A Very Hard Day

The 12 foot by 4 foot aluminum building had no door, broken windows, no floor and mounds of dirt piles in the corners. This was the school “cafeteria” at the Medekeni Junior Secondary School. You wouldn’t know this because it looked more like a tool shed than a cafeteria but for the moment it held a long table with small stacks of buttered hard bread. This was the children’s lunch.

After seeing the conditions of the Coffee Bay J.S.S yesterday, we thought we would be prepared for anything, but walking up to the building this morning there were about 40 students sitting outside on broken furniture and muddy hills attending the 3rd grade. This is an unacceptable level of education for anyplace, but for now, this is normal for Coffee Bay. There are 3 entire grades that have to be taught outside because there is nowhere else for them to go. And yet the children still smile, the teachers don’t, they know better.

We were escorted around the school by N. Madlalisa who asked us to call her Kwanda. She is a very strong a beautifully spirited woman. She has done everything in her power to keep her school together and the children safe. She tracked us down when she heard that we were here and invited us to visit her school. During the tour of the school, she showed us room after room filled with students sitting on concrete floors (as you can unfortunately see from the picture above). She continually tried to show us that she was doing everything in her power to use all of her available resources, as if we had to be convince that the needs of her school were legitimate.

Without any loss of pride, she told us of having to constantly beg the authorities for more resources. As she explained how she had to stretch her budget, we suddenly realized exactly how bad the situation was. We did some quick math in our heads and came to the awful reality that the school was receiving less than $90 per student per semester. That $90 was to be spent on everything from teacher salaries and textbooks to school repair and the stacks of buttered bread that the children get served for lunch.

$90 per student…think about how little that is for the wealthiest nation in Africa.