The Stepping Stone

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.