We asked ONE members for submissions to The Big Read book — a collection of stories from people around the world supporting education for everyone. Although only one member story will be published in the book, the runner-up submissions, including the one below from Robin Strickler, a US citizen in Kigali, Rwanda, were so good that we wanted to share them here.

You can show your support for The Big Read and help ensure a pathway out of poverty for children around the world. Endorse the book by adding your signature here.

Thanks for reading!

-Emily Stivers

Going Without

By Robin Strickler
US citizen in Kigali, Rwanda

As an American teacher starting a secondary school in Rwanda’s Eastern Province, I am both nonplussed by the hunger our students have for education and repeatedly dismayed by what it means to go without it.

My husband almost went without. Born in a Tanzanian refugee camp, he was one of three primary students selected from his school to go on to secondary education. Like most of his classmates, he ran 14 kilometers to and from school. Today he is a church leader with two master’s degrees who works in community development in Rwanda. He gives back to the community with a passion that is shared by many other former refugees. We often wonder together: how many others were left behind?

“Jimmy” and John Peter are hungry for it: they come and politely beg to be allowed to take our precious library books home. Jimmy carries a dog-eared dictionary with yellowed pages everywhere he goes and John Peter has filled notebook pages with carefully lettered vocabulary words he has learned.

Mutoni and Jean-Baptiste went without in the war years, and now in their twenties, their awkwardly formed handwriting tells of primary school lessons lost when their eye-hand coordination could have been trained to write with ease. Mutoni ducks her head with embarrassment when she can’t answer a question but she is too ashamed to ask the questions that would help her learn.

I’m also moved by the stream of mothers who are hungry for their children’s education: their faces careworn, their kitenge and headscarves faded but clean, they speak softly and persistently to implore us to help their daughters and sons. Lacking education themselves, they know it is what their children need to battle the poverty that wears people down, year by year.

The Rwandan government is keenly aware that girls should not go without education. With the continent’s highest population density, family planning, development and literacy are important tools for improving society and girls play a key role in changing those patterns. Yet girls are the most likely to stay home when family members are sick, when water needs to be carried, or when they menstruate if they don’t have access to modern supplies.

Rwandans around me are hungry for things to read. Magazines that are a month old still sell for a high price because they are hard to get. Newspapers sell fast but are hard to find because printing presses are old and often break down. An NGO is trying to start Rwanda’s first public library but funds are scarce. A small company is starting for the first time to print booklets with children’s stories because most children see no books until they go to school. In a country that lacks a reading culture, even top students are challenged when they qualify for scholarships at major universities; their classmates are used to reading far more and have more practice at analyzing what they read.

Teachers are hungry, too. On a teacher survey, they hoped for well-ventilated rooms, classes with “only” 40 students, enough textbooks and teaching aids — a globe perhaps, or protractors or a single microscope. I find classrooms are often dark and gloomy when they are made from local bricks and have small windows. When the rain beats down on the tin roofs, the teacher must stop talking because it is impossible to hear over the din.

But going without has affected teachers’ expectations and pedagogical methods. Many teachers treasure the notes they took in their teacher training classes or the notes of their former teachers because they may be the only materials they get to teach with. Lacking textbooks for their students, rote learning and copying from the board are primary methods for sharing information. When I suggested to one teacher that he make photocopies for each student of the two pages he needed for his history lesson, he was surprised.

“Is that okay?” he asked tentatively. He wasn’t used to thinking of that much paper being available for teaching.

Schools go without. In most schools here, there are no science tables, no picture books or field trips, no bright colored posters or bulletin boards, and no texts with photos. Schools with more than 50 books in their library would consider themselves lucky. Most schools lack electricity for videos or movies or computers. Usually, there is only the teacher’s handwriting on the board for students to painstakingly copy.

One day a group of five young men in their late teens and early twenties called me over to their group where they were sharing a children’s book that shows the stages of life of various animals.

“Is this true?” one said, pointing with astonishment to the picture of the pupa that becomes a butterfly. “Does that really happen?”

In Rwanda, it is happening. Fifteen years after the genocide and still struggling with all the pain that such a tragedy entails, Rwandans are pushing hard to change their country and their future. They know that education is one of the keys to development and one of the ways that they can alter the extremist ideology that led to the abyss of human experience. Like a butterfly, we are fragile here, hoping for possibility.