Sharing Stories, Linking Lives: Literacy Practices Among ... - CPLS

Perry Sudanese Refugees
KiSwahili, the national language of Kenya, as a second language. Because English and
KiSwahili were the official languages of schooling, few southern Sudanese children had the
opportunity to become literate in Dinka, the local language spoken by the majority of the
refugees, or other local dialects. Churches in the camp offered the only opportunity for local
language literacy instruction. Chol explains, “In the school, they taught us English and
KiSwahili. At church, they taught us Dinka, not English.”
Limited funding for Kakuma schools caused severe shortages of educational materials
and supplies; often, there were not enough textbooks to go around for each student, and students
often could not take the limited textbooks home to study. However, Kakuma does have some
libraries, which help support refugees’ academic development. Chol said that his high school
classes would go to the library “two times a week, during chemistry teaching or biology, because
the biology books were very limited, so they were in the library. . . . The library is very big. It
can take a lot of students.” Francis described the library as having “newspapers, magazines, all
sorts of things. We have Newsweek.” The large libraries were funded by international donor
agencies, according to Francis. Individual churches also had libraries, which were intended to
help students with their academic studies. It was this sort of church library that Ezra’s grant
proposal supported.
Due to limited resources, basic literacy instruction in the Kakuma Refugee Camp’s
primary schools typically took the form of repeating after the teacher and copying from the
chalkboard. According to Francis:
The teacher may write something on the board and then pronounce it. That’s the kind of
reading, basically . . . you repeat after the teacher, then you go and do some writing on
the ground. You write on the ground because there is a lot of shortage of stationery.
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