15-year-old girl narrates her thirst for education

In the wake of the recent celebration of the International Day of the Girl Child, most girls are still struggling to get education in Liberia as 15-year-old Miss Eva Kenneth laments how she and some of her siblings are not in school.

In an interview with this paper, Eva said she lives with her biological parents in Paynesville, suburb of Monrovia but she is not currently enrolled in school primarily due to financial constraint, narrating that her siblings include five brothers and two sisters. However, only three of her brothers are going to school with the rest staying at home, looking into a bleak future.

According to Eva, her parents are unemployed as her mother sells cold water to feed the family and maintain the home.  “I wish to be in school, every day I’m just home doing nothing. At times my brothers, who are in school, teach me to read when they come from school” she continued Eva is a member of the Children Clubs or CCS supported by the charity Save the Children International. “I feel good living with my parents. My parents treat me good, my mother can cook every day and I eat one time a day, but I feel safe with them because I am not abused sexually and neglected”, she added.

She said, “My mother is a well-disciplined woman. She punishes me whenever I do wrong by sending me to bed and sometimes she makes me to kneel down, I can take treatment at home when I am sick.”

Save the Children International has been implementing the DEC project in Montserrado, Margibi and Bong counties, respectively. The project is aimed at measuring the level of impact made in improving the quality of care and wellbeing of children who have been placed in family based care or foster and kinship caregivers.

By Ethel A. Tweh-Editing by Jonathan Browne