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| The Courtyard at Pendla |
Now I know that I have spoken many, many words of praise
about Pendla Primary, however I have only sugar coated everything that I have
seen. Like most African schools, there is no one giant building that contains
all of the classrooms; instead there are 4 cement buildings that form a square
with a courtyard in the middle. Each of
these buildings consists of multiple classrooms. All of the doors to the
classrooms open to the courtyard so the classrooms are exposed first-hand to
the weather. There is not heat nor AC and the kids must wear uniforms
year-round so they are hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Most of the uniforms
are hand me downs and the kids wear them until the last stitch rips out. Most
of the skirts are too short for the girls and many of the boys have tears in
every article of clothing they have on.
The kids are packed into classrooms and there are usually
not enough chairs for every learner. In that case, the kids run from classroom
to classroom looking for a spare. None of the chairs match. Some are orange,
some are blue, some are wooden, some are metal, some are plastic, there really
in no one type. Some of the chair seats are not attached to the legs and I have
seen many students slip out of their chairs for this reason. Also, most of the
chairs have cracks in the backs or the back has completely broken off leaving a
ragged edge on the chair making it easy for learners to cut themselves. The
desks are rock back and forth because not all of the legs are the same height
and all are scratched from the many, many years of usage.
When a teacher does not show up for class, which is quite
often, the learners from that class are shuffled into the next classroom and
the teacher must teach 2 classes as half of the kids sit on the floor. There are
no substitute teachers. And when a teacher retires (which has happened this
past week, with 2 more retiring before we leave) that teacher is not automatically
replaced. All of the other teachers must pick up those extra classes or hop
between multiple classrooms to teach the extra classes (I witnessed my teacher
doing this today). There didn’t seem to be much discipline in the classroom
until I realized that most of the talking spurred from sharing a single pencil
stub between 4 different learners, in multiple cases. The learners share
pencils, pens, sharpeners, rulers. They have one set of color pencils for the
whole class. Their books are in very poor shape. Nothing is the same as what I
grew up with.
Yesterday we had the opportunity to tour a couple of the
homes where Pendla students live. Before I get ahead of myself, let me first
say that Pendla Primary School is situated in a fairly nice part of town (I use
the term “very nice” loosely, my perceptions have definitely changed since
coming here). And we all assumed that the houses surrounding the school are the
houses our students live in. We were sadly mistaken. Just a couple of blocks
away is a large area of shacks that have been built on top of a trash heap. The
majority of our students (Pendla total is about 450 learners) live in these
shacks. The shacks literally consist of
4 pieces of metal thrown together for walls and one on top that acts as the
roof. The house that we saw had 3 rooms which housed 7 people. There is no
kitchen and no electricity so they cook outside on a fire in a single metal
coffee pot. There is no running water. They must walk a long way to the single
tap that provides water to the whole area and then must drag that bucket full
of water back to their house. The toilets work on a “bucket system.” There is a
bucket located in the corner of the yard. If you are lucky, it has walls around
it. This bucket is emptied once a week, no more, no less. If one family does
not have a bucket, then they share with their neighbors. It rained about a week
before we toured. Water was still sitting in the roads and yards. And like I
mentioned, the whole place is situated on a trash heap, so the stench was
unbearable.
In the first few days of volunteering at Pendla, I was
amazed at how much learners shared their food with one another. They literally
would pick food straight out of another kid’s lunch and eat it immediately. I
was so surprised because it was a crime in my elementary school to share food
with one another. However, I found out that many of the kids attending Pendla
do not have money for food. Therefore, the teachers encourage students to share
whatever they have with one another so that no one goes hungry. The school used
to be funded by the government for lunches, however the government suspended
their funding because they did not think Pendla had the “need” that other
places did. The government assesses the need of the school based on the statistics
of the students such as poverty. Since Pendla has not had the time or resources
to put together a thorough report, their funding is still cut and most of the
students go without food.
One of the houses that we toured was actually the house of a
Pendla student who had drowned a week prior. His mother was kind enough to
still let us into her home, yet you could see how much she was hurting. Like I
mentioned with the rain, a mini lake had pooled in middle of the area. This
little boy and his friend thought it would be a good idea to swim, but neither
one knew how to swim and drowned in the “lake.” The family was devastated. And
to make matters worse, that little boy was the only income into the household.
His mother was unemployed and his two sisters in secondary school are too old
to have grants provided for them from the government. The family was given a
grant for R280 (approximately US $40) a month to support this entire family.
With the loss of their son, this money was also lost. There is now zero income
for the family. And one of the sad possibilities is that these two young girls
may have to turn toward prostitution in order to bring money into the home (a
commone occurrence in the township). And of course this doesn’t help the
ever-present AIDS/HIV epidemic here in Africa. It is a vicious never-ending
cycle.
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