Retired/Former Employees
MARCH/APRIL 2008 - FORMER SIDWELL TEACHERS IN AFRICA; A VISIT TO THE QUAKER SCHOOL IN RAMALLAH, PALESTINE
Posted March 4
Pat Froelicher, retired Lower School teacher:
Up go the thumbs, "sho" on their lips, smiles on their faces. I have entered Xhama Educare ( in South Africa) for the first time. I reach out my thumb to each of theirs, also saying "sho," which is a combination of “What’s up?” and “I’m all right." The scene was overwhelming, with 30 children aged 4-6 and one teacher who had started her job the day before. Having had a long teaching career as an early childhood educator in Washington DC, I found this to be a new and different environment. There was little equipment, few supplies, broken swings and bikes, dirty and malfunctioning toilets, and two bowls where all the children washed their hands in the same water. Everything missing was something that money can buy: books, supplies, toys. I wondered if I could make it through the next three hours when someone would take me back to the train home, much less the two days a week I had pledged to give for the next five
months.
It is now the middle of November and I've had the opportunity to know the teachers and a principal dedicated to work and children. They are poorly paid and hard pressed by the long hours, the numbers they handle, and the few materials they are given. Yet they're cheerful, resilient, and generously helpful to one another. When one teacher is sick, the large classes grow much larger. When the wind blows and the rains are heavy and the roof moans and heaves; they put pots where the leaks are largest.
Like most children, the children here are cute, lively, and eager to do whatever there is to do. Some love books; some learn anything quickly; some are clearly artistic, athletic or gently caring. They are fairly well dressed and look clean, in spite of constant runny noses. The food they are served is gobbled to the last scrap. Many are less socialized than more prosperous children, finding it hard to share when there are so few things for so many. It is a community of some mixed economic levels but there is much poverty, along with poor services, broken families, violence, illness, drink, drugs and unemployment. The children need and deserve everything that better off children find in school, and then some.
I wondered what I could and should do in a culture and language I don't understand and in economic circumstances I've never experienced. I brought things: paper, crayons, balls, puzzles, water toys, bean bags, and library books in Xhosa and English. I took lots of photos of and for them, taught them songs and games and read from beautiful picture books. Vuyiswa Mavis, the teacher and a great story teller herself, would dramatically repeat the story in Xhosa. She could grab the attention of the most restless child. Imagine how I felt when I came in from the playground one day to hear her reading Amazing Grace in English and then the translation in Xhosa! Being an extra pair of hands, as I learned the routine, I felt helpful to this good natured teacher who never had a break, I usually took the children to the playground by myself. It could be a lot of fun, playing ball and games with them, laughing and pantomiming. There was lots of time for hugs. It was scary too. Rules were minimal and their rough and tumble recklessness made it seem a daily miracle that no one was seriously hurt.
And then came "graduation" for the 13 oldest children. It was a joyous community festivity. Parents, mostly mothers, fixed food and brought juice, sodas and candy. Siblings crowded the small room and played outside. Some school officials spoke briefly and ended talks in songs that everyone-except me - knew. It was easy to share the rhythmic swaying and movements that came with the music. There was a mother’s chorus, incredibly strong voices, beautifully smiling, vibrantly dancing in place and in circles. It was as warm and vital and joyous a communal festivity as one could imagine to an outsider like me, "tribal" in its exuberance and spontaneity. Still, I didn't feel like an outsider. I had to give a speech, thanking everyone for the experience- not my favorite activity but warmly heart-felt. And they thanked me, both the principal and a mother in warm and witty and vastly over-appreciative terms. One knows how things are stretched for such occasions, but they convinced me of what I'd often doubted. I'd given something to them as they had to me. They presented me with an African apron. I put it on; they sang and we all danced together.
And there were the children, boys in Sunday-best white shirts and gray trousers and girls in frilly white. They sang and gestured children's songs in Xhosa, and English that I'd help teach them. As the children sang "The Children on the Bus," I beamed, along with everyone else. Each walked to be capped and gowned - like a college graduation - and to have their picture taken with their certificate to loud parent-led applause.
When I wrote sometime ago about the limited supplies, our granddaughter Maja started to collect and sharpen all the household pencils to send. While it was perhaps not a practical strategy, it showed a shrewd sense of what was needed. Helping these children get a reasonably good start is very hard - and very hopeful - work. It takes money for pencils and books and to fix toilets and to keep the roof from blowing off and to pay the devoted teachers who bring love and care to the business. Teaching for them has a good deal more than the usual frustrations, but no less of its joys and rewards.
That is my experience.
Anne Rigby, Former Lower School Teacher:
In late 2007, I visited two countries that face terrible challenges – Zimbabwe, and the West Bank (Palestine). In both places, in the midst of suffering and hardship, I witnessed the power of commitment and tenacity by teachers and caregivers. And in both places, I find that I inescapably see people through the eyes of a teacher.
In October, John and I spent three weeks in Zimbabwe, returning to Harare, the city where we had lived from 1999 through 2002. We were well aware, before going, of the country’s economic, political, social free-fall: wretched governance, hyper-inflation, food shortages, no petrol at the pumps, limited electricity and water. Nine out of ten urban households survive on less than the equivalent of 1 US$ per day. Almost half of the country’s population relies upon the World Food Program for basic food needs. (And, we understand, the conditions in Zimbabwe have worsened since our October visit.)
We returned to Mashambanzou, the HIV/AIDS organization where I had volunteered when we lived in Zimbabwe. Mashambanzou now partners with the World Food Program and provides food to some twelve thousand AIDS-affected families. This added program stretches Mashambanzou but has not diluted the quality of Mashambanzou’s core value of recognizing the unique story and the human dignity of each patient, each orphan, each ambuya (grandmother), with whom they are in contact.
Our time with Mashambanzou took us beyond the numbers and behind Zimbabwe’s “big picture.” With Mashambanzou’s community outreach teams, and at Mashambanzou’s hospice center at Waterfalls, we had a glimpse of the human face – the human faces – not just of suffering but of endurance, survival, resilience...even hope.
Education, systematically denied to black Zimbabweans before independence in 1980, remains a treasured opportunity for Zimbabweans, even in the midst of the current crises affecting day-to-day living. We went with a Mashambanzou outreach team to Epworth, one of the poorest communities in Harare. Enika, a grandmother (ambuya) was getting her five orphaned grandchildren ready for school, laying out their frayed uniforms, scolding Primrose for dawdling. (The children’s mother, Enika’s daughter, had died of AIDS; their father was one of the many black farm workers killed in the violent take-over of farms.) Enika told us that even though the teachers were on strike, the children still went to school and the older children helped the younger ones with their lessons. Enika told us: “I will not let my grandchildren stay home and be lazy. They need to learn for Zimbabwe.”
On our last day, we went to the Mashambanzou center at Waterfalls, to say goodbye to Sister Margaret MacAllen, the director, and for a final visit at the hospice with the adults and children who are spending their final days in dignity, comfort, and love. As we walked from the office to the children’s wing, we heard the singing and laughter as the nurses, Felicitas and Petunia, gave the children an opportunity to be children and not just AIDS patients. Petunia showed me the books that Sidwell Friends Lower School had sent six years ago, now a little tattered from so much use. We sang “If you’re happy and you know it,” a favorite from my days at the Center, and in earlier years with children at Sidwell’s Lower School.
The laughter and joy of dying children, or Ambuya Enika’s hopeful horizons of a future Zimbabwe, are neither anomalous nor phony. They give evidence of the human powers that guide people in their daily work, whatever the circumstances.
In December, while accompanying my husband on a business trip to Jerusalem, I had the opportunity to visit the Ramallah Girls School in West Bank (Palestine). Arranging the trip revealed the ever-present tensions that exist between people who live so close to each other. Where we stayed in East Jerusalem and the border of Ramallah is about the same distance as my home in Chevy Chase to Sidwell Lower School. But the human distance is enormous and now there is a wall that divides the two territories. Jewish friends told me Ramallah was too dangerous. My Palestinian driver, a resident of Jerusalem, worried that we would have trouble at the checkpoint. We did have to circle the area to reach an open checkpoint but our trip was uneventful and we arrived early at the school.
I walked into the happy chaos of teachers and students – predominantly Muslim -- preparing for the annual Christmas show. In the entry way, students were hanging a Christmas tree collage – hundreds of green and white cut-outs of the children’s hands formed to make a huge Christmas tree. In the auditorium, fourth and fifth graders were singing, “Joy to the World.” Some of the boys wore traditional shawls around their shoulders. Diana Abdul Nour, the elementary school principal, answered my questions as we toured the school.
“We are a Quaker school, a Christian school. When parents first come to see the school, I explain that we do not proselytize but we do celebrate Christian holidays. We also celebrate Muslim holy days.”
As we walked through the school, Diana introduced me to teachers and students. Some of the teachers wore the Muslim head scarf. Some were in slacks. In the kindergarten class, the children rushed forward to show me their drawings. I noticed a child with Downs Syndrome, another with Cerebral Palsy. I met three Special Education teachers, two counselors. I saw a school that reflects the best of Quaker education – and this in a country where unemployment and poverty are at staggering levels, and where fear of new violence is always present.
Diana showed me the photographs of two young children killed in an explosion at a nearby gas station. No one knows if the explosion was an accident or an act of violence. She spoke of children whose parents have been forced to flee the West Bank, suspected of being part of the Intifada. She spoke of the struggles teachers and students have getting to school, navigating checkpoints and sudden road closings. Diana spoke of the dedication of the teachers whose lives have become increasingly difficult but who still bring energy and love into their classrooms.
Diana did not dwell on the hardships. She wanted to talk about new plans to enlarge their special education department to care for more children who have no access to education. She wanted to talk about the qualities that her teachers and students can bring to their communities - the qualities of integrity, honesty, cooperation and compassion. I can think of no place where Quaker education is more needed than here in Ramallah and no school that could do a better job in preparing young children for the challenges they and their country faces.
So, in the conflictive contexts of Zimbabwe and Palestine – I again found myself centered by my experience with Sidwell.