Can I be like Melane?

“No, because you work so hard and you don’t get paid. I don’t want to be broke like you.” This was the response of a young twelfth grade, or “matric” student at Zonnebloem NEST high school, when asked by his instructor Heather, whether he’d like to be a teacher himself someday. He was not alone in his opinion. Not one of the twenty odd learners in her class room answered “yes”. This is why Melane, a soft spoken young man undergoing a teacher training program through ASSET (an NGO I mentioned in a previous blog entitled Cape Town Contradiction) in Khayelitsa, is special. He said to me: “I want to uplift my people. Many students want to go overseas. I want to stay and help my country.” When he spoke those words, a destitute and crime ridden sea of squatter settlements, where he had been mugged days earlier, sprawled out behind him.

Another voice that’s been echoing in my head is that of Dr. Derek Joubert, Executive Director of the ASSET program. He told me that, after Apartheid, all the best teachers had been paid to leave the Western Cape because the government didn’t want to pay their salaries. The poorest learners of Cape Town are in trouble. Qualified math and science teachers are a rare commodity and the transition to the newly instituted Outcomes Based Education system (OBE) has their under trained educators struggling to provide quality classes.

For twenty years Dr. Joubert has been working to help disadvantaged high school students connect with the most committed teachers on weekends, to help them graduate, and to do so with better scores on their matriculation exams. Dr. Joubert and Melane are examples of people who have committed themselves to giving young people tools with which to climb out of Apartheid’s mire and into a new South Africa. In demonstrating such passionate commitment they have made me think about my own actions across the pond.

I mentioned a South African man named Rob in my last blog. He told me that after going abroad for the first time as a young man he “learned more about the country than in twenty one years of living there”. Sometimes it takes gaining a different perspective to see what’s close to you. It’s just like using a mirror to be able to clearly see the nose on your own face. Cape Town has been a mirror for me to reflect on the conditions of people within my own borders. While distinct, the issues of poverty, disadvantage, and crime in the townships of Langa and Gugelato are not entirely unique from those found in the states. The issues of under funding and understaffing in schools which now must face the harsh standards of “No Child Left Behind” are concurrent with similar struggles I’ve been witnessing in South Africa. Children with limited access to good education need help everywhere. But what meaning does this have for me?

My first week in South Africa has taught me that I don’t have to take a twenty hour flight to find people in need. There are so many students that don’t receive the guidance at home or sufficient tutelage to have opportunities to advance themselves. Nevertheless, much like Rob, it took my traveling thousands of miles from home to see my own country more clearly. Because Soka University of America is located in Orange County, one of the richest and safest places in the world, it is sometimes easy to forget or feel distanced from the Melanes of the world. However, an hour’s drive can put us students right in the heart of schools that are reminiscent of Zonnebloem NEST, and neighborhoods that are cousins of Khayelitsa.

When I return to the States, I am going to find ways to involve our student body in taking responsibility to help less fortunate students, right there at home, receive help. After all, isn’t that part of living the “contributive life” that our “steady stream of global citizens” aspires to?

~Orpheus