KaNyamazane Blogs 2008

Blog 1

Weeks 1 and 2
KaNyamazane 2008 know how to throw a party. Moustaches drawn on with eyeliner were the highlight of the cocktail evening held to celebrate the end of training week and our first Friday night.  In some cases even full beards appeared, looking fabulous with our cocktail dresses (we’re mostly girls, apart from token male Chris) – oh yes, we’re cool.
The group is based in the Old Vic Travellers Inn, a backpackers hostel in Nelspruit, about 200 miles from Johannesburg. We live in dorm rooms in the hostel itself and in a flat just out the back, and spend most of the time we’re not in school sprawled out in the sun on the veranda. It’s winter here, which means freezing see-your-breath temperatures at night and in the mornings until about 9 or 10, but weirdly hot and sunny weather in the
daytime, at least as warm as the summer days we’re missing at home. The rest of the time we have actually been working quite hard, especially in the schools we were introduced to this week and will be working in until September. Our official role is as ‘teaching assistants’, helping to coach smaller groups of children in the subjects they find the most difficult, working with teachers in lessons and organising extra-curricular activities. The learners speak SiSwati as a first language but have almost all their lessons in English, so we can really choose any subject we feel comfortable teaching. In practice, the hardest thing so far has been mastering the differences between the schools here and the education system we’re used to at home.
Working in KaNyamazane, a township on the outskirts of the city, means that the community is fairly poor, and the schools are generally under-resourced. Class sizes can be anywhere between 50 and 90 learners, and there is a different approach to the timetable meaning that even in the primary schools, classes can be left without a teacher for whole periods at a time. At other times, teachers will begin the lesson and then leave without notice after 10 or 15 minutes, leaving the class alone to get on with the work without help. Overall though, the general experience here has been amazing, and I feel like I’m learning a massive amount, especially about teaching.  The first time I walked into the school with my placement partner on Monday, our first full day there, was incredibly scary, and I remember we turned to each other to say “Don’t forget, it will never be as scary as this again!” I think this was a pretty accurate assessment. We have spent this week
visiting all the different classes to see children across all the grades, with all the teachers, and although we felt a bit lost to begin with, already we feel that we’re getting to know things much better. It’s all starting to become familiar, and I’m starting to feel that given time, we will really be able to find a niche for ourselves where we can really be
constructive.
Blog 2


Weeks 3 and 4
Party animals that we are, the group is now settling into a routine of early nights, early mornings and evenings spent cutting pictures out of magazines for lessons the next day. It’s surprisingly exhausting going to school every day,  especially as classes start so early. We’re at quite an interesting point of the project in terms of school, and the way the teachers are beginning to accept us.  In my school we are feeling like we’ve made a breakthrough in the last week with communication and sorting out what we want to do. The teachers are really friendly to us, offering us things to eat at lunchtime to see how we react to them and chatting about where we come from and what we’re doing here in South Africa, and after a few of these conversations we are beginning to establish how best we can be helpful. We have a few regular groups of children from grades 3 and 4 to help with reading, mainly the ones who struggle, as they rarely get one-to-one or small group attention within the usual timetable, and so the ability level in those grades is very varied.

We also have a few regular classes of our own, including Life Orientation (things like puberty, self-esteem, sports and careers). This week we even took over Arts and Culture with the grade 7s, the oldest children in the school at about 12 and 13, to teach them salsa dancing with a small amount about Hispanic and Latin American culture. One of the things it is difficult to get a handle on is the cultural context of the teaching – whenever we need to illustrate an explanation of a word or idea with an example, we tend towards examples from the UK which have no real meaning for the learners here. This happens surprisingly often, especially as a lot of the books here, for some reason, are stories originally published in either England or the USA. This week we chose Matilda by Roald Dahl, and found ourselves trying to explain what bingo is, who Charles Dickens is, what Expectations are and why they might be Great. Outside of school there’s a lot else going on too.  For our second weekend, we had a completely different experience by going on tour to Mozambique, staying out all night in a nightclub and recovering with a barbeque on the beach, on an island, in a lagoon in the Indian Ocean.  Ifthat sounds like quite a jump from a week at school, that’s because it was, and it was my biggest culture-shock yet being picked up from school and driven to another country.
Mozambique is quite rural and very poor, so driving through the countryside to the capital Maputo where we went out was also a bit of a jolt. In a way, it filled many more of the stereotypes of ‘Africa’ (poverty, poor infrastructure, wooden shack housing) than South Africa seems to. Here, we are working in a community that has a lot of its own problems, some of them economic, and in schools that have very few resources, but the country in areas does not appear to be a poor one: the mall here in Nelspruit is as nice or nicer than any at home. The difficulties here run much deeper than being just about money, and that I think is one of the main reasons we’re here – to show the children in those township schools that people outside their own communities do care about them and that their education does matter, to the extent that people will fly halfway across the world to listen to them read.