Musings from Durban

The following are some excerpts from e-mails I have recently sent to friends.

On where I am staying:

I am falling in love with Yvonne, my homestay mother. Yvonne is in her sixties. She’s a retired school principal and in fact she was the first female and coloured principal in South Africa. She is wise and funny and caring and powerful. She loves talking, and will go on endlessly telling stories, which is perfect because I love listening to her stories.

I live in the neighborhood of Wentworth, which is really an armpit of a place. Once a designated region for Coloureds to live, it is wedged in between two large oil refineries and a paper mill with the airport so close that there are always loud airplanes blaring overhead. About 80% of the school children in the area have asthma on account of the factories. And the crime is rampant: murders, rapes, car theft, drugs. Sometimes dead bodies show up in the gutter in the morning. And apparently it is often the case that a fight that starts Sunday night outside one of the clubs will conclude Monday morning at school—a boy’s enemies will show up at his school during the recess and stab him in full view of the others. And this has happened multiple times.

Yvonne knows all about it because she is the chair of the Community Policing Forum, a community group that teams up with the police to promote safety and justice. It’s important enough that she even has an office in the police station. She knows everyone in town. One time we were sitting in the parking lot when some large man got out of his car and walked towards the supermarket. “Oh that’s ‘Blacks’,” she said, “He’s involved with stolen cars.” All the drug lords in town know her, and she knows them, and they treat her with respect.


On education in South Africa:

The education system here suffers from a whole slew of problems. Many people say that since the end of apartheid in 1994 the quality of education has ironically gone down—even for the black and “coloured” schools which were systematically under-resourced under the repressive pre-’94 regime. While such a claim may be a slight exaggeration, it may also not be too far from the truth. The other irony is that education gets more funding from the government in South Africa than any other sector. Education even gets more money than the military. And of those funds, somewhere in the range of 80% of it is spent on teachers’ salaries—and yet there is still a teacher shortage in South Africa. When I confront figures like that, I begin to understand that there is something more fundamentally awry with the basic culture of teaching and learning in South Africa. Education is a cultural, societal problem, and it doesn’t just get resolved by throwing more money at it. But money is important too, of course, and it seems there is a constant back-and-forth debate between school administrators who say the problem is lack of funding and government officials who say the problem is bad management. Meanwhile, the national curriculum is based on a pedagogy called “Outcomes Based Education,” which many educators now agree simply doesn’t work well in the South African context.


On my adventures at the local elementary school:

Today I was at Collingwood Elementary School, where I will be this entire week, observing and learning about education. Except today was a field day: the entire school, 1200 students from kindergarten to seventh grade, came to the school’s field for sack races, three-legged races, spoon and potato races, etc. It was a fantastic day and the weather was perfect, and myself as well as the two other American students who were with me served as the judges at the finish line. But the most memorable moment was when the large tent that was standing in the middle of the field got knocked over by the wind and started rolling towards the students. I was actually faced the other way when the tent started flying, but from where I was standing I could hear a teacher over the speaker system saying, “Attention all teachers—will all the teachers please meet under...the TENT THAT IS FLYING AWAY RIGHT NOW!!!” And I spun around and there is was, this swirl of blue and gray, barreling across the field directly towards the bleachers where a thousand plus little people were sitting. With a look of horror on my face I sprinted as fast as I could to get my body in between the tent and the youngsters, and I got there just in time. All was well in the end, and we laughed about it afterwards, but man did it give me a little fright.


On the stars:

I look at the stars differently when I am in South Africa. The constellations in the southern hemisphere are entirely new to me, and I have no way of knowing when I will be here again, and so for the brief time I am here I have taken every available chance to gaze at the stars. I memorize their positions, I take note of which ones are last to disappear at dawn, I tie the stars together in my own made-up constellations, and I give each constellation its own story. Each star has significance. And unlike in the North, where the stars speak of constancy because they are in the same position they have always been in and will continue to be there for me to gaze at for the rest of my life, in the South the stars are foreign to me and remind me of how fleeting my time here is, and I feel an urgency to comprehend the significance of every star in the southern sky.