It rains in Bata.
The water violently hits the zinc sheets of the school's roof, causing a thunderous noise.
Nobody seems to care.
In fact, nobody seems to even notice it.
The teacher continues explaining the equations while the students fix his gaze on the movement of his hands, on the drawings that his fingers form, so as not to lose the thread.
Only when the water begins to filter and the first drops fall on the Math notebooks, the class notices the deluge.
Pilar Bilogo, the director, picks up the phone and calls someone: there is another problem in the center.
PHOTO GALLERY
An essential woman for deaf children in Guinea
"I think the best thing would be to leave and start selling used clothes in the market."
That is the phrase that Bilogo constantly repeats.
She is exhausted from rowing alone, discouraged, but despite the fact that everything becomes more difficult every day and that she feels alone in the face of the challenge that lies before her, she knows that giving up is impossible.
The idea of leaving La Fe, the school for the deaf that she founded in 2013, vanishes as soon as she opens her eyes in the morning.
In front of her, six children with hearing disabilities and another mute with a mental disorder whom she welcomes, feeds, clothes and educates without any support.
At the college, more than one hundred students enrolled.
No, Pilar Bilogo cannot leave.
His days begin in the Nkolombong neighborhood of Bata, the most populous city in Equatorial Guinea, on a wooden ground floor at the end of a dirt road.
Moisture, locked in dark rooms, clings to piles of faded clothing.
A gritty hallway leads to a windowless bedroom where mosquito nets drape over mattresses.
In the middle of the corridor, a kitchen full of utensils, a rusty camping gas and an empty refrigerator.
Lucía, at La Fe school, waiting for the teacher to arrive. DIEGO MENJIBAR REYNES
It is half past seven in the morning;
some students take the path to the hearing school and others the path to La Fe. In Equatorial Guinea there are three educational centers for the deaf.
Bata houses two: La Fe and Manos Felices, which was until 2013 the only one in the entire continental region.
The third, belonging to the Red Cross, is in Malabo.
Equatorial Guinea has not signed or ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
On the other hand, the current General Education Law, approved in 2007, specifies a series of articles to provide educational opportunities to the group of the national population affected by a disability, but currently all educational centers for the deaf in the country they have been created by private initiatives and not by the Equatorial Guinean Administration.
Data that saves lives
Hearing loss affects poor countries more.
Nearly 80% of people with impaired hearing live in low- and middle-income countries, according to the WHO.
Access to ear and hearing care is also more limited in these countries: “For every million inhabitants, the
78% of low-income countries have less than one ear, nose, and throat specialist, 93% have less than one audiologist, and only 50% have at least one teacher for the deaf.”
The causes of hearing loss are directly related to the implementation of preventive measures, and, therefore, with the investment and strategy that the country in question adopts.
In the case of Equatorial Guinea, the Bertelsman Transformation Index (BTI) states: “There are no recent poverty statistics available, although the World Bank states that the rate was 76.8% in 2006. In 2015, only one out of every four newborns were immunized against polio and measles, while one in three was immunized against tuberculosis.
It is estimated that half of the population lacks drinking water and that six out of 10 children are enrolled in school”.
Rubella, meningitis, measles or mumps can cause hearing loss and most of them can be prevented by vaccination, according to the WHO.
Nicaraguan lessons
A year before founding La Fe, Bilogo left Africa for the first time.
He was 26 years old and had been collaborating with Manos Felices for a few years when they offered him the opportunity to continue training abroad.
He did not think about it and went to Nicaragua, a special country for the Deaf Community: after the Sandinista victory came the sowing of literacy in 1980. Its fruits reached all corners of the country.
At the Villa Libertad school in Managua, the youngest students created on their own what is now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language or LSF, a historical milestone studied by linguists from all over the world since it was children, and not adults. who created it.
Upon his return, Bilogo founded La Fe and made a series of differences: it lowers tuition costs, it opens the door to teaching for students with other Special Educational Needs (SEN) and the most important: La Fe becomes the first center school in the country to accept deaf students over the age of seven without previous training in sign language.
This woman knows of the urgency of educating young people as soon as possible, but she is also aware that closing the doors to those over seven years of age would mean depriving them of any educational opportunity.
Her job is to prevent that from happening.
There are 8.9 million deaf children in sub-Saharan Africa
However, many students cannot afford to pay the registration fees at La Fe, which poses a risk to the continuity of the project.
Bilogo refuses to give in: "There is a reason why I continue to accept students in class and children at home: family abandonment and isolation suffered by minors with deafness in my country."
In Equatorial Guinea, especially in the interior regions, there is still a widespread belief that the mothers of those who suffer from this condition were bewitched during pregnancy and, therefore, the newborn is cursed.
Young people (and mothers) grow up with it, bear that burden throughout their lives, but Bilogo works to remedy the problem.
His strategy of him?
Sensitize parents: “Every day they show me that they are capable of doing everything, of being one more in society.
family acceptance,
For this reason, the WHO created the World Report on Hearing in 2021 with the aim of providing guidance to States so that they integrate ear care into their national health plans.
The report explains: "Lack of accurate information and stigmatizing mindsets around ear diseases and hearing loss often limit people's access to care for these conditions."
In 2021, 1.5 billion people were living with some degree of hearing loss and 430 million needed rehabilitation services.
Future data is alarming: the WHO predicts that by 2050 there will be 2.5 billion people with some degree of deafness and 700 need rehabilitation.
According to the NGO Deaf Child Worldwide, there are 8.9 million deaf children in sub-Saharan Africa.
build a dream
Bilogo wants to ensure that all children with hearing disabilities in his country have access to education.
In 2012, that dream was a utopia;
in 2021, he carries much of that responsibility on his shoulders.
His dream is to build a boarding school.
The land he needs has already been donated by the mother of one of his students, but for now it remains a rectangle of virgin forest the size of a soccer field.
“My idea is that there are 50 students who live there permanently, and that the rest go to class and go home every day.
For this we need bedrooms, kitchen, classes, dining room, performance rooms, church, and various supplementary classrooms to teach sewing, computer science, or other useful disciplines,” she explains.
Lucía and another student communicate from classroom to classroomDIEGO MENJIBAR REYNES
In Bata, deaf youth have more options to access education than those in the interior regions, who suffer much more than in the cities the consequences of not having a school to attend.
The results of not learning to communicate can be disastrous, affecting both the educational level and mental health, one of the forgotten areas of the collective.
Stefania Fadda, the president of the European Society for Mental Health and Deafness (ESMHD), makes this clear in an email interview: “In the most deprived and poor areas of Africa, children with deafness they run the risk of not developing an adequate language and not having access to education, and therefore of becoming socially disintegrated adults, alone and isolated, unemployed,
The World Federation of the Deaf (WDF) states that it is essential to ensure that children with this condition are exposed to sign language as soon as possible, and Fadda confirms the consequences: “Exposing them to an effective and early form of communication , either spoken or signed language, or both (bilingualism), greatly reduces stress, discomfort and difficulty that could cause suffering, identity alterations or psychiatric disorders”.
Learning to communicate is the first step to avoid these consequences: for this reason, Pilar Bilogo's dream is, for now, the only safe bet to save the future of many deaf people, both in her city and in the interior regions, where neglect and stigmatization are more accentuated.
The results of not learning to communicate can be disastrous, affecting both educational and mental health
In small steps, the inexhaustible work of this woman is permeating Equatorial Guinean society.
At 35 years old, she can be seen working as a translator at the Cultural Center of Spain in Bata (CCEB), taking her students to awareness talks on HIV prevention or on the television program Con M de mujer, talking about the need to integrate people with deafness and eliminate prejudices.
Nadia Valentín, director of the CCEB, says that Bilogo has become a great ally of the cultural center: "Because it is one of the few professionals in the country who can interpret in sign language and because it also makes it easier for students to have equal access to conditions to the activities that we program in the CCEB”.
Teachers are missing, teaching fails
The words of Santiago Bivini Mangué, Secretary General of the National Commission of Equatorial Guinea for UNESCO, did not have the relevance they deserved: "Although there is a legal framework on special education and care for SEN, there is no evidence that there are mechanisms institutions and operations for its implementation”.
His message was written in the document Special Educational Needs in Equatorial Guinea
,
prepared in 2011 within the framework of the Equatorial Guinea Educational Development Program (PRODEGE).
The legal scenario to which the secretary refers is the aforementioned General Education Law.
Fifteen years after the entry into force of this law, there is still no pedagogical guide for the curricular development of Special Education and most institutions rely on the Regular Education guides.
In 2015, Unicef prepared the Analysis of the Situation of Special Education in Equatorial Guinea, a document in which it pointed out that only 2% of teachers for the population with SEN have a technical level in Special Education.
The same organization concluded through a survey in 76 centers that 90% of teachers have difficulties in serving students with SEN.
And the World Federation of the Deaf itself warns: "children face barriers in education if teachers and peers do not master sign language fluently, which can result in illiteracy."
Remigio Agustín Esono, an electricity student at the National University of Equatorial Guinea (UNGE), puts a face to these data: “I have been a volunteer teacher for three years now, and I want to continue training and collaborating with this project.”
Although the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obliges the states parties to guarantee that teachers master that language, this does not affect the absent Equatorial Guinea.
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