It is from the community trash that comes the soup of letters and numbers

A group of Mozambican teachers is provisionally improvising classes using recycled plastic material to teach. The idea is to close the gap created by the lack of free textbooks.

A bearded "state" phrase, perhaps even known to pre-school children, is: "books are not enough. In fact, it seems that they never will be. It has always been lacking, and the habit may even become cultural.

To get around this shortage, now motivated by the pandemic, Mozambican teachers, in the center of the country, are using recycled plastic material such as gallons of water (drums) and cardboard. These materials, now molded to actually serve pedagogy, are letters and mathematical signs.

"This is making learning easier," said Américo Semente, a teacher at Messica-based Primary School in Manica Village, Manica province.

This engineering is contemplated by students who, without a proper classroom, follow the lessons sitting on the floor, on stones or, for those who are lucky, on tree trunks.

Between playing with this material and gravel (small grayish or brownish stones widely used in construction works), Semente guarantees that he has managed to increase the number of students who can read, write, and count.

Other teachers have followed suit and started producing their own teaching materials since 2020 using cardboard, drums, and raffia bags offered by the community, replacing the traditional teaching materials, which besides being expensive, had a short lifespan, they say.

It is from the community trash that comes the soup of letters and numbers, as told by elementary school teacher Celestina Daniel.

"I make a soup of letters, machine and cursive, and add syllables and numbers together" in a talking tree, making the child "learn" rather than just memorize "a letter or a number," the elementary teacher recounted.

With teachers producing their own teaching materials the lessons are less affected by chronic budget deficits in the public sector, according to Teresa Faife, Head of Messica Primary School.

"Before it was normal for the teacher to enter the classroom without teaching materials [due to lack of paper or markers]" and so it continues.

The teacher estimates that the number of students who reached the end of elementary school with complete mastery of reading and writing, skyrocketed from 20% to 75% in a school with 8,083 students.