Too Little, Too Late.

Yesterday, we received an email from the Warwick in Africa team about behavior management within the classroom, it contained two power point presentations about effective classroom control, positive reinforcement and how to be an assertive teacher.

I have to be honest - too little, too late.

As tomorrow is Women's Day schools will be closed for the day, and of course we couldn't possibly go to school on Friday after having Thursday off. As a result, we're effectively half way through our time in Africa now. Taking into consideration that the majority of us are not trained teachers, and have had very little teaching experience, waiting until half way through the programme to give us any advice on this front is slightly ridiculous. Particularly since the moment for establishing ground rules has been and gone.

In a lot of ways I feel our preparation was inadequate for the experience of traveling to Africa. We weren't given preparation for how to deal with so many of the issues that are key out here. Dealing with naughty children being a classic example. Teaching is hard work, you don't just waltz into a classroom and rattle off a lesson. If that were the case, South Africa wouldn't need us in its schools.

Then there are all the social issues, essentially we were warned not to delve too deeply and be aware that there may be major issues going on with the kids at home. No one told Steph how to respond to the essay from one of her Year 10's about how she was raped by a teacher. We had no advice on how to respond to the fact that half our kids are on drugs, or in gangs. What to say when the kids lashed out at one of us for being white.

Apartheid has left huge scars on South Africa. I was reading an article earlier about a group of black men who murdered the family they were working for, including the eight year old child who witnessed his parents murder. One of the comments was that they could not blame Apartheid for the crimes since the men were only babies when Apartheid ended. How ridiculous. We can't just wipe out the country's history and pretend it's all fine.

The statistics on rape out here have truly horrified me, in Soweto girls are more likely to be raped than to finish school. Every 17 seconds a girl in South Africa is raped. A third of men admit to having been involved in gang rape. Corrective rapes to "cure" lesbianism are popular. And as if all of that wasn't bad enough, there's a common belief that the cure for AIDs is to rape a virgin - and how will you make sure that the girl is a virgin? Choose one that is only a few months old.

I had heard of the issue of child rape as a perceived cure for HIV and AIDs before coming to Africa, but there hasn't been much evidence of it in the western media for the last decade. Naively, I assumed that this might mean that the issue was being resolved. Actually, all this means is that in our usual fickle way, we got bored and moved on to the next celebrity scandal. The issue is as prevalent as it always has been.

Honestly, I am feeling extremely resentful of how little support or preparation we were given for the actual problems we would be facing on a daily basis.