in the ass. This is every day but the weekends. Of course on Saturday we wake up at 5:00 am to clean the school. But the bright side of things is that we get Sunday off, that's more than my parents can say.


But then there is the saying...we work hard, we play hard. And like any group of students we know how to play. And we know how to play at the expense of others. Any student who enters our school and wants the right to be a part of our family must pay the costs. So we put them to the test. Here is Silverio to tell you all about it.



To better understand the process...all the freshmen are lined up and each older student escorts their younger counterpart through, what you might call, the gauntlet. We begin with a little water, ice cold water. And then...well, why don't you take a look.





The point is that the students work hard and go through hell in order to work hard. They spend three years studying the art of agriculture and livestock in order to enter a labor force which faces a 21+% unemployment rate. Most of them are forced to go back home and use their skills to raise crops for their family as opposed to entering the industry where the money is. Yet, they keep coming with the hope of bettering their lives. These kids are the fortunate ones. The less fortunate are those who are picked up by traffickers and dragged across borders where they are massacred for organs, not always for transplant but for use by witch doctors.

So the next time you hear the story of the lack of an American Dream being used to explain the lack of success in developing countries, ask the jackass what his childhood was like and spread the word about the students working in Inhamussua. Africa isn't just a playground, people live and die here too.