Life as a school teacher. Not sure who learnt more .....

I learnt that I would not be going to the Khomas medi-clinic until Monday and so I volunteered to work (with a certain amount of trepidation) in the school on Friday morning. Though this is not necessarily a formal part of the programme the volunteers are encouraged to participate and today the children were making Easter cards to send to their school teacher who was back in the UK trying to earn enough money to come back. For the time being Carol (who normally works in the research department) was standing in. After Carol had talked me through the programme for the morning and designated me some jobs (she said try to draw like a child when you show them how to make the Easter cards. I assured her that really wouldn’t be a problem) she sent me up to the Bushman village to collect them. She is never really sure how many children she will get but the children are encouraged to attend regularly, though one of two are in their teens now and have had almost no schooling so far. I walked with one of the other volunteers up to the village which takes about ten minutes and is the same route we take on the baby baboon walk. The village is very basic, several wooden huts which look much like our beach-huts back home and a couple of largish tents. A circular seating area has been built where any discussions about the group as a whole take place. I’m uncertain how many people live in the village in total, but from the few times I have been up there, mainly to visit or feed the meerkats which live in a pile of rubble, it seems like there are about six families, most of whom have 2 or three children. The ages range from one year old to Anna, who at 15 is the eldest. As you approach the village you call out “time for school” and the children slowly trickle out of the huts or tents or from under the tree where the mothers are sometimes sitting. A couple of the children are quite bright and show some potential though they are all a very long way behind where similar aged children would be back home. But there is little urgency in the way the children come over to us and it takes some minutes of cajoling and persuading to get a reasonable number together. In the end we have about five or six and communication is not very easy. They speak Bushman first, Afrikaans second and English in third place if at all. I speak no Bushman, some very basic Afrikaans which I have picked up or learnt in the last few days. But in the end we manage to get together a raggle-taggle bunch of children of differing ages including some very young ones which gives it the feel of running a crèche as much as running a school. The children get fed a good lunch before they break at 11:30 or midday for the older ones and there is sense the mums are sending them along for this as much as for the schooling. In the older generation there doesn’t seem to be much value placed on education or desire to see the next generation in a better position than they were. Perhaps this is just a behavioural manifestation from a cultural group who’ve been surpressed in one way or another for a very long time. As a group, we make our way back to the farm. This way it is slower as one of two of the girls are carrying their younger siblings and/or buckets of tea and so I help with this. I find it difficult not to help when for example you have a small eleven year old girl carrying her three year old brother on her hip at the same time as having her one year old sister strapped to her back and all while carrying a largish canister of tea. The interaction is also a way of getting to know the children a little bit before school starts though most of them are very shy or don’t have sufficient English to do much more than make the most basic exchange. But it is nice nonetheless, to stroll along together, smiling at each other when we really don’t understand what is being said and also to think that perhaps this bit of schooling might make a difference to their lives in some way. If they have some education and English it at least offers some prospects of being able to apply for a job in the tourism industry or perhaps do something on the farm. It’s unlikely though that any of these children will end up in more challenging careers even if that is the dream of those that run of project. Perhaps the children of the children might be more lucky. The compound fence comes into sight and we pass through the gate and onto the farm, crossing it as we head towards the original small thatched Lappa at the far end of the administration building. A variety of metal, wooden and plastic tables have been set out to cater for the different ages and I see Carol mentally making a tab as we walk over of how many children we have got and how old they are. More children have come in from parents working at the farm-owners house and so in total we have about twenty children, of which about eight are probably under three. It makes for a very interesting schooling session and needless to say, everyone has to be a bit flexible.

Before we left for the Bushman Village we’d made some example Easter cards and we showed them now to the groups we’d been assigned and gave them card and coloured pencils to make their own. I’d brought a variety of stationery and bits and bobs for the school in my suitcase and this included some small stickers which happened, usefully, to have rabbits and lambs as well as flowers and hearts so ideal to use on Easter cards. One or two of the older girls have some artistic talent and could be left on their own to draw and colour something suitable. But attention span is low for many of the children and the Lappa being open to the lawn where the baby baboons live and also miscellaneous dogs, chickens and humans wandering freely through and round makes it difficult to keep the children focused for very long. The old schoolteacher had devised a teaching plan for Carol which included work on numbers, shapes and colours and everyone does their best to keep the children going on these important tasks until they are done but you can see for almost all of the children that they would really rather be somewhere else. The children have been learning some songs over the last few months and so once the cards are done and the lessons completed we take them all over to the lawn by the new Lappa. Everyone is encouraged to take part in the songs and games and so ensues half an hour of mayhem with much laughter and falling over as everyone does the penguin song and the hokey cokey, volunteers, cooking staff and all. The younger children are carried so they too can take part in the fun and it’s lovely to see them so happy. One of the cooks has a two year old son called George (all the children have Christian names and then Bushman names too) and he is the most amiable and easy going child and all the volunteers love him. Whatever it’s the morning or afternoon you see someone playing with him and his infectious giggles and laughter make everybody smile. At the end of the games everyone looks happy and you can see from the children that this is probably their favourite part of coming up the farm for school. After an early lunch, the younger children are taken back to the village and the older ones stay for a little while for some extra tuition. I look at the older girls. There are three or four that are aged between thirteen and fifteen and I wonder about the lives that they will lead. Their generation is important in that it is they that have the power to improve the lot of future generations of Bushman children behind them, but with little education available to them the odds of making positive change in the short term is stacked against them. These girls don’t have Bushman role models to learn from and so must become them themselves. But as I sit here and think about the ways in which I might be able to help, the sheer prospect of what needs to be done seems daunting. I do my bit to encourage them to think beyond their very narrow and confined world and to try and get them to understand how education can offer them some level of freedom and control over their lives. I’d like to spend more time with them but tomorrow I will be going into the clinic at Khomas to start my medical training and so might not get the opportunity to see much of them again.

Comments

[Morley family]

hi
it sounds amazing
Mum says to stay away from the Black Mamba
i hope its all you expected.
Andy