SMELL NO TASTE — Marcus Kamara, 19, is one of the lucky ones. His parents both survived the Ebola outbreak that ravaged his community two years ago. And soon he will graduate from R.S. Caulfield Senior High School, which U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama will visit on Monday, June 27.
Kamara is excited that she is coming but he will not be there when she does. He has to take the college entrance examination that day. A high score would qualify him to attend the University of Liberia where he plans to study sociology. And not even a visit from an Obama can distract him from that ambition — especially considering the difficulties endured by many of his 1,033 schoolmates.
“Life is actually difficult in Liberia. You know it depends on what you have to do (in order) to get a surviving,” Kamara said. “Students here, they don’t have parents. They are self-supporting in the school so they have to do a business or go and do garage work so they can raise money and buy the school materials.”
The school represents the best in Liberian public education, a system known for many shortcomings. A school counselor tends to students who lost parents and family members to Ebola. School uniforms appear crisp and the classrooms tidy. Final class examinations progress in an orderly fashion, but the facilities look very plain. Four walls, desks and a roof constitute the best that public education currently offers in Liberia.
A functioning high school nonetheless indicates progress compared to the carnage of the civil wars and the widespread death from Ebola. Vice-Principal Steve Bannie said the biggest challenges he faces at his job are keeping those walls and roof intact and making sure students and teachers alike show up each day.
The school enjoys notable success at encouraging girls in science and mathematics. A tutoring program before school helps those who need extra attention.
“So it’s not a surprise that Michelle Obama would select this school (to visit),” Bannie said.
Obama has made girls’ education one of her most prominent issues in her seven years as first lady. The White House plans to announce new sponsors for her Let Girls Learn initiative, which seeks to end a longstanding problem in schools across the world.
Gender equity poses a particular problem in Liberia. Only 37 percent of girls and women — ages 15 to 24 years old — can read and write, according to UNICEF. Sixty-four percent of boys and men in that age group are literate.
School enrollment statistics paint a similar portrait of a society struggling to provide girls equal opportunities as they age. Girls make up almost half of all primary school students but just a little more than one-third of students in senior high school, according to a 2013 report from the Ministry of Education. Less women also teach at the high school level compared to primary school — about 33 percent to 9 percent — notes the report.
It blames a number of factors for the relative absence of girls at senior high schools including child labor, early marriage, and limited employment opportunities for women once they graduate from school.
Obama, her daughters and mother, will meet with female students as well as American volunteers. The Peace Corps returned to Liberia in recent years with an emphasis on combatting gender inequity. Programs aim to inspire confidence, and improve communication and leadership skills for girls.
Obama will visit a Peace Corps facility in Kakata the same day that she will come to the school with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Twelfth-grader Vicky Moryohn, 25, told FrontPageAfrica that she can hardly wait for the visit.
“I’m very happy indeed,” she said. “I think she (will) come and see things are not in order and then she will be able to help us when we ask her.”
She added that the school needs a laboratory for science classes as well as other improvements to the L-shaped school surrounded by a field of mud. The students walk through it each day as they come to school and leave for home. Like every public school in Liberia, students only get around by their own two feet.
Many of them still have work to do besides their studies. Some sell petty merchandise at the market or along the potholed road that leads to the plantation road. Others work in garages like a friend of Kamara’s does. Some have little choice since they lost their parents to the Ebola tragedy. For many people across the world, that’s the only news they’ve heard about Liberia ever since the civil war ended 13 years ago.
At the end of a muddy road in Smell No Taste though, 1,034 students see a way to create a new national identity and a future for themselves. With a bit of good luck, they might take a country along with them as they move further away from the tragedies of the past.
An American Bison serves as the mascot at R.S. Caulfield Senior High School. The species once numbered in the millions, before it almost went extinct more than a century ago. The mighty bison returned to the Great Plains of the American West. In a few days’ time, the First Lady of the United States will view the resurgence of another type of fighting bison in the making.
A new coat of paint would make it easier to read the faded school motto on the side of the R.S. Caulfield school building. That is not what students say the school needs most, but it gets to the heart of everything that matters for what’s happening inside.
“Quality education is the key to success,” it reads.
Reporter Zachary Williams is an intern with FrontPageAfrica from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.