21 July
Part I: Books for the World
LEAP’s Learning Center employs immigrants from all over Africa, offering them a chance to develop their English skills and to train for job interviews. Most of these immigrants were engineers, teachers, and scientists in their home country, but without the language skills they cannot get a job in South Africa. (For more on the LC, please see my blog from 25 June, “Changes from the Ground Up.”) One of the LC’s employees, “Papa” Chris, an energetic and neatly-dressed man from Burundi, manages a program called Books for the World, under the Rotary International umbrella, which works to bring books into township schools in the Cape Town area. The goal of Books for the World and its partners is to build a library in each township school, reaching especially K-6 students to develop their English language skills.
Chris invited me to a distribution event, where representatives from township schools and other organizations come to the “warehouse” and gather their treasures. This morning, seven primary schools, a church, and a non-profit that works with even more schools all came to receive books. The festive nature of the event had to do with the opening of a container of books that just arrived from Texas, where Rotary gathers, sorts, and ships the books to Cape Town, Johannesburg, and other cities in South Africa. At LEAP, Books for the World is housed in three side-by-side metal freight containers, and Chris’s office is in one of them. He humorously, but rightfully, boasts the largest office on campus.
By the time I arrived, the unloading of the container was already well underway. Chris’s policy is that, for every box of books that a recipient gets, she must help organize and stack two boxes for future recipients. It is an efficient way for the one-man operation to organize the thousands of books shipped to him once a month or so. Fifteen or so men, women, and children busily sidestepped one another in and out of the container to gather the books that they wanted to keep and to stack those that needed to go into the storage container. Although it is hard for the by-stander to see, the representatives from each school knew exactly what kinds of books they were searching for; and there was some competition for certain boxes, especially for books that teach language at the primary-school levels.
Even though township kids are getting more and more opportunities to attend good secondary schools, like LEAP, where most of their tuition is subsidized, students entering ninth grade often lack English language skills necessary to prepare for the matric exam and to succeed in university. The four years in high school simply are not enough for many township students. It is imperative that the school system reaches students at the primary and elementary levels, where kids are more likely to develop fluency in multiple languages. To this end, programs such as Books for the World and Equal Education seek to bring textbooks, early readers, and teaching resources to township schools.
When it was all said and done, the visitors signed for and drove away with the content of 50-60 boxes, each with 40-50 books. The entire event took less than two hours, minus the clean up afterward.
Part II: Talfalah Primary School
Located on the outskirt of Manenberg Township, Talfalah Primary is the largest in the area, providing instruction to 1036 students this academic year. Currently, Manenberg, a colored township, is suffering a gang war for turf, which made it too dangerous for us to drive through the township even in broad daylight. Instead, the deputy principal, Shahida, drove us around the perimeter and pointed out the highway along which many of Talfalah’s students walk to and from school every day. Many students from schools inside the township have relocated to Talfalah because of the spreading and on-going violence.
We pulled up to a one-story, unassuming building with the small sign bearing the school’s name. On the other side of the main administrative building, the only point of entry for normal foot traffic, laid a huge campus divided into two square courtyards with classrooms surrounding each. In the background, looming above the courtyards and buildings is Table Mountain. Today’s clear and sunny sky allowed for a goose-bumpy view of the mountain.
Talfalah Primary will celebrate its 100th anniversary in two years, but it had moved from the original location in Claremont to Manenberg about 30 years ago, when apartheid laws dictated that colored people and Muslims had to live in that particular township. In South African parlance, a “colored” is a black and white mix. The school teaches in Afrikaans and English, but students also greet guests with a traditional Arabic blessing. All students are Muslim, although it would be difficult to tell that many of the students are not fully black. I have been confused on many occasions about how anyone these days can designate a skin color with certainty, nevermind why one should do it at all.
On its old campus, Talfalah had a functioning library, but the lack of funding precluded such luxuries when it had to move. The Education Department does not fund school libraries in South Africa. The school hopes to open the doors to its library, with a full-time librarian, in February of next year, although the space already looks like a library and just lacks enough shelving. The current deputy principal, Shahida, is completing a two-year library studies course at the University of Western Cape; she attends class two nights a week in addition to running a school and teaching a full load. When I asked her how she was able to do so much work while also tending to a family, she said, “I have a very compassionate husband who lets me spend time with my books.”
Shahida and the school’s principal, Mogamat (who was present at this morning’s book distribution), walked us to the library’s heavy wooden door, which was in turn protected by a metal gate. The security guard gave us access to a well-lit and clean room with neatly arranged tables in the middle and bookcases along most of its walls. The paint looked as new as some of the polished tables, although most of the furniture was second-hand. Mogamat explained that most of the books in the room were donated by Rotary’s Books for the World program, and the school is expecting to get more before the library opens. Currently, Shahida and Mogamat are looking for ways to procure more bookcases to make aisles in the middle of the room.
Taking a couple of spiraled volumes from a shelf, Shahida excitedly pointed to the teacher’s resources that were sorely lacking before the books arrived. Teachers here often graduate with few resources with which to enter a classroom. They are told what to teach, but not how to teach it; nor are they provided with ideas and the how-tos of developing a lesson plan, managing a class, and writing an assignment. The two volumes of Texas Teacher’s Edition, for math and literature, contain a treasure trove of materials. “We only learn about ways to teach reading now, in the books,” said Shahida, pointing to a illustrated lesson in the literature edition. “Before, we had to figure out on our own.” The book to which she pointed (pictured) would cost 1000 Rand to purchase in Cape Town, and it came from LEAP’s Books for the World via Rotary at no cost to the school.
Talfalah’s 26 teachers are not the only ones who benefit from the teacher’s resources currently at the library, even before it opens. Some 20 teachers from other township schools also use the library’s volumes. Once opened, the library will serve as a learning resources center for all schools in the area that need one, and Talfalah will hold monthly educational workshops for teachers. The idea is to share the treasures in the books.
Service learning idea:
Any American school can join in this effort to bring learning and teaching resources to schools like Talfalah. The dots are already there; they simply need to be connected. I have contacted two branches of Rotary that have sent books to LEAP and will propose a partnership with the Omprakash in the Classroom program. Schools can conduct book drives, raise funds under Omprakash’s non-profit status to ship the books to Texas, and Rotary can send more precisely targeted texts to book distribution centers such as the LEAP School.
To find out more or contribute your own ideas, please contact me at Steve@omprakash.org.
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Steve, This is a very well written article which I enjoyed reading. The issues in Manenberg have been ongoing for years. I used to visit a branch of a bank that I worked for in Manenberg on a weekly basis, and it was always a bit stressful. That was 10 years ago and with the swell of the narcotics trade in Cape Town since then I can only imagine that it is much worse. I don’t know if PAGAD is still running the show there or if they have been replaced by a larger Nigerian operation. Most Muslims in Cape Town are indeed “coloured” (as defined by the old apartheid laws) and if there is any Afrikaans instruction, it is likely that most students are indeed coloured. I was interested in the container of books from Texas. Although South Africa is not necessarily the most needy African country in terms of educational resourses, the fact that instruction in S.A. schools is in English makes the shipment of books far mose useful to learners who are instructed in English than in a Western or Central African nation that might teach in other languagers. Pacific Ridge students in the 10th grade used the recent seed grant project to devise projects similiar to the text book container. They need now to take that to the next step when they enter your service learning program in grades 11 and 12 and actually get similiar containers to S.A. I also liked the L.C. report. Parking your car anywhere in Cape Town will invariably see a DRC or Congo national asking if they can watch your car for a few rand. I have spoken to these guys, and just as you wrote, many were well employed in their native countries. Is the program in a response to the Zimbabwian Xenophobia issue that the country went through a few years ago. There is a very good movie that came out a few years ago about a man from central Africa who moves to Cape Town and lives in Mandela Park in Hout Bay. I’ll get it on Netflix and perhaps we can watch it when you get back?
Yeah, there’s a lot going on in this post, and I’m going back to Talfalah this morning (Wed) to film. I’m hoping that the footages and stories will help communicate the needs of schools like Talfalah in a more human and direct way. Our service learning program can benefit from forming a relationship with any of the schools and organizations here, and I’m hoping that you will lead a group to do something like that next year. Hint hint.
It’s a huge problem – finding books which are suitable for the needs of teenagers whose reading age is around 11. The text needs to be understandable but the content needs to be aimed at issues which concern adolescent teens. Townsend Press (publishing the Bluford Book series) in the USA does fabulous work in this regard. We need something like them in SA.
In the meantime, maybe we (or I) can contact them directly and see if they have unsold books that can be sent overseas. From speaking with several people, it seems pretty clear that sending books alone do not help much. They need to be the right kinds of books. I’ll be making this plea to future donors with the voices of actual people who are receiving the books.