The Stepping Stone

I was going to write something profound in this blog entry.

Like about how I am on the verge of making a giant scientific discovery, proving that the children of Red Hill Township have organized to overthrow us, including the establishment of a chain of command, code words/slurs and special ways of communicating through high-pitched crying sounds. Yesterday, I swear, I saw a three-year-old salute another with his little chubby hand. Today after what seemed like a high-pitched cry, they all mobbed one of our volunteers.

These hypothesis are real and need serious exploration, but in this blog I want to tell you about something more pressing.

Today I saw the coolest toy I’ve ever seen, and according to the Internet, it is exclusive to Africa. It’s called the “Push-Pull Wire Car.” A child in the township let me take his for a spin and I must say it handled pretty nicely. The car was made of wire and about the size of two shoe boxes. It had a long wire sticking up from its front axle with a steering wheel. As I pushed the car, I turned the wheel and its tires turned. I got into one accident but still it was better than X-box.

I only have one question: Can I get rims on mine?

Tops spun off strings also seem big with township boys along with imitating Michael Jackson—yes, the crotch grab lives on in South Africa. They love soccer but seem to have no ball. Yesterday, I saw boys play a mini soccer game by kicking a tennis ball up and down a small cement patio.

Check out the wire car at these links:
http://www.wunderphoto.rilinger.com/wunderphoto/children/zulu_boy_with_wire_car.jpg
http://www.highlightskids.com/Science/Stories/images/SS1105_wireCars2.jpg

South Africa’s Cheetah Outreach has 16 cheetahs, but the entire time I find myself looking at a dog.

The center has dedicated itself to saving the fastest cat on the planet, and has ironically found that the best way to do so is with a Turkish dog called the Anatolian Shepherd. The center raises money to place shepherd puppies on local ranches with the agreement that the ranchers will use the dogs instead of guns and traps to save their livestock. Because the dogs scare away cheetahs instead of kill them, they could be the best solution to saving the cat whose numbers have plummeted since 1900 from 100,000 to 7,500.

Jay and Kohlue are the center’s ambassador dogs. They have strong jaws, stocky builds, but overall look like common house dogs. Today they sleep with their chins resting on their paws and their bodies languidly spread out in the grass. From their appearance it is hard to know that they were domesticated thousands of years ago and bred with the tenacity to scare off bears, wolves and jackals but also with the temperament to befriend sheep.

To me, the shaggy white dog symbolizes solution, even if the entire idea—using dogs to save cats—seems backwards.

 

You cannot patch a soccer ball with duct tape. I’ve learned this twice over the course of my service trip to South Africa. Today the situation came up again as we played a game with the school children of Red Hill Township called soccer/keep-the-ball-away-from-the-stray-dog.

I lugged 47.5 pounds of books across the Atlantic Ocean only to find out that the township was most in need of a two-pound soccer ball. If only I had known. Next year students will make the same trip and here are some things they should bring:

Stickers: To preschooler’s, stickers equal power. It’s the little sticky stars and shiny circles with the words “Wow!” and “Bang!” that grease the wheels of any successful art project.

Baby Wipes: “We should have just brought a whole suitcase of baby wipes.”

Antibiotics: You will be working with kids, which is synonymous with, you will be getting coughed on. Go to www.CDC.org and the California State Department for health tips.

Candy: If stickers are power, MMs are gold (yes, we were shameless…and desperate).

Preparedness: I remember singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” five times in a row because we didn’t know what to do. Have a list of at least 20 songs and arts-and-craft projects. When you arrive it’s sink or swim and many of us sank.

Pictures: The children loved being photographed. They always wanted to see themselves in the viewfinder. It would have been nice to have brought a color-photo printer.

Puzzles: They loved puzzles and nothing was worse than watching a five-year-old struggle through a puzzle only to have pieces missing (ages 1-8).

Books: The program director told us they were totally saturated with books. Bring only the best ones.

Supplies: The children mulched through arts-and-craft supplies, bring as much as you can.

Hygiene: The preschool has a teeth-cleaning break everyday for the children and is in need of toothbrushes, toothpaste and floss.

Look for future updates to this list.

 

Today we only lose complete control of the children twice.

Somewhere during the melee I am turned into a train. A 50-pound five-year-old rides my shoulders yelling “go, go,” kicking me in the ribs and prodding me forward. A line of children grab the back of my pants, yelling “choo, choo.”

Only seconds before I had dignity.

My situation is no worse than the 12 other Southwestern College students volunteering at the township preschool. We are all being manhandled. At one point I find myself falling to the ground under the weight of a giant dog pile. I manage to move a shard of glass to the side before my chest lands on it. Little arms wrap around my neck, choking out my last breath.

If this were a movie, the scene would fade into a flashback and you would see a montage of memories covering the last four days—ever since since we arrived at the preschool. It would look like this:

A child jumping into my arms; a three-year old waddling by on the wrong side of the school fence, seconds later, a volunteer runs by in pursuit; a child’s hand with two ring-worm soars reaches up for a hug; a stray dog sneaks in and sends the kids into a ruckus; my facial expression when I learn the kids do not paint often because there are no sinks; one child runs his thumb across his throat when we try to give him oatmeal—is he allergic to it or threatening our lives?; children running around pretending to be tigers after making paper-plate tiger masks; “You don’t know how scary a classroom full of kids is until they all look at you with their big eyes.”; little fist punch, little feet kick; “I don’t think this is going to turn out good,” a volunteer says after giving the children paint; little fingers trying to push the shutter-release on a camera; children laughing as they play dodge ball; a volunteer calls for help as she tries to pry a pencil away from a three-year-old; the giant steel hinge on the side of a storage-container classroom;

“You don’t know how scary a classroom full of kids is until they all look at you with their big eyes.”

The expression of a girl with sours on her mouth after one of our volunteers pecks her lips with a kiss; hearing the names of African children in your sleep; watching kids play soccer barefoot and thinking “nobodies feet are glass proof.”; watching children brush their teeth and then being warned if a toothbrush has blood on it: “Make sure you put it on the side. I don’t want to contaminate. I don’t know who has AIDS and who doesn’t.”; hearing the program’s mission: “We’re breaking the cycle, evening the playing field…it’s about empowerment, it’s about skill building.”; asking a child to find the photograph of himself and he can’t; asking a child the number that follows six and he says 13; asking a child to name the color of a shape that is red and he says, “red,” and you think, “thank god.”; the bark of a stray dog; the way the children dance when they sing, “In The Jungle Big Fat Mama Cleaning Laundry.”

And when the children finally let me up I look down at a bunch of smiling faces and remember what one of the volunteers told me: “If you want to work with kids, you have to leave your dignity at the door.”

Today I use a small stick to sweep through sand in one of Red Hill Township’s playgrounds. I’m on my knees looking for shards of glass and every time I shuffle forward I do it deliberately and slowly. I am a soldier making my way through a mine field.

The situation seems futile. We have already pulled up 10 trash bags of debris and still there are little glimmers of glass in the sand everywhere. This is only one of my discouraging moments of the day. Earlier we assessed the five-year-olds at the preschool and found all of them behind by about two years compared to U.S. standards.

They have problems recognizing letters, numbers and speaking. Professional educators tell me that if they are not brought up to speed by next year, their gap in development will start widening on an exponential level and they could be behind their entire life.

Their English vocabulary is estimated to be 400 words when it should be 1,500. They do not know the alphabet when they should be starting to read and write. They count to 29 when they should count to 100.

It is obvious that if the township parents don’t take part in the development of their children at home, the kids will not have a chance. So we’re talking major cultural, political and financial rethinking.

I’m thinking impossible.

These are the kinds of thoughts that race through your head when you are 12,500 miles from home, low on sleep and picking shards of glass out of the sand that will probably stay clean for less than a week. You begin to think, why am I here?

U.S education standards are higher than in Africa (and lower than in Europe). In township areas of Africa, children don’t learn their alphabet until first grade, and since the preschool was taken over in 2008 its students have gone off to grade school and out-shined their classmates. If the school had not been in place, no government agency would have stepped in and the children would probably grow up illiterate.  Fortunately, some of the parents in the township are coming around to the idea of education and beginning to become more involved with the school.

But still there are the undeniable truths. The brain belongs to no country. It must be stimulated in certain areas by certain ages or face serious consequences. And the township is behind. Some of the problems come down to simple lack of space.  Others deal with lack of resources and parental support. The only thing we can change, it seems, is in the department of skill building.

I have no idea what that means until our program director explains to me how complicated it is to stimulate a children’s brain properly.

“I say, ‘grab your right ear,’ you raise your right hand and grab your right ear,” she tells me, demonstrating as she speaks. “But what about grabbing your left ear with your right hand?”

This would stimulate a cross-body set of synapses in the brain, an area that will go undeveloped if a teacher doesn’t know this little trick.

The teachers at the township are hard-working, compassionate teachers but they are not educated in child development. Only recently, encouraged by the program, they have tested into a community college program.

Once you know what you are looking for, the under-developed areas in a child’s brain stick out like giant potholes on a smoothly paved road. And we find a lot of them when we begin assessing the students earlier that day.

In one of my test, a young African boy looks at me with nervous eyes and dried snot in the corner of his nostrils. In front of him is a large laminated floor mat with different shapes and colors. I ask the boy to find the shape that is red and tell him to place a bean bag on it. The boy places the bean bag on yellow. I point to green, he tells me it’s yellow. I point to red, he tells me it’s orange. He is guessing.

One by one we test them and see how well they know their shapes, numbers and letters. We observe how well they can handle a pair of scissors, if they can cut paper at sharp angles, which tests dexterity and cognitive development. We listen to their speech. At the age of five, U.S. standards say they should speak in seven-word sentences…they can’t.

One mental pothole we zoom in on is the children’s inability to recognize numbers, instead they see them more as lyrics in a song, “One, two, three…”

I place three M&Ms in front of the boy and he can only tell me three if he counts them—what professionals call “roll counting.” With a simple twist in teaching style, this can be corrected and that mental dark spot can be lit. Our professional educators meet with the teacher and show her a technique that is called “One-To-One, hands-on connection.” Translation: make the child pick up pipe cleaners as he counts. That’s it! Do that and he’ll recognize numbers. We came 12,500 miles and if that is the only technique we imbue, I think we could still consider the trip a success. But we brought many more.

Every lesson our group does, whether its playing with a parachute, painting a picture or building a paper elephant, strategically fulfills what one of our professional child developers calls the “four pies of development.” They expose the child to…

Another pothole we learned of was that the children have self-identification problems. Simply put, they have no mirrors and photographs and basically have no idea what they look like—this can have major developmental repercussions. We plan to leave photographs before we leave.

***

The next day we arrive at the school and I see two pieces of toilet paper stuck in the sand in the playground we just cleaned. But then, about an hour later, I see six kids playing there. One dangles from the monkey bars. He is smiling, his feet swinging above soft, clean sand.

By Sean Campbell

I’m about to travel 12,500 miles, sit on a plane 21 hours and pass through multiple security checkpoints that have me counting the ounces in my aerosol deodorant.

I am one of 13 Southwestern College students traveling from San Diego to South Africa to help a preschool in an illegal squatters township outside Cape Town. Right now I am standing in line to check my bag, wondering if there is anything “illegal” about shipping 50 pounds of stickers and glue.

Most of us have giant bags filled with school supplies. Here’s a breakdown of my bag, alone: “Harry Potter,” “Bartholomew Bear” and 47.5 pounds of other children books, 3.8 liters of glue, empty towel rolls, tissue paper, 4,000 motivational stickers, 2,000 animal stickers, 2,000 fashion stickers (yep), 275 tattoos, nine different colors of Play-Doh, balloons, race car pencils and a bag of pixie dust.

And there are 12 more bags.

To say the school we are headed to is short on funding would be an understatement. Think 10 toilets for a population of 500. The township residents are squatters, meaning the land does not belong to them. They bootleg their electricity from neighboring areas and walk on eggshells when it comes to dealing with the locals, we are told. The teachers have little formal education but are doing their best with what they have.

For the last month our group has been creating study plans under the guidance of two child-development instructors. We will work with children as young as toddlers and as old as fifth graders. Some of us have experience working with students. I have none. We’ve all spent about $2,000 to $3,000 for the trip and while the others work on lesson plans, I mostly think about contingency plans. Plan B: If the kids get bored, scared, out of control—read them Harry Potter.

We meet the children Tuesday.