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Meet
Bismeiliana
Bismeiliana is five years old and lives in Grizh Balshaj in Albania.
Most of the people in the village are farmers but the village is poor.
The village has no good roads and does not have good access to water.
There is not enough water for the crops and even when they do grow it is difficult to get the crops to market for selling.
Bismeiliana is friends with Ciljeta and Geri. One of the activities they enjoy in school is making fruit out of plasticine.
Their teacher teaches the children to count the different fruits they have made out of plasticine to teach them numeracy. She also gets them to stick little lengths of wood into plasticine to help them learn to count.
Lessons start at 8am and the children go home at 12 o’clock.
Fewer
girls in school
In some countries fewer girls than boys go to school. In Albania, especially
in the villages, many girls are expected to stay at home and do the housework.
The
parents think that the girls do not need an education if they are going
to be housewives. Children who live in the countryside have to walk up
to ten kilometres to school. This is often impossible to do in the winter.
Sometimes the parents are afraid that their daughters may not be safe
on the way to school, so they keep them at home to protect them. Many
of the children who live in Albania are not 'registered'.
This means they do not have a special certificate from the government, and without this they cannot go to school.
How is CAFOD helping?CAFOD assisted with building the elementary school in Grizh Balshaj and the kindergarten (nursery school) for the 4-6 year olds. Before the nursery school was built the younger children had nowhere else to go.
The elementary children (6-10 years old) had to walk a long way to another school and cross a main road. Many children were killed on the road.
FACT:
Two-thirds of the people in the world who cannot read or write are women.
Photography: Simon Rawles
