Day One

Hi everyone,

Sorry it's taken me so long to post, but the last few days were hectic. We met up in the evening on Saturday at Birmingham Airport, flew out to Dubai (7 hours) and then on to Johannesburg (8 hours) overall this means 24 hours of traveling, half an hour of sleep and catching a cold while I'm at it!

Miraculously we managed not to lose anyone in the airport, and after waving goodbye to the Alex Group, found our buses and drove to the Guest House.

Jean Jean Guesthouse is beautiful, and probably one of the more luxurious places I've stayed. Each room is equipped with a double bed, ensuite bathroom and heater - because Jo'burg gets cold. During the day, in the sunshine it's quite pleasantly temperate, and the teachers at school have been laughing at us for wanting to go outside. However, as soon as the sun sinks it becomes cold, dropping down to maybe 3-5 degrees celsius alarmingly quickly. Also, as we're rather far South, in the winter, sunrise is around maybe 7am and sunset (which is happening as I speak) is rather beautiful but sadly around 5.30pm. The good thing about that is by 10 you feel like it's really late and are ready for bed. Which, if you're getting up at 5.45 in the morning (might be graduating to 6 tomorrow - watch this space), is really rather necessary. I will be posting a whole lot of pictures sometime soon, but as I've, rather stupidly, forgotten my camera lead I will have to borrow an SD card reader from someone, so please bare with me.

Jo'burg from my balcony.

Jo'burg itself is a strange city. Arriving in the dark, the airport reminded me of Italy, the same type of manic driving and somewhat decrepit parking lot, followed by long stretches of motorway with arid grass on the banks beside - for those of you who have been to Malpensa airport, picture this. We drove through the city, which lit up at night time is really quite beautiful.

Soweto

By day it's a strange mix of beautiful luxury homes, expensive cars with thick brick walls, barbed wire fencing, and guards often quite prominently visible. The drive to Soweto in the morning is maybe half an hour, although by the time we had dropped people off at all the other schools this morning, Vijay and I had been in the bus an hour and a half. Soweto has over a million inhabitants and driving around it we have gotten extremely lost. The South West Township varies between brick buildings with the compulsory barred windows to basic thrown together shacks. In some ways it is sturdier and richer than you would imagine when you consider a township, but even then the area is obviously one of extreme poverty.

The racial divide is clear, expensive cars are predominantly driven by white people while every single pedestrian is black. In my first lesson, one of the kids asked us about the weather in England, when I explained how it's much colder than South Africa, and how we rarely have sunshine, he grinned at me and answered, "So that's why you're so white!" Other Warwick in Africa teachers have had a much harder time of it, and have come home with stories of deep underlying anger and hatred which the kids still hold for white people. Trying not to accidentally cause insult is quite high on everyone's list, generally after you've said or done something really stupid. While explaining the rules of hangman, I had a sudden moment of wondering how appropriate the game was, Pete on the other hand managed to announce "I'll go first, because I'm white" during a game of chess mentally slapping himself in the face. So far, I haven't had much chance to chat to the kids about their lives outside of the maths classroom (other than to tell them that I'm not single, I'm not on facebook and I'm not giving one of them my phone number :S ).

I really regret not updating my blog yesterday, as I feel I would have been able to capture my emotions more purely after my first day. But I will try to recap before I tell you about today. After our first night of, frankly, far too little sleep. We woke up bright and early to go to meet the delegates from Ernst&Young who will be teaching alongside some of us during our stay here. EY are an important addition to the programme, providing more man power, the hopes of continuing our work during the entire year and a massive amount of stationary, whiteboards and pens to take to school. Corin, our on the ground contact met us and talked to us about the ups and downs of being in South Africa, the hardships involved in experiencing such poverty as well as warning us of the crises we are likely to face being frustrated with staff, each other and the importance of trying avoiding "the little seeds of romance blossoming in the Savannah" which are allegedly a key byproduct to working in a stressful environment like this for six weeks.

After this it was off to school, Namedi Secondary School is smaller than I imagined it would be, and actually a better structured building than you would guess using google street view. The school is split into a collection of different blocks, most of which are unlabeled - "We assume people will know where to go" - we met the head of Maths, spent a while discussing timetabling, arguing over how many lessons we would be able to teach (as far as the school is concerned - all of them) as well as being told about the class schedule for our time here. Gauteng Province issues a strict schedule, detailing exactly what should be taught each week for the entire year. This was somewhat disappointing news, as I was hoping to be allowed to structure my lessons according to what I felt the kids needed. Then, after lunch (a banana and some toast I had stolen from breakfast since the Guest House doesn't seem to have received the message that I don't eat cheese and have already nearly killed two people for not having informed them that they don't eat fish in advance, today's sandwich was something to do with sweetcorn, it looked like cheese so it was the second of what I expect to be a great many sandwiches that I am going to donate to Pete), Vijay and I went to observe two lessons with one of the teachers we are working with. We introduced ourselves to the kids but the teacher immediately sat at the back on his Blackberry, giving a fairly clear indication of what his input on our lessons was going to be. The kids seemed to be getting the maths, which was really positive; however, I finished the day feeling rather low about my chances of having a positive impact on either the learners (who seemed to be doing fine) or the teachers (who obviously see this as a paid holiday).

Yesterday evening left me feeling a bit like a tourist, going in to gawp at the poor people living so differently before coming home to my heating and my cushy double bed, rather like a Victorian lady at a freak show full of siamese twins and pygmies.