One Heart Source
During the summer of 2015 I volunteered at a school in South Africa for a month through a program called One Heart Source. The program was based outside of the city of Cape Town. As part of the program I was able to teach students from the Imizamo Yethu township(LINK). Wikipedia describes Imizamo Yethu as “an informal settlement in the greater Hout Bay Valley area. The 18 hectare settlement houses approximately 33,600 people with little or no infrastructure for sustainable living.”
All 33,600 people who live in the township share the communal water source. On my first day of teaching I asked the student I mentored if she had any questions for me, to which she replied, “What is it like to have a toilet in your house?” To say that this experience was humbling is an understatement.
The school that I worked in was called Moravian Primary School. It was not built to be a school. Each classroom was in a small building of its own. There was no playground and limited access to school supplies and the supplies they did have were often in poor condition.
In South Africa, standardized testing begins in the third grade. In 2010, when One Heart Source started their program in Cape Town, only 13% of the students passed the English reading exams. Twenty third-graders were selected by their teachers to be taken out of the classroom to be a part of the G.I.F.T.E.D (Growing Intellect For Township Educational Development) community. Some students were selected because they were falling behind, others because they were ahead. The idea was to make it easier for the teachers at Moravian Primary School to address the needs of the students in their classroom. Each year 20 more students are selected in third grade to join the G.I.F.T.E.D community. When I volunteered, third through sixth grade students were participating in the program. The program was structured so that we would teach third and fourth grade students in the morning and fifth and sixth grade students in the afternoon. I volunteered during their holiday break so all of the students were at school because they wanted to be, not because they had to be.
Each volunteer was assigned a student to mentor from the third to fourth grade group and from the fifth to sixth grade group. In the morning, I taught one fourth-grader for an hour in English and in math. Then we split apart into large groups to do workshops, such as science, around the world, art, physical wellness, etc. In the afternoon, I taught a sixth grade student English and Math and then the fifth and sixth graders also did workshops. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the fifth and sixth grade students didn’t have workshops. Instead, they had Brotherhood and Sisterhood. I worked with the students in sisterhood. The focus of the Sisterhood group was loving your sisters and empowering each other as well as yourself. We discussed a variety of topics, such as the concept of beauty and what it means to them and their hopes and dreams for the future.
We held a community day on one of the Saturdays I was there. The event was held to showcase what the students had been working on at school. I was able to meet the parents of my sixth grade student and show them everything that their child had been working on. My fourth grade student came to the event, but her parents couldn’t make it. Many of the parents work several jobs and are unable to attend school events. This can make it difficult for students to be motivated to learn without any adults at home showing interest which is why I believe it is essential that teachers show they are invested in each student's’ learning.
At the event, we displayed the goals that all the students had written when they entered the G.I.F.T.E.D community and their current goals. Some of the sixth grader’s goals from third grade were things like “my goal is to make it to the fifth grade” and their current goals were things like to become a doctor or a teacher, things that they didn’t think were possible before. It is so important for kids to have someone pushing them and telling them that they believe in them. This volunteer experience has taught me so much. You never know what the student’s home life is like and sometimes they just need someone to push them and tell them that they believe in them. This was a valuable lesson for me and I know that I am never going to stop encouraging my students in my class, even if they aren’t listening because sometimes they just need to see that someone isn’t going to give up on them.