#TuesdayTales | Patricia Now Knows Her ABCs 🎵📖
By Grace Nakafeero
Welcome back to #TuesdayTales, a series of stories from the field, told firsthand by our Building Tomorrow Fellows. Today, you will meet 8-year-old Patricia, a girl who went without basic schooling for several years, never gaining the opportunity to learn to read or write. Thanks to Building Tomorrow Cohort 6 Fellow Grace Nakafeero, the help of a persistent mother, and after a few sessions in a Roots to Rise camp, the little girl can now recite the entire alphabet, count, and stitch together simple sentences. We are so proud of Patricia’s academic growth and feel empowered knowing our programs are changing tens of thousands of lives across Uganda!
The Saturday sun rises in the Village of Galinandha in Kamuli District, Eastern Uganda. In front of a mud-brick house, 8-year-old Patricia Babirye stands feeding maize grain to the chickens, reciting an alphabet letter for each piece of grain she throws. In the background, her mother Lydia Tibiwa pauses her cooking to watch. Her face is beaming with pride because a few weeks ago, her daughter knew little about formal education.
During our weekly Roots to Rise community-based learning camps, I often noticed a little girl who would observe other children from a distance and then leave. She always appeared to be enjoying the sessions but never participated. Together with my Community Education Volunteers (CEVs), we tasked ourselves with finding out who the little girl was so we could hopefully enroll her in school and Roots to Rise camps.
After a few days of asking around the community, we identified the young girl as Patricia and discovered that her mother Lydia was a subsistence farmer, making just enough to provide for her six children. Lydia could only afford to send five of her six children to school at the time, and because Patricia was more introverted and shy, Lydia initially made the difficult decision to keep Patricia home.
Lydia never went to school but understands the importance of education. She wants her children to study as much as possible, as she believes it is the most promising pathway out of poverty. Relationship-building with parents and caregivers like Lydia is arguably the first step that we Fellows and CEVs can take, as it determines the success we will have enrolling and retaining children in school and Building Tomorrow programs. For this reason, I was grateful to connect with Lydia in this way and find an interim solution for Patricia: enrolling her in my Roots to Rise Community camp while Lydia saved money for Patricia’s school fees.
On Patricia’s first day of camp, she was warmly welcomed by all learners. I performed a learning assessment before starting the camp and realized Patricia could barely read, write, or identify any numbers, which determined the type of instruction she received. By placing her among learners at the same skill level, Patricia felt comfortable participating in the lesson. After the standard 40 hours of camp, Patricia had learned the alphabet, could count from one to ten, and could read and write some basic words. Throughout Patricia’s time in camp, her mother Lydia often came by to check on her daughter’s progress and walked away with that same smile knowing her daughter was receiving the education she deserved.
Building Tomorrow’s foundational learning program, Roots to Rise, has helped over 120,000 learners like Patricia develop and improve their literacy and numeracy skills through school and community-based lessons. Since writing this story, Patricia was accepted into primary grade 1 at Galinandha Primary School thanks to Fellow Grace and the CEVs she mobilized. Together, they were able to convince the Headteacher to accept Patricia into school as Lydia works to pay off the school fees at an unpressurized pace. Patricia continues to strengthen her learning skills, and after finishing school, she hopes to become a nurse to treat sick people around the world.
