It’s a rainy afternoon when we arrive at Nkomo Primary School, in Mnqobokazi, a small village within Hluhluwe town in northern KwaZulu-Natal, a province in South Africa.
The school’s 51-year-old principal, Nomusa Zikhali, approaches us with a smile and a gentle handshake as she welcomes us to her office in a school she first started for a handful of students under four hulking trees.
Zikhali was born and bred in this dry corner of Mnqobokazi. Teaching was always her passion.
“When I was young, I used to play school with my friends and I was always the headmaster. I used to love being a teacher or I’d be a social worker because I loved working with people,” she says.
Zikhali had it tough growing up. She ran away from home, as her father wanted to marry her off at the age of 16.
“I left school in standard eight because my father believed I was old enough to get married. He wanted 11 cows, so I was supposed to get married to a man with five wives,” she says.
Her older brother suggested she relocate to big city: Johannesburg.
“He also didn’t like the idea of me being married at a young age, so he wanted me to go and stay with him and his girlfriend, who worked as a domestic worker in Johannesburg,” says Zikhali.
“I was scared and confused; I didn’t think I would survive. I didn’t even have an ID or passport, so I had to hide at the house where my brother’s girlfriend worked. I sometimes felt lonely and intimidated by the huge buildings, big city lights and busy lifestyle.”
Even here, life was not easy but she managed to survive for two years.
Zikhali and her brother’s girlfriend sold street food – fat cakes and polony – in Ellis Park, commuting by train every morning. Her R500 ($37) profit bought her a ticket to return home. It also brought her face-to-face with her future husband. He benevolently offered to pay for the 11 cows her father wanted.
“On my way home I met my future husband on the bus; when I told him about my story, he offered to pay for the cows.”
At 18, she got married but personal tragedy was in store. Tears well up in her eyes as she relates the story of her two-year-old son’s death in 1994.
“He was burning, I went to the clinic and the nurses told me that they only treated emergencies on weekends. I was turned away and at night he got worse, he had a fit and died on a Monday morning before I could return to the clinic. I couldn’t accept his death, I almost went crazy,” she says.
She channelled the pain into completing matric. She couldn’t go to university because she had to take care of her mother-in-law who had had a stroke.
Because of her love for mathematics, she volunteered at a school as a teacher for seven years without pay.
“I decided to register part-time at the Rand Afrikaans University for a teaching course through correspondence,” she says.
She noticed that the nearest school was 20 kilometers by foot, so she wanted to build a school nearer, and approached the education department, which approved her proposal, but didn’t have enough money to fund it.
“I started the school alone in a hard-to-reach area where I was supposed to walk and cross a flooded river with a handmade boat with 35 children every day.”
She had to move to a rondavel [an African-style hut] on the other side of the bank for two months.
This made teaching difficult as nature continued to conspire against her.
The floods worsened, and the number of students in her school shrank from 60 to 25.
Zikhali was forced to look for a better, safer location. The site she finally settled on only had trees but no brick-and-mortar infrastructure, whatsoever. But under those four majestic trees, she set tables, wooden mats and a stove where she cooked meals for the children.
“I decided to make one of the trees my office; whenever you came to the school you would wait for me in my office; and I used the others for grade 1, 2 and 3. I was the only teacher and had to teach the different grades at the same time,” she says.
Zikhali asked the Africa Foundation, an independent non-profit organization, for classrooms; they built two.
Sixteen years later, the school has 20 classrooms, 860 children and 26 teachers. Zikhali also opened a center for orphaned and vulnerable children.
“I decided to do some home visits after school and saw that the situations at their homes were not alright. There are some children who have bad mannerisms; I don’t push them away, because it’s their way of crying out for help, there’s usually a story behind a child’s behavior.”
Khumbulani Ngwane, a 30-year-old plumber and electrician who was taught by Zikhali, recalls how learning under the trees taught him perseverance.
“The situation was difficult, especially on rainy days; sometimes we’d bring planks and used them as chairs and others would sit on dirt. But that whole experience taught us to never give up in life. As much as we were learning from text books, we were also trained on how to handle life problems.”
Ngwane’s parents died when he was young; his mother was shot by robbers and his father passed away following an illness. Zikhali took him as her own.
“She’s an amazing person,” says Ngwane. “She basically raised me and opened so many doors for me and others in the community without expecting anything in return.”
Zikhali plans to retire in 2020 and continue with her community projects.
Hopefully by then, her rain cloud will have a silver lining and her children a roof over their heads.

Nomusa-Zikhali-130

Classes  Under Rain  Clouds And Trees

It’s curious, and almost incongruous, to see Juste Chisenga, the Grade 1B teacher at the Kasisi Primary School, give a lesson in a neat black suit and checkered tie in the Zambian language of Bemba.
It’s hot and sweaty under a rusted tin ceiling that has been around since 1924. The classroom walls are full of cracks and its light blue paint is peeling. Dozens of curling educational posters hang, yellowed with age.
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The children look as worn out as the building they are in. Some have walked as far as 14 kilometers to get here. Their uniforms are mismatched and layered in red dust.
This is the last place you would expect to see a teacher wearing a suit. Chisenga looks like a man from another time.
It’s also the last place you would expect to see children staring at a slideshow on a solar powered projector instead of a blackboard.
It’s even more bizarre seeing the same seven-year-olds sitting on uneven wooden desks and pulling out several smart tablets from a cardboard box to continue their lesson.
This is the brainchild of entrepreneur Mark Bennett. His idea is to help educate young Zambians by making a tablet part of their school curriculum for their villages.
“We decided to do something about the way teaching is done in Zambia&#8230; These days everyone has access to a cell phone. What’s more, in the rural areas they know how to work it; without being able to read. So we designed something that could be translated into several different languages&#8230; We’ve spent around $6 million developing the software with the help of 250 designers from around the world animating it. So far, we have had 2.3 million words translated into local languages and a quarter of a million sounds,” he says.
Bennett first came to Zambia in 1985 on a two-year contract to work at a computer center at the University of Zambia. He left the job twelve years later after the university figured out he was still on its payroll, he jokes. From there, he spent years bringing the internet to Zambia. He became a household name when he sold his Zambian internet service provider, AfriConnect, to Vodacom in 2005.
Wondering what to do next, Bennett’s idea for iSchool came seven years ago while sitting next to Clare Stead on a plane.
“We started by asking what would we do in education differently in the bush. What would you do to teach better,” says Stead, who is now the E-Learning project director for iSchool.
“The internet is a great learning tool but not for Africa. It’s not contextual. We found that children in rural areas didn’t understand why Elmo from Sesame Street would need to hang washing up between two skyscrapers in Seattle. Our first step was designing an education program suited for the rural people of Africa,” she says.
With overwhelming class numbers of between 60 to 100 children at a time, teachers in Africa are overworked, underpaid and lack organization, says Stead.
“With the ZEduPad, children can engage with the tablet and find answers faster than a teacher asking the same question 60 times over. We were also able to devise a curriculum plan for teachers to help them set goals for the week, for the month and for the whole year.”
It’s not always been smooth sailing. The team has encountered a number of hurdles including the Zambian government that passed a law to allow children to be taught in their mother tongue. It meant Bennett’s team had to write out whole new languages, including the first dictionaries for a number of dialects.
Regardless of the difficulties, Bennett remains resolute. Now in its second year, the project has distributed 7,000 tablets across Zambia.
The tablets are solar charged meaning they can go pretty much anywhere in the county, says Bennett. The children find them fun to use and, thanks to the language changes, easily understood. It makes learning easier than staring at a blackboard and far more interactive, says Stead.
The results according to teacher Chisenga have been amazing. His grin is as wide as the tablet he helps his grade ones complete their basic maths with. A man in a suit that looks as out of place in the classroom as the tablets.

Tag: Learners

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Classes Under Rain Clouds And Trees

Tablets that ease the learning headache