Jehona Salaj: My old school

I have tried to keep my posts free of politics. It is not something I like, so I would rather not talk about. But, it does influence our lives and (I guess) it is impossible to completely exclude it from every topic.

A couple of days ago, I saw in Facebook photos of my old school. Although I visited there last September and saw that the front façade looked pretty bad, I didn’t imagine the other side to look like this. Ironically, this is the backyard, where the children spend most of their time outside the lectures. In the Facebook post, some guys are thinking to gather some money and paint it. But, does it make any sense painting this? What would the paint do, anyhow? Just hide all this for a couple of years? What is important is not how it looks, but how dangerous it can be for the health of its students and staff.

Yes, this building that looks like a place the Hollywood directors would choose for a horror film is a school. Built in the ’60s and starting to work in the ’70s, it did see its good days once upon a time, in communism time Yugoslavia. It was once even proclaimed the best elementary school in Yugoslavia, owing both to its hardworking teachers and students, and to its rich classrooms and laboratories. But, as the world goes forward, we go backward. Those days are long gone and forgotten. The color of the numerous certificates won in competitions by students, teachers, the school, has already fainted so much that they are unrecognizable. The classrooms are the same still… the ones that were in the ’70s… the same benches and chairs… The laboratories cannot be called with that name anymore, as it is difficult to find a test-tube in the chemistry lab, or any working device in the physics one, difficult to find any new map in the geography classroom (don’t even think about globes… a ball can be used to show the shape of the Earth and the children can just imagine like the continents are drawn somewhere there, over the surface)… I don’t know if the old good skeleton of the biology lab is still entire, or has it lost part of it’s bones. What is sure, is that the teachers and students are everyday loosing their hope that better days will come. Every day seems to show them that in the horizon is only something worse. And they loose hope, and with hope goes the motivation to teach and to learn. Why teach, if nobody is going to need what you teach? Why learn, if you will never use what you learn?

This is not a school in some poor country far away. It is in Montenegro, right in the middle of Europe, in a country that aspires to become member of the European Union. Just one month from the salary of the minister of education might be enough to get this place to a level of not being dangerous for the people inside it. But, why would the country worry, anyways? The children studying here are not Montenegrins, they are members of the Albanian minority inhabiting the zone. The country only cares about keeping the territory. The people living there were just the unwanted part included in the territory. Killing them would attract too much attention from the countries around. Poisoning them little by little is easier, giving them no schools, no jobs, no future, making them leave by themselves… It sure takes more time, but nobody will even notice, just like nobody will care that Ulqin (Ulcinj), inhabited by Albanians, is the poorest municipality in Montenegro. This school is situated there. Little does it matter that Ulqin (Ulcinj) has extreme natural beauty (including a river, the only river island in Montenegro, two lakes, over 13km of beach, springs, mountains, a beautiful mountain of olives…) and a rich history (being founded in 5th century BC and having in it’s territory the medieval town Svacia, the town of 355 churches), it is anyhow not included in any touristic maps. You will never hear about it, nowhere!

I am sorry if I am drifting a little off topic here, but this situation gets me really angry. Seeing the photos of the school looking so bad, so destroyed… Nobody could even guess that it is a school. Nobody could even guess that this building is still in use for anything. It looks more like some abandoned old factory. Unfortunately, it is inside this ‘old factory’ that the roots of the future of many children are being produced. In the courses about teaching, the teachers say that the class should be welcoming, in order to make the children feel good and in mood for learning and engaging in the learning process. How do you make a class in this school feel welcoming? How do you tell to a child that has to wear his jacket inside the classroom that s/he should be focused in learning. And, from what I remember from my days there, the summer is not any better either… It is insanely hot, especially in the upper floor. How do you take a child to this school and tell him that there is a future? The school looks much worse than it did in the times when his/her parents used to study there, maybe even his/her grandparents…

Who knows what the future holds?! Maybe somebody will take care of it too. Maybe the population of the zone will move away completely. After all, it has been moving away little by little for decades now. Maybe, there will be some donation coming directly to the school, although it  is quite difficult to imagine that. Maybe, just maybe, the country politics will change and they will start regarding all the country’s inhabitants as equal and they will spend something in this school and the other schools (not in much better condition) in Ulqin (Ulcinj). Bigger changes have happened in the world. Let’s leave that to the future…