This interview was, in my view, a mess. The principal, Silvio, does not know English, so he brought a translator, a teacher from his English department, his English was, in my view, very bad and I barely could understand him. I had the opportunity to meet with 3 students in the English section, they were in grade 6, and their English was bad, then I asked them if the teachers were teaching in English, and they were doubting, and before they could say something the translator teacher whose name is Red intervened and said English!
Q: Can you introduce yourself?
A: My name is Red, and I am a teacher here, I will be translating what the director is saying.
Q: When was the learning center founded and why?
A: 2010, we started with KG to senior 3, we have two shifts, Arabic and English
Q: How many students do you have?
A: We have 450 students who are mostly from South Sudan and Sudan. Students also come from other African countries like Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Chad, and Yemen, we have students of 7 nationalities.
Q: Which curriculum do you follow?
A: The Sudanese and South Sudanese curriculum. For the subjects in English we follow the South Sudanese and Sudanese, but for Arabic, we just follow the Sudanese curriculum.
Q: Last year in senior 3, how many students did you have sitting for the exams, and how many passed?
A: 10 for the English and 10 for the Arabic. 14 out of 20 passed. Many of the children study and work at the same time to pay for the exam. We know that because we are also doing community services, we are an NGO, and we have two branches, one here in Al-shams and the other in Faisal. In Faisal, we have 250 students.
Q: Last year how many students passed the senior's 3 exams?
A: 20 sat for the exam and only 14 passed, from English just 4 and the 10 in Arabic.
Q: How many teachers do you have here?
A: Here we have 32 and in Faisal 17
Q: How much do you charge the children for school fees?
A: It starts with 2.500 EgP and the maximum is 2.700 EgP for senior 3.
Q: Which legal status do you have?
A: We belong to South Sudanese Teachers Union, and we function under the umbrella of the South Sudanese Embassy. This is why we teach South Sudanese books in the English section. In the coming year, the South Sudanese Embassy will bring the exams, and the price will be between 70 and 100 dollars, much lower than that of the Sudanese exams.
Q: How do you recruit teachers?
A: We ask the committee for learning centers in Cairo. That is something different from the South Sudanese Teachers Union, it is a group for all the learning centers in Cairo.
Q: For the English branch, do you use the books translated by the Combonis this year for preparing them for the exams?
A: The Comboni translation is too bad. Because of this, we created a committee in our school. We go through these books and correct them, so we did this two years ago and now we give them the notes with the corrections, so in case they do not understand something they can use these notes.
Q: How much do you pay the teachers?
A: It depends, the new teachers receive only 1.000 EgP. The maximum teacher salary is 3.000 EgP. It is too little and I have been two or three months without getting my salary. This is because many parents do not pay school fees.
Q: How much do you pay for rent?
A: 8.000 EgP for 4 floors, and every year we pay more money, and 5.000 EgP/month for water and energy.
Q: Someone helps you with the money?
A: No, CRS only gives money to the students. Five years ago CRS used to help us with furniture and painting, not anymore. CRS still gives training for the teachers, workshops that last one day, how to teach, also when COVID-19 came, how to teach with online classes. But this was not useful because we didn’t do online classes during COVID-19.
Q: Do you have problems with the neighbors?
A: No, when we first came here the first thing that we did was try to build a good relationship with them. We explained to them that this was a school for education for children of the UNHCR and that they needed to respect us.
Q: Do you face problems with Sudanese gangs?
A: This is a big problem, the Sudanese gangs were formed by those children not receiving an education, and now, they try to recruit children that go to school, so when they join a Sudanese gang, they do not go to school anymore. And when they drop school they also start consuming drugs, and they start selling drugs. Egyptians used to sell us drugs because we are foreigners and the Egyptian government would not suspect us, even less from children.
Q: Do you have students that belong to Sudanese gangs?
A: We do not know, but if we find out that some of the students belong to them, we would tell the parents. But one time a week what we do is organize workshops to have the students busy so they do not join Sudanese gangs, organize sports, life skills, and other workshops.
