Issues in Development

The last few days have been slightly more engaging but still very difficult. I am facing many challenges with how the local people in the North regard development programs. On Monday we were called out to a local NGO because they were hearing stories of students being turned away from schools for illegal resasons, ei they were not paying the optional school fees, not having 'proper' uniforms, etc. All of these reasons are phoney and made up by school administrations as a way to keep classes smaller. My issue with this is not only fact that students do not have advotes for them out in the field, but that the Ministry of Education hires 'inspectors' to monitor situations like this. The inspector's job is strictly to monitor schools and make sure that policies are being followed. Clearly, in this case they were not. I heard that part of why inspectors do not go visit schools in the 'bush' is because they are only alotted so many kilometers a week/month in company cars and thus only visit schools near by. Which begs the question, how effective are such positions? If they are not going to monitor thorougly, they might as well take the inspectors income and give it to the rural schools to cover fees that certian administrations are forcing children to pay.
The following day we proceeded to Divundu for some school follow up visits, I struggled with this becuase we only interviewed four teachers, not nearly large enough to cover the entire region which has hundreds of schools. I had been ready to visit many schools throughout the area, I mean after all we drove 2 hours to get there for only a short time frame of work.
Today was probably the most frustrating, as follow up to Mondays meeting with the NGO we were going to go out and have a meeting at Mayana Primary School at 8, along with the regional office of education, the deputy director, the inspector (who was only going because we brought up the issue) we were supposed to meet with the principal and the school board. After waiting an hour and a half for the party members at the regional office to join us, we finally headed to the school. When we arrived at the school we were informed that the principal and school board had been on campus but had recently left, and they argued that they did not know they had a meeting with us. So two more hours we waited fro him to return, it was not until 11:30 when he casually walked back in the office of the school. the whole situation was such a waste of resources. The regional office are his direct superiors, they simply could have come in, on time, and told him the policy and then come back in the following few days to collect the list of OVC in attendence. (The schools are also supposed to keep a list of this, so it should not take long.)
While I know that all parties have the interest of the students, it is hard to ingore the seemly obvious steps that could be easily shortened to effect more people. For instence, instead of spending hours at one school, we could have visited multiple schools in the area and confrimed that they had enrolled the students properly.