School Visit in Ekuphumleni

On the fifth of February I visited a school in the township called Ekuphumleni. Ekuphumleni is one of the townships nearby Kenton on Sea. I attended a class in the afternoon given to the fourth grade. This class had three teachers. One teacher only speaks English while the other two also speak Xhosa. This is the mother language of the children. 

When I woke up in the morning and went to the kitchen for some breakfast there was a friend of my 'landlady' sitting at the dinner table. This friend told me that she volunteers at a school in Ekuphumleni and that she had lots of work to do for that afternoon. She had to make about 40 sandwiches and she had to prepare a creative work for the kids. Because she actually couldn’t finish everything in time I decided to help her out.

So after a morning of cutting and preparing the creative work for the kids I also went along to go the school. The school in Ekuphumleni is a pretty big school with many children in one class. That thursday there were 31 children present while there supposed to be 40. The English teacher told me that sometimes some children don't come back after lunch time because the school is too far away or because they just don't want to go anymore. That is one of the crazy differences between The Netherlands en South Africa. While children in The Netherlands are obligated to go to school everyday the children in South Africa just decide for themselves if they are going or not.

Anyway, I really liked the lessons which were given. Most of the lessons were about teaching the children English. This is very important because the children need to speak English to go to the university or to get jobs. The kids were taught English through songs, games and stories. It was nice to see that the kids were very enthusiastic. They really wanted to give the right answers and when the teachers asked a question almost every kid raised their hand. You could also see how proud they were when they had given the right answer.

But besides all of this I still got a little sad while I attented this class because of various reasons. So is there not much to work with for the teachers. There is a shortage of all kind of teaching equipment like books, stories, games and so on. I was also told that there is a shortage of qualified and concerned teachers. A lot of the teachers just don't care about the children as long as they are getting paid. Luckely this wasn't the deal with the teachers I met. I also noticed that the children aren't on the level as the children in The Netherlands would have been at the same age. There were even two kids who were already 12 years old.


All in all there is a lot to improve for the education system in South Africa. This is why I am glad to see that there are different organisations working togheter with volunteers and teachers to do the best they can to improve the education of all these children in the townships.