AfricaPress-mozambique: Egesse Patrício resisted early marriage when she finished primary school. Now, at the age of 15, she has to walk 14 kilometres and cross a river by canoe to continue her studies.
Mizunga, Egesse’s birthplace in Tete province, does not have a secondary school. Usually, when children in the region complete primary education, they are handed over in marriage or sent off to herd cattle.
Such practices are discouraged by school councils struggling just to eradicate illiteracy in the face of challenges in access to education, but prevail nonetheless.
Any child who challenges them has, like Egisse, to seek education in Mandie, an administrative post in Manica province.
She walks several kilometres on narrow clay paths and crosses the Luenha River, an arm of the Zambezi, in a canoe carved by hand or wading waist-deep in water, depending on the time of year and the flow.
“I study in Mandie,” Egesse Patrício tells Lusa in Nhungue, the local language of Tete. “I spend every day here, and now I cross this river in a canoe to get to school.”
The young Mozambican girl had the rare support of her parents in resisting the elders and continuing her schooling in Mandie.
A total of 46 students from four villages in Changara district (Chambuluca, Gama, Mizunga and Nhamagoa) cross the Luenha River every day to attend school in Mandie, a village of precarious houses, and a few built of masonry amidst the rubble of old colonial buildings.
The 50-metre river crossing is made, in the dry season when the water level is low, in two places: one deeper, using canoes made from tree trunks, and the other on foot with the water up to the knees or the waist.
“This side (Gama) has no secondary school, so we have to cross the river, on foot or sometimes by canoe, to study in Mandie,” explains Domingo Afonso, 15, a ninth-grade student who has been studying there for two years.
Another student, Enelma Fernando, 15, an eighth grader, says that at the beginning of the school year the river “was violent” for several days and she missed some classes because her parents would not allow her to cross.
Resident Joaquim Matchissa, whose two children are already studying in Mandie, confirms the apprehension, which is greater during the rainy season (October to March) at the beginning of the school year (February).
Other parents rent huts on the Mandie bank so their children can study without risking a river crossing.
Cristopher Baera, principal of Mandie High School, says he encourages parents to place students in boarding, formerly of precarious construction but now brick, to avoid daily river crossings.
This year, only two new students joined.
It is a challenge, he recognises. “We are battling against illiteracy, even with children crossing the river,” he says.
And those who don’t want to cross the river? They have to walk about 35 kilometres on degraded paths to Missawa, where there is another secondary school.
Travelling in the opposite direction to the students, residents of Mandie cross the river to the Changara side to get supplies from the markets of the provincial capital of Tete, about 90 kilometres away, and also to deliver agricultural production, the main family economic activity.
The construction of a bridge linking the districts would be an incentive for trade and agriculture, Maximiano Macapula, head of Mandie’s administrative post, tells Lusa.
In addition, it would promote the accessibility to education essential to eradicating illiteracy
