Julia Grey visited a desolate school that is barely limping along
Setting up in the morning for a day’s work can be a mission even for those with all the creature comforts of modern life – not least access to some kind of transport. So just imagine that simply getting to work involves walking for about three hours along a deep-sanded road that winds through 17km of hot, dense African bush. Add to this the fact that your place of work is two sad-looking rooms and that you face the day without access to a decent toilet, a phone, electricity or sometimes even water, and it must be hard not to feel dread.
Every day for the last four years, Principal Aobake Nthwane has been getting himself from the village of Mokgobistad near the Botswana border in the North West province to a school called Mayaiyane. Sometimes he gets there in his beaten-up van; sometimes he organises transport to the tune of R400 a month; other times he spends six hours of his working day walking.
Nthwane wanted the job of principal at Mayaiyane: “I felt there was no-one to give a good education because then [none of the educators] were qualified, so I just applied for the post to help.” He emphasises that he feels “at home” in the community, but his exhaustion is obvious when he says, “Nowadays I really feel I made a decision that is not good for me.”
The two other teachers who serve the 52 pupils in the remote area don’t make it to school “once or twice a week because of transport problems,” adds Nthwane.
Mayaiyane is an isolated island in a sea of want. Nthwane says all those with a vested interested in the school — the circuit office, tribal authorities, the neighbouring white farmers, even the parents — contribute next-to-nothing to their needs. Appeals to the circuit office for accommodation for teachers and learners, or alternatively for help with transport, fell on deaf ears; and, says Nthwane “If I don’t go and fetch them [the learners] they do nothing [for the school].”
Circuit manager Modisatsile Moeng is sympathetic that the school “can’t do anything without our support”, but says “I don’t have transport, and it makes it difficult to get to the school.” He adds that “[the department] has been promising since 1996 to fix the situation.”
What makes teaching here even more gruelling is that very few learners have opportunities beyond becoming farm workers, like their parents before them, once they leave Mayaiyane in grade 5. In fact, Nthwane can count on one hand the number of learners who have gone on to grade 6 in the nearest town of Mokgobistad. For many of the youngsters, the real value of the school is the one meal a day they get through its feeding scheme.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, March, 2001.