The Gozitan student in Malta

Abstract

He was wearing a Manchester United T-shirt which he seemed to have had on for a couple of days, maybe since the semi-final match between Manchester and Juventus. He was sitting on the back seat and had his satchel right next to him. The bus was full and the only vacant seat was taken up by the satchel. Half way to Cirkewwa he decided to offer me his satchel's seat. It had been one of those days when lectures start at 8.00am and finish at 5.00pm. His smell of sweat, the noise (the bus was the oldest one you can get) and the bumps my back (and derriere) had to take were not my idea of entertainment. The bus stopped at every stage. I don't know how may; it was too nauseating to count them all. Any way we ended up missing the ferry and having to wait for another lousy hour at Cirkewwa. All this isn't new and the GUG would have liked to make our lives a bit easier. So together with the Gozo University Centre Board, we came up with the idea of having a direct bus on Friday afternoons. Brilliant idea! Everybody seemed to like it! So we formulated a questionnaire and sent one to every Gozitan student attending University. By the closing date, when these questionnaires were to be returned, I realized that the scenario I've just described wasn't as familiar as I thought. Out of around five hundred students, only ten percent seemed to be bothered by the system. However I really couldn't come to grips with this answer so I tried to find another one as to why so few of the questionnaires were sent back for the necessary analysis. The other possibility is that Gozitan students aren't really comfortable the way they are but they are not really ready to do anything about it.