The Marol Academy is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting sustainable education in South Sudan.  It has grown to envision plans to support healthcare of the students and community in the region. Follow us on Facebook

I always get teary-eyed whenever I get into a conversation with schoolgirls such as these in the photo who are enrolled at Marol School, both Primary and Secondary sections, and hear of their struggles to stay in school. I was at the school in January this year and I met a crowd of them. They were still on Christmas break but upon hearing of my arrival, a number of them came back to the school just to meet me, as we would miss each other during my visit. 

On this occasion, we swept the school compound, we played a little volley ball, we chatted about their ideas of education, their determination to stay in school despite the challenges that they face, not just in terms of deprivation but also the social gendered-obligations such as chores at home that derail their efforts to study or the constantly looming specter that any one of them could get married off any day, at a young age, regardless of her desires. 

When I challenged them to do their best, they said that I had done my part to ensure that there is a school within their reach and that the rest is up to them. They told me that there is more to their lives than become wives and mothers. “Of course, we want to be wives and mothers, but we will get to all that when we’re done being children…and when that time comes, we will have accomplished other things that are equally important for us, like going to university and becoming skilled,” one of them explained. I cried, of joy. In this community, as it is all over the country and Africa at large, such clear-headedness about what girls want is often buried in the rush by families to define for them what the society thinks they ought to be doing. 

When girls don’t accomplish any of their dreams in life, we all lose as a society, as a country, for no society can hope to move forward in any aspect of life while inadvertently suppressing its women. At Marol, we’ve endeavored since 2007 to create a rural community school that at least takes the issue of poverty and lack of school fees and school supplies out of the equation of the factors that deny girls and young women the opportunity to pursue their educational dreams. The remainder of the factors such as the socially constructed lower station that women and girls are assigned to, can be negotiated. 

Marol Academy’s mission is to be part of that negotiation, facilitating the girls to become the agents of the change they want. This does not have to be a sort of a gender war or a battle of the sexes; it is about a society discovering what it loses when half of its population, the women, are subjugated. The best way for all to see and address this loss is to give as many girls as possible the chance to achieve a level of education that makes them full citizens, for education is a citizenship right and must democratized.

This school year, before it got disrupted by COVID-19, was poised to become another successful year at Marol, where record number of high school  graduates would have matriculated into the universities and training technical colleges come this Fall. Right now, the school is closed, like the rest of the country’s entire school system. This means we have to innovate simple but effective ways to help the children to continue to learn at home and to prepare for national examinations, should these be held when the global pandemic has been brought under control and the lockdown is eased.

Continuing learning during the lockdown, in a remote community without access to the internet, is a tall order indeed, but a challenge we are not taking while lying down. We have offered the teachers opportunity to prepare notes on campus and for the pupils to come to school, ten at a time, to pick up study material. We shall prevail, especially with the help of Marol Academy Board of Directors, Marol Friends and all our donors who have given so generously over the years. This is a note of update as it is a chance to say thank you to all the people who make our small efforts sustained and meaningful.