Let’s share the cófra, a sort of Pandora’s box full of opportunities

There was no conflict between science and religion in my primary school. Every year at this time, without so much as a cellular whimper, let alone a Big Bang, science submitted to the superior fighting weight — in traditional Catholic Ireland at least — of religion. For one month only, our classroom nature table, beloved repository of rotting foliage and interesting shells, was discreetly cleared and a May altar sprang up in its place. Present on every respecting May altar back then were: a small, immaculately stitched white altar cloth, a statue of the Virgin Mary, a couple of strings of Rosary beads — easy to source; everybody had Rosary beads back then — and a couple of vases of daily renewed fresh flowers, most frequently, if I remember correctly, mugged from one of the many cherry trees growing on the road on the way to school.

I liked May back then because it had its own hymn, May Is The Month of Mary, the weather was improving, lessons were sometimes moved outside and it felt like the beginning of the unwinding of the school year. But as a classroom fixture, the nature table beat the May altar hands down. The dessicated leaves and overspill shells from Bray weren’t that interesting, but sometimes you’d get a piece of bark with some mad fungus growing on it that the teacher would warn you against touching (though not against inhaling, which I can appreciate now may have been either a health and safety issue or a missed opportunity) or a complete bird’s nest. On a couple of occasions, we even had an egg in a nest, which was simultaneously fascinating and sad. A friend tells me that a boy in his class once carefully brought in a perfect pint of Guinness to place on their nature table and the presumably panicking teacher got the class to draw a picture of it.

For that, they’d most likely have needed their cófra. Aside from the nature table/ moonlighting May Altar, the most compelling furniture in every primary school classroom was, and presumably still is, the cófra. A stationery cupboard cum toy box cum book repository, the cófra was like a sort of Pandora’s box in reverse: the first thing it contained was hope, then, after all its possibilities for fun had been depleted, all that was left were the smelly mala mats. I loved mala (a bit like playdough, only worse, in case you were born in the current century). I liked its uniform brownness, no matter how many other colours were mixed in, and how the only limit to what you could make with it was your imagination. But lest we get too carried away on a tide of everything-wasbetter-then, it did smell absolutely awful.

My own kids didn’t have mala in their classroom cófras. And for the record, they did have way, way better stuff than us.

Theirs held flash cards and pictures and laminated everything, and weirdly weighted straws that could be used to construct whole skyscrapers in the 20 minutes where anything was possible before formal class started each day.

It was my children’s cófras that came to mind during my trip to Uganda with World Vision Ireland last year. On my first visit into a school classroom there, I was so shocked by the scale of its shortcomings that I couldn’t think beyond the bare concrete, the lack of doors and windows and the 200 small, smiling faces crammed into a single room, to think of flash cards.

It was only after the second school visit that I remembered the Irish cófra and started to think of possibilities instead of impossibilities.

There are no resource cupboards in these African classrooms. There are no resources. Six or seven children share a single, tatty book and there are no posters or artwork on the walls. There are no opportunities for them to learn with their hands as well as their heads.

So that’s how the Cófra Project was born (here’s the shameless plug). A seed of a memory in a bare classroom in Uganda has grown into a fund-raising initiative to provide resource materials for school children in Africa, so that they can have at least a whisper of the opportunities our children have. We’re not shooting for the stars: €1,000 will furnish three classrooms with basic resources to encourage children to learn through engagement with their surroundings.

We’re especially hoping that schools will get involved, not least to give Irish children a sense of how fortunate they are with their own cabinets of possibilities.

And now that they don’t need to replace the cherry blossom on the May altar every day, sure what else would they be doing?

Sign up at worldvision.ie/cofraproject