What Really Matters

Here's my final blog post about my trip to South Africa. I actually wrote this about a week ago, I just kept forgetting to post it.

I’ve spent most of this blog describing my adventures on this trip, the big events and for the most part the tourist-y things. Those were the things I took the most pictures of and the things that really stand out in my mind when I think about this trip. But in between all those trips and exciting adventures were the simple, daily life things. These are the things that truly make a trip like this as special as it is. It’s not about how many mountains I climbed, animals I saw, World Cup games I watched, or amazing adventures I had. What matters most from a trip like this is the people I met, the friendships I gained, what I learned from them and what they learned from me. After all, I went to South Africa mainly to get experience teaching in a classroom there. The sightseeing and adventures are just icing on the cake. For three and a half weeks I got up early every morning, taught at a school, came home and spent time with my host family. It doesn’t seem like much, but the things I learned and saw during these weeks were huge to me. However, these are not the kinds of things I can always put into words. I’ll always be grateful to all the wonderful South Africans I met – the women I lived with, the other teachers at the school, my students, friends of my hosts, and Corvell’s own family – for opening their hearts and homes to me and the other MSU students. They set an example of friendship, hospitality, and caring that I never want to forget and I hope I can embody here in the U.S. Here are some people who deserve a special thanks and I hope we stay friends for a long time to come:

• Sunet, Rika, and Janci- my wonderful hosts who shared their home, friends, food, and life with me. I had fun being your fourth roommate for three and a half weeks. You are three wonderful people with huge hearts and you really helped make my time in South Africa so special. And Sunet especially, thank you for sharing your classroom and students with me, giving me lesson plan ideas, guidance for how to teach the kids, and support when I really didn’t know what I was doing. Thank you for taking care of me and being a great mentor and friend.
• The Cranfield/Hendricks family- Corvell, Faith, Dayle, Dominic, Johnny, David, Jesse, and more. These were people who basically adopted all 23 of us into their family for six weeks. They cooked meals for us, attempted to teach us favorite South African sports (that wasn’t always successful), helped us along on hiking trips, drove us all over the place, gave advice, answered countless questions, and entertained us with their jokes and stories. All of our adventures were extra special because we had you with us.
• Everyone else from MSU who came on the trip- Part of the fun of having a big adventure like this is being able to experience everything with others. I remember lots of great conversations riding in the vans or sitting in the guest houses late at night, sharing our experiences and discoveries in our individual host families and schools, our favorite parts of each sightseeing day, and our lives back in the U.S. We’re all very different people but we shared the same passion and excitement for this trip. Coming back home, it’s nice to know that I have a group of people here that I can share memories with.
• My Grade 3 students at Eikendal Primary School- I did my best to be a good guest teacher, but in the end I’m not sure if you learned anything particularly special from me other than a few new facts about the U.S. I slipped into your world for less than a month and I hope it was enough to leave a lasting impression. In the end, you were the ones who really taught me and I hope I can take what I learned back to the U.S. to share with future American students. I hope I can be a better teacher because of it and students in the U.S. can have their eyes opened because of what I can tell them about you.

Some of my favorite memories (the small moments between the big adventures):

• Countless conversations with my hosts about comparisons between the U.S. and South Africa.
• The collective excitement from the whole group every time we saw something new, beautiful, and exciting
• Getting hugs from my students at the end of every school day
• Reading to my students and watching their little eyes light up with excitement over the story. Most of them don’t have many books at home so they love it when they are read to at school.
• Watching the Grade 3 rugby games
• Having my Grade 3 students write letters to my student teaching class in the U.S. They were so excited about it and drew beautiful pictures in the margins of their letters too.
• Watching South African Idol with my hosts, laughing about all the bad singers and calling dibs on the cute guys. I think I watched more South African Idol in three weeks than American Idol in the whole time it’s been on.
• Playing the Question Game in the van
• Relaxing evenings at Deo
• Listening to the students imitate my accent
• Staying up late at the "Robben Island" house, hanging out and playing Scrabble
• Laughing about the stupidity of the English language with my hosts
• Sitting in the computer lab every interval with Candice and Mallory, frantically checking our e-mail and Facebook since this was the only time we had to do it
• Randomly jamming out to “Waka Waka” in the van
• Jesse and his model poses
• Attempting to understand conversations in Afrikaans through context and body language, and amazing my host family when I occasionally succeeded
• Hilarious games of BS and Egyptian Rat Screw on weekend trips
• Taking pictures with the kids on my last day at school. They all thought it was so fun to take pictures of each other with my camera.
• Talking about all the same kinds of things with my host family in South Africa that I would with my friends back home – family, friends, faith, guys, movies, TV shows, education, college memories, and more. Even though we live halfway around the world, we’re really not that different in the things we care, worry, and dream about.

Home and School

I’ve been living with my host family and student teaching in the school for a week now, so I thought I would write a little bit about my life in this environment. I live with my mentor teacher Sunet Kellerman, her younger sister Rika, and their friend Janci. All three of them are in their twenties and moved to Cape Town from Pretoria (the capital city of South Africa in the north west part of the country) about two years ago. They moved here basically to get a change of scenery and start careers in a different part of the country than where they grew up. All three of them are white Afrikaners, the cultural group that had very high privilege during apartheid. They have a very nice townhouse in Kenridge, another suburb of Cape Town, near to the city of Durbanville where our guest house was. They’re all very nice and we get along well. They have introduced me to a few of their friends in the Cape Town area also. Everyone I’ve met has been very nice, interested in hearing about life in the U.S., and willing to tell me all sorts of things about South African culture and society. The only slight difficulty is that all of them speak Afrikaans as they’re first language and often speak that language when they talk to each other. Everyone speaks English fluently so they have no problems talking to me, but they sometimes switch to Afrikaans in large group settings and I can’t really participate in the conversations. When that happens I find myself paying attention to changing tone of voice, body language, etc. I can actually guess a lot about emotions or context, even if I can’t understand the words. It’s kind of cool, actually.

They’ve also taken me to church and Bible study since I’ve been here, which I’ve liked a lot. Religion, especially Christianity, has a much stronger role in society here than it does in the U.S. Separation of church and state doesn’t really exist here. For example, every morning at the school we begin with a Bible reading and prayer. It’s also interesting to see young people close to my age speaking very openly about their faith. It’s something that I’ve found to be very rare in the U.S. You really have to know where to look to find people comfortable discussing their faith. People are much more open about it in South Africa. In other ways, living with these women is exactly like living with young professionals in the U.S. We go to the movies, go out to eat with friends, go dancing at clubs on weekends, and sit at home watching TV and talking.

In contrast to my home life, the school is a very different world. I work with Sunet in a 3rd grade class at Eikendal Primary School in the nearby suburb of Kraaifontein. The school has grades 1-7, which is typical for most South African primary schools. (Kindergarten is offered some places in South Africa but it’s not required.) Class sizes are larger here than they are in the U.S. and my class has 34 students in it. In the upper grades, classes can sometimes have more than 40 or 50 students! The students in the class are all coloured and black, as are most of the teachers. My mentor teacher is one of only two white teachers at the school. Most of the students come from poorer families and often come to school with not enough supplies and torn or dirty clothes because the families can’t afford to take care of things as well as they should. All South African schools require students to wear uniforms, but often in the poor schools kids only have one piece of each uniform item. Regardless, the kids are adorable and are truly grateful for everything their teachers do for them. They get so excited at even the smallest praise. They have so much enthusiasm and I love working with them.

The school building itself is also very interesting. It’s constructed kind of like a hotel with outdoor corridors. The classrooms all open to the outside and there are outdoor staircases leading up to the second floor. In front of the classrooms and connecting the different wings on the ground floor is a raised sidewalk called the “stoop.” Between the wings of the school is a large enclosed courtyard area and there are large open spaces in front and behind the school as well. There’s no playground, but during the break periods or “intervals,” the students run around and play in the open places around the school. There is no set lunch period at the school. There are two 15-20 minute intervals during the day that serve as a combined lunch/recess for the kids and staff.

The language difference can make things interesting sometimes when I’m teaching. The class is entirely taught in English, but most students in the class learned Afrikaans or Xhosa as their first language at home and really only started learning English when they came to school for the first time. Most of them speak English well enough to communicate in class, but many struggle to write in English. I always have to remind myself to speak slower and choose my words carefully when explaining things to them. When I talk to them I always have to make sure that I don’t use vocabulary that’s too difficult for them and speak slowly enough so they can understand my accent. Overall, I’m enjoying my home stay and school experience. Things aren’t always easy, especially at school, but I love the opportunity to learn and experience new things.