Zikiyali Primary School

Zikiyali Primary School is out in Zinkiyali, which is a small place in the Morbi district. This is a primary school, so we deal with the younger children who are just starting out. The area around us is quite rural, with a lot of open space and farms. You can often see tractors passing by the school gate while we are in the middle of a lesson. The school building is quite small, just a few rooms where we teach different grades together sometimes. We don't have a big budget for decorations, so the walls are mostly plain with maybe a few charts the kids made. It can get very dusty because of the unpaved roads nearby, so we are always dusting the benches. The teachers here often live in the same village or nearby, so everyone knows everyone else. We don't have a mission statement or a fancy philosophy; we just want the kids to learn to read and write and do their sums correctly. At lunchtime, the smell of the midday meal being cooked fills the whole place. It’s a very simple, honest kind of life here. We don't have computers in every room, just the basics like blackboards and some old books. It’s a quiet life in Morbi, and the school is just a small part of this big landscape. Even the birds in the nearby trees are louder than the classes sometimes, especially during the morning session.