Interns/Volunteers in South Africa!

Christina and Emma’s South Africa Adventures! WK9

October 12, 2009 on 8:56 am | In Christina and Emma's South Africa Adventures! | No Comments

Our first week back to school was pretty good. While outside with one group of first graders, Christina was reading a story called “Worm Watches.” According to the story, Worm watches a movie about kissing. Upon hearing this, the first graders erupted into laughter and disgust–the girls starting squirming around and hiding, and two of the boys literally spit onto the ground. It was so funny. In general, it was nice to see everyone back at school.

At Zuurbekom, we have decided to organize their new library using the “dot system” that Mrs. D’Innocenzo, the Pingry lower school librarian, designed during our trip two years ago. We chose dot colors to represent books at different reading levels, and spent a lot of time Thursday and the school day on Friday labeling and shelving the books. Upon doing this, we noticed again how few books–only about thirty–there are for the first and second grade readers. We were happy to see that, despite the break, almost all of the second graders who checked out books last time returned them. We’re hoping it will soon be a fully-functioning library.

While the break was refreshing for everyone, we have definitely had some trying moments because of the lack of direction from some teachers. We often find ourselves leading classes with no knowledge of if (or when) the teacher will show up or what exactly the class is working on. We do become frustrated with these teachers, but we try to remember that we have only been here for two months, while many of the teachers have been working for many years. In most cases, they started working as teachers before apartheid ended (in 1994), or at least experienced it as students. It’s fascinating to us that this is such a crucial, dynamic time for the South African educational system, but we have also seen that the constant changes have made these teachers’ jobs more difficult.

One challenge that we were unaware of before this trip was that there are no substitute teachers here, so if a teacher is absent for the day, the kids are dispersed among classes of different grade levels. We have yet to be in a classroom that does not have these kids, who are called “subs.” The subs usually become either bored or overwhelmed, and the teacher, who already must deal with a very full class, has to try to find something for these kids to do. Despite all this, there are many people who work hard and genuinely care, and it’s begun to pay off–given what we’ve heard, schools are drastically different than they used to be.