Child Study

As part of my work I have been reading and commenting on the 3 year (final) student’s major project – a child study. It has been heart-wrenching!

The focus of the child study is to compare the home lives of two children in the class and the impact this has on their performance in school. The students have usually chosen to study an orphan, single-parent or foster child to a child with both parents.

Reading these studies have really brought home some of the cultural contexts that these children grow up in. To be an orphan, single-parent child or foster child is far more common, yet vastly different to these categories of children in Australia.

In each of the students’ classes they have around 30 children – 2 to 4 of these might be orphans, another 2 to 4 foster children and another 2 to 4 or more single-parent children.

An orphan is a child with both parents. In the Gambia, street children are pretty rare, orphans are usually taken in by relatives or family friends (as they say the ‘village’ takes them in). In some instances aid organizations have set up child villages, for orphaned children and the like, to live and go to school. In some cases the parent who takes them in are poor and try but find it difficult to properly provide for a child (one story I read was of a child who lived with his aunt and thought she was his mother until the village children started teasing him after a fight and said that she wasn’t his real mother, then both the boy and the aunt ended up in tears and the boy said it was the worst day of his life, discovering that both his parents had died without him knowing).

A foster child is a child who has both their biological parents but lives with another family. This may be because the parents are poor and have sent their child to live with someone else so they have access to education. It may also be because a woman has no children of her own and so a family allows her to bring up one of their children. It may also be because either the parents are travelling for work or that the parents are divorced and remarried. In these cases the families that take the foster children take all of the financial responsibility for bringing up the child.

Single parent children may be the result of a divorce or of one of the parents dying. Often if the mother is bringing up the child on her own it is the result of a divorce or of having the child out of wedlock (in one case the mother was attacked). In a few cases the father is bringing up the child on their own after the mother had died, but in most cases widowed parents remarry. A child is still considered a single-parent child if they have a step parent, because it is unusual for the step-parent to care for the child as their own.

Given all this sounds so sad it is really important to note the incredible compassion in the child study’s, the teachers really care about these children and try to look out for them on a personal level.

It is also important to note that some of the teachers themselves had commented that they themselves were foster children but now they are studying and live happy lives. They said that these children grow up with strong values and often make a success of their lives.

My reason for commenting on all of this is because I know some of you may consider aid. In some of the schools I have been to the children are given free schooling, well trained teachers, provided with uniforms and books and food at school. These schools are heaven for the children I am talking of. While I am here I will find out ways people can help these kids. I know Anne already gives to local children, from donors she knows, to pay for schooling.