A subtle yet important lesson learned

At the end of 2008 as I was finishing up my ‘training’ assignments for Peace Corps, I came across an opportunity in which, at the time, I felt I could make somewhat of a substantial difference.  The so-called ‘training’ sessions for Peace Corps in the School and Community Resource Program of which I am a part, mainly involve pedagogical activities: classroom observation, teacher interviews, Student-Governing Body Assessments (SGB which is similar to the parent-teacher board), etc.  In the three-months of Peace Corps ‘lockdown’ training which follows swearing-in and constitutes the initial time in a volunteer’s village, volunteers are not to leave their sites except for an occasional afternoon grocery excursion.  The purpose, of course, is to fully immerse a volunteer in the culture of the village and allow the volunteer to become a visible and contributing member within the village.   During this lockdown phase, I had amassed a binder full of interview forms, community maps (crafted both by me and by the students who are referred to as learners here), educational review standards, and various other rather dry documentary offerings.  During these first three months in Phoshiri village, life was quite exciting.  Bucket baths and mosquito nets seemed novel and fun, and I was still in shock (and not annoyance) at my celebrity status.  As exciting as life was, however, the binder I was compiling was rather bland.

So when I came across an opportunity to make a marked difference in the education of the learners, I embraced the prospect.  After all, making a difference is one of the central reasons I joined the Peace Corps!

At this point, I feel a bit of brief background on the village to which Peace Corps assigned me is needed.  Phoshiri Village is marked by sheer remoteness.  The only way to reach Phoshiri is on one of two dirt roads through 12 km of brush and over a river which is prone to flooding after any substantial rain.  The village sits on the side of a mountain of which the other side only provides miles of additional dry brush.  No South African taxi-van (combi’s) service the village which is rare even for rural South Africa.  A bus service is the only mode of transport to and from the village and the bus only leaves once (at 7AM on Saturday) during the weekends and twice during each weekday.  The village just received electricity in 2007.  I have constantly heard and observed South Africans coil back in surprise when I tell them I live in Phoshiri.  Even the man from the Dept. of Education Circuit Office (which oversees Phoshiri and neighboring Lesetsi Village schools) remarked to me “wow, this place is very removed” as he unloaded by bed from the Dept. of Education truck last summer.  I think the amount of roosters, donkeys, cows, goats, and sheep outnumber the people by a ratio of 2:1.

In Phoshiri, I have been assigned to work at Mokgapaneng School.  This school provides education for Grades 1-7 but the physical school building only has 4 classrooms and 4 full time teachers (plus the principal who is also my supervisor, Mr. Magoro).  As a result, several grades are clustered together in one classroom and taught at the same time by the same teacher.  The teacher will often give “classwork” for one grade to complete while instructing a different grade within the same small room.  As the principal, Mr. Magoro does not even have an office in which to meet with parents, government officials, food suppliers, etc.  Clearly, this all adds up to a rather serious educational problem.  It is a problem you notice on Day 1.  Thus, it did not take me long to inquire to Mr. Magoro about this rather egregious circumstance.

And to this end, Mr. Magoro was eager to tell me that he had sought assistance and funding from both the Department of Education as well as private donations repeatedly in the past but the Department never responded and private donors, if they responded at all, declined.  Initially it was something that I pondered but figured I would leave alone and work within.

The time that I saw an opportunity to provide a substantial change in this school environment came in late 2008 as I was completing the aforementioned Peace Corps ‘training’ assignments.  One morning, Mr. Magoro was summoned to the neighboring village of Lesetsi and their primary school to collect some sort of document.  He requested me to accompany him and meet the Principal of Lesetsi Primary School.  Through this visit, I saw in Lesetsi Primary School a school which had not one, but 4 separate buildings for Grades 1-7 and over 10 different classrooms.  Oh, and a separate principal’s office.  This was not uncommon for rural South African schools but it did strike me since Lesetsi School was less than 2 km away from Mokgapaneng.  Lesetsi Village was in the same remote area and transport predicament as Phoshiri.  In fact, Mokgapaneng and Lesetsi Schools together supplied the learners for the single Secondary (High) School in the community.  In other words, Lesetsi and Phoshiri are adjoining villages of which there are two separate primary schools feeding one secondary school.  And these two primary schools are less than 2 km apart.  And one of these primary schools is disproportionately less endowed with infrastructure than the other.

I asked Mr. Magoro the reasons for this discrepancy and he did not have many.  If anything, what he told me further fueled my confusion.  While Mokgapaneng School carries an extraordinarily minuscule roster of 78 enrolled learners from Grades 1-7, Lesetsi School isn’t exactly a megaplex of elementary learning either with a roster coming in at just under 200.  If one school with a small amount of learners has ten classrooms why should the school less than 2 km away have only 4 classrooms?  They are both public schools after all.  Why were the two schools even separated?

I began to discuss the possibility of merging the two schools with Mr. Magoro.  To my surprise, he said that he had considered it in the past, but not seriously and had never followed with any action.  He said that the Department of Education Circuit Office would assuredly ignore any such request and it would be effort wasted.  I sensed he was right but I could not put away the possibility with just that assumption.  If the two schools merged, all of the grades would have their own classroom and their own teacher.  The learners would be exposed to more children from the village in preparation for their secondary school education.  Perhaps most importantly, the funding for the schools would be pooled in order to maximize the teaching materials, sports equipment, office supplies, food for the learners, etc.  After a few conversations with Mr. Magoro, he told me to “go ahead with it.”  In other words, write a proposal to the Board of Education.  He said “they won’t answer it but it will be good to have documentation that we have tried.  They may come back to it in a few years.”

So I momentarily put aside my Peace Corps training assignments and searched through the binders of old letters and forms Mr. Magoro had meticulously filed for the very reason of documenting his past efforts.  I amassed photocopies of letters mailed to the Department of Education which had requested additional classroom buildings as well as requests for office space.  These letters dated back over 5 years and I was able to attach various forms sent to private donors seeking funds for classroom construction.  I crafted a letter to the Deputy Educational Allotment Officer at the Department of Education explaining that the community of Phoshiri has accepted that further classroom construction was not possible.  I explained that the lack of response from private and public sectors was clearly taken to mean that school expansion would not be happening.  I explained that Mokgapaneng Primary School had attempted numerous times to acquire funding for additional classrooms and teachers.  And thanks to Mr. Magoro’s pack-rack sensibilities, I had the documentation to prove it.  Finally, I sighted reasons that a merger would be beneficial and reported that in light of the fact that additional construction would not be occurring, a merger was the best option.

So the letter was drafted, the documentation organized & attached, and the package sent.  If nothing else, it was a fun activity in writing persuasive English once again.  A pleasant reminder that my past occupation as a Social Security Claims Adjudicator was not labor done in vain and skills garnered there were perhaps transferable to rural South Africa.  I expected to not hear a word on the topic from the Department of Education.

And so it came as nothing short of an astonishment when, early in February of 2009, Mr. Magoro received a phone call from the Department of Education stating that they had approved the merger and Mokgapaneng School did qualify to merge with neighboring Lesetsi Primary School!  I remember the day Mr. Magoro told me the news.  I was riding in his car through the brush to Phoshiri from Seleteng (the village where my second school assignment is located).  He was beaming.  He couldn’t believe it.  And frankly, neither could I.  He told me that the Circuit Office was planning to come to Mokgapaneng School the following week to meet with the SGB and the staff of the school.  That is, all 5 members of the staff.

And now should have been the easy part.  The Circuit Office would come out to Phoshiri for a quick meeting, the meeting would be met with welcome praise, plans would be made to merge the schools at the end of the 2009 school year, the learners and villages would mutually benefit, a certain Peace Corps Volunteer would experience an early sense of satisfaction, and life would go on its merrily way.

Except it didn’t happen like that.  The Circuit Office officials made their visit and the SGB met them with appreciative skepticism at best.  Despite Mr. Magoro’s reasoning and later pleading, the members of the SGB would not grant a go-ahead for the merger until all the parents had the opportunity to voice their opinions.  So the circuit office officials left without consent for any merger and were only to wait until further word from the parents of Phoshiri trickled back to them.

I was bewildered that this opportunity was not embraced.  It was so rare to have the Department of Education respond to any requests here in South Africa let alone one requiring significant paperwork and restructuring.  Yet here they were in agreement with my reasoning and the Mr. Magoro’s convictions.  Clearly the opportunity to expand their children’s schooling would be something embraced by the parents of Phoshiri.  Yet as the SGB-only meeting expanded to a neighborhood-wide meeting, dissent toward any merger continued to gain momentum.  To put it mildly, I was frustrated during these meetings.  I could not keep up with the rapid Sepedi exchanges during the meetings and consequently was left at the mercy of Mr. Magoro’s providing intermittent broken English translations.  And none of the conversations were positively in favor of a change.  The reasons were plentiful: The parents didn’t want their children to walk an extra kilometer to school; they didn’t want the (previously unknown to me) positive reputation of Mokgapaneng School to be tarnished; they wanted their children to go to the same school that they had; they questioned Mr. Magoro’s motives; etc, etc.).

By mid April, the prospect of a school merger had been entirely squashed and the learners were destined to continue in the small 4-blocked building of a school.  The official decision to not merge had been delivered to the Department of Education.  Mr. Magoro said that he could only provide the facts to the parents and let them decide.  It ultimately wasn’t up to him.  And it wasn’t.  It wasn’t up to him, it wasn’t up to the Department of Education, and it certainly wasn’t up to me.  The way that the public schools in rural South Africa operate, it was up to the parents.  And perhaps this was best.  Perhaps not.  This is not for me to say.  However the experience, while not providing me entirely with that desired early sense of satisfaction, did teach me a valuable lesson for my life here.  It is a lesson that didn’t occur to me right away but has stuck with me and will undoubtedly stay with me until my service concludes:

I am not here to persuade or change life as much as I am here to provide support for the life which is already existent.

~ by Andrew Bernish on July 8, 2009.