Nepal entranced mathematician Anne Prescott in 1983 on her first visit to the lakeside city of Pokhara, and she promised herself she would go back one day to do some trekking.
That return trip, in January 2011, ended up being a professional mission when Dr Prescott, a senior maths lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), led a teacher-training team to the western region of Nepal.
Dr Prescott has always viewed education as a way for people to get out of poverty, but the visit opened her eyes to the problems faced by teachers and pupils.
“Some teachers walked three or four hours each way to attend the professional development classes,” she says. But it was the dilapidated state of Gandaki school, near Arughat, and the lack of sanitation that really left an impression. Boys far outnumbered the girls and Dr Prescott soon realised girls stopped attending class because the toilets were terrible – little more than a concrete slab.
Girls avoided drinking so they didn’t have to use the toilets or, if they had their periods, they wouldn’t attend school at all. “It was really unhealthy,” she says. “So when I returned to Australia, I set about trying to raise money to improve the toilets in Gandaki school.”
Dr Prescott collected twice the amount of money needed, and her efforts have been recognised with a UTS Social Inclusion award.
She is now raising funds to rebuild the Gandaki school and replace mud floors and broken desks with something more conducive to learning for the 80 to 100 children. Working with the community development organisation Sambhav Nepal, Dr Prescott is supported by the Rotary club of Wahroonga and a group who volunteer their services in Nepal.
Dr Prescott will make her fourth trip to the Himalayan kingdom in January, when she hopes the rebuilding of Gandaki school can begin.
Since she began training teachers at the school, Dr Prescott says the spoken English of pupils and teachers has improved enormously and they are now able to hold conversations rather than just exchange simple textbook phrases.
“Teachers tend to think you can only learn from textbooks so we have been taking them outside and playing educational games to show there are alternatives.”
Classroom management has been another issue to address. “I thought there was a lot of shouting in class – they teach the way they were taught – so we try to break some of those habits.”
The cultural disconnect that can occur between fund-raising and local needs is evident in some well-meaning but under-used initiatives. One charitable organisation had built a library that was hardly used. Dr Prescott discovered this was because teachers didn’t know how to incorporate books other than textbooks in their teaching.
“So I read aloud to them just as I would to my own son. No one had ever done that before and they were enthralled,” she says.
Another school has a science lab that lies dormant – again because teachers don’t know how to use it. “The internet is too expensive and not available to them so one of our big plans is to get them access to DVDs so they can watch experiments and learn how to conduct them.”
Sanitation and sanctuary have to be uppermost, though, if girls are to have an equal stake in education, says Dr Prescott. “It’s very hard for the kids. They have to work on the farm as well as go to school. There’s some electricity but it’s intermittent and, in the winter, temperatures can drop to below zero.”
Her pragmatic message to a society that prioritises boys’ education is simple: “If you want your sons to be educated, you have to educate their mothers.”
For more about community development in Nepal, see sambhavnepal.org.
- When Anne Prescott first visited Gandaki, she found dilapidated facilities, broken desks and toilets so unsanitary the girls didn’t want to attend school
- Since then she has introduced a teacher-training program and raised money to rebuild the school to encourage students, particularly girls to attend