By Adama Kone, Teacher Project Coordinator

It usually rains heavily July through August in Mali, which is summer vacation for students. During this time, many parents rely on their children when it comes to working in millet, corn, peanut fields. This leads to a real dilemma when school reopens — do students stay in the fields or return to class?

In Mali, all men from the same family are supposed to work in one field in order to feed the whole family. Those fields are called common fields because they belong to the whole family and the crops from them are supposed to feed the family – not be sold. Those families that have only the head of family or only two or three men need help from their children. Many families would also have large different fields of many crops like corn, maize, millet peanuts, cotton to be used for sales. Some families would have a plough and cows but a very few families can actually afford that.

Once the school is closed end of June, students are supposed to be helping parents in fields with weeding, sowing, fertilizing etc. Some children like these tasks but some do not because they think they are too hard and require so much physical effort. Some children get sick from hard work in fields, especially at the end of September when the rainy season is ending. School usually gets started early in October, but many parents struggle to send their kids back to school because they would still want them to keep helping in fields. Children who like school do not like this idea of keeping working with parents in fields but those who do not like school rather like the idea of skipping classes!

Due to this hard work in fields in rural areas, a very few students get to review their notebooks over summer break, when the only thing most of parents care about is their crops or harvests. However, the people in villages have no other ways to feed families because it is so important for them to have good harvests so they can feed their family all year long.

This is a tough problem for our students, their parents, and our teacher partners. While everyone wants children to be educated, everyone also needs to eat. The next month in Mali will be full of hard work in the fields for our students in the hopes that they can return to school in October and have full bellies all school year long.