Retired teacher Liz Button painted a vivid picture of life for school children in the hugely deprived area of the Eastern Cape of South Africa.
Liz, who has visited the country twice and is about to embark on a third trip, went to a remote rural town where she worked as a voluntary teacher of IT skills under the aegis of the Tyume Valley Schools Development Association. (www.tvschools.org.uk)
The organisation works with schools helping them to improve teaching, education opportunities and standards.
She described South Africa as a country with immense natural resources but a very poor education system, thanks largely to corruption, lack of capacity, incompetence, lack of commitment and poor accountability.
Eighty per cent of schools are classed as failing, hundreds have no water and thousands no library.
At the school where she volunteered four of the five teachers were diabetic thanks to a poor diet high in sugar.
“The government pays for children to have a meal as the area is so deprived,” she said.
“But the children are lovely which is why I’m going back.”
School life for them bears no relation to the one that exists in the UK. She revealed that she had some problems with discipline in the classroom as, unlike the local teachers, she wasn’t willing to beat ill-behaved pupils!
The school day ran from 8am to 2.30pm with a twenty-minute break and temperatures were often 35 degrees.
On Fridays, when lessons ended, the pupils cleaned the school.
Liz said she had also become involved with the charity Thare Machi Education (www.tme.org.uk) that provided interactive DVDs in the local language to help rural communities become aware of essential health education and HIV prevention.