Poverty Hinders a Hunger to Learn

In a rural corner of

South Africa

, a grandmother is raising eight children on R700 ($97, GAA) a month - and her biggest worry is paying school fees

IT'S 6.30am . Suzan Dolo sniffs her snuff, with her right hand clutching a hand-made grass-broom. At 64, she still sweeps her sandy 100m' yard before sunrise - the first activity every morning for the women of Vergenoeg village, 80km northwest of Mokopane in Limpopo .

"You lot are going to be late," she screams at five of her eight grandchildren. "Ms Makgotlho is already on her way."

They don't have any means of measuring time. "Our wireless [radio] is not working any more," says Cylia, 16, a Grade 9 pupil at Nakonkwetlou Secondary School . Thus Perpetoa Makgotlho, principal of Modisha Primary School , is their only chronometer.

Salome and Pula didn't sleep at home the previous night. Pula , 21, the truant and delinquent, hasn't been to school, where he is doing Grade 10, for two days. Salome, 20, has been asked by a relative to babysit for two days.

N ine-year-old twin sisters Elizabeth and Francinah are bathing in a plastic wash basin. Cylia and Suzan, 14 - named after her granny - are the first to get up, prepare the fire and sweep the mud veranda before having the basin to themselves. Manoko, 11, is next in the basin queue.

Manoko is combing her hair , using a piece of a broken mirror to look at her dark-skinned face and beautiful eyes. "I would like to become a nurse," she responds to my question, while shyly hiding her face behind her hands.

They all wash in the tiny, weather-beaten, thatched-roof hut. It smells of sweat, sorghum, the cow dung used to polish the mud floor and smoke from a makeshift fireplace.

All of them, including Salome's daughter, depend on their granny's R700 monthly state pension grant.

"Please eat, you cannot go to school on an empty stomach," says Dolo. Their breakfast is black tea without bread. "I can't give them anything. I don't have a cent to buy dry bread. They will have to go on like this until I get paid on Monday," she says, sneezing continuously from the snuff.

Food is the least of Dolo's problems - school fees are her biggest worry.

The mother of seven of her grandchildren is in Tembisa, on the East Rand , looking for a job. She has left the children under the guardianship of Dolo. The granny is not prepared to say anything about their fathers.

Pula 's parents died and he has been living with Dolo ever since.

Her husband died in 1979 and she has known nothing but poverty for the greater part of her life. However, the two schools still demand about R500 in fees a year.

"Every time we get paid, I have to settle my debts at the local store for groceries I took the previous month," she says. "I pay about R260 each month."

This is for a bag of mealiemeal, sugar, washing powder and tea. She spoils her grandchildren by buying them a chicken on payday - the only time they can lick their fingers besides Christmas.

After she pays R10 to a burial society she buys other basic groceries amounting to about R250. A n electricity recharge card costs R30, even though they only use it for lights to allow the children to do their homework.

On weekends, Dolo supplements her pension with the sorghum beer she is brewing. "If business is good, I might rake in around R150 and I will buy tsotsi [a 15kg bag of mealiemeal] and pay more fees," she says.

A brownish liquid is leaking from a big brown clay pot in the hut, "a sign that the beer is maturing", she says.

"All that I want is to see my grandchildren doing something for themselves in future and not ending up like me and their mother," she says. "I want them to be nurses, teachers or to be like you [a journalist]."

A large portion of her income goes on school fees. "If I don't give them [the schools] anything, I'm likely to meet my grandchildren at the gate returning from school. The schools send them home every payday to get money. They say they must not return until they get money. If I don't pay until the end of the year, they won't get their report cards.

"I tried to tell the principals that I'm struggling but they say I'm not the only one struggling."

However, Makgotlho says her school doesn't chase away children but "just sends them home to remind their parents of the fees".

Such incidents are common in rural areas where principals take advantage of illiterate and ignorant parents such as Dolo, says Limpopo Education spokesman Freddy Greaver.

Asked whether he has told parents about exemption for those who can't pay, Nakonkwetlou principal Malesela Lekalakala says parents are frustrated by the bureaucracy involved in applying for exemption and end up not applying.

He adds that the government does not supply enough teaching aids and that funds have shrunk, which means the school has to depend solely on fees.

Solly Mabusela, chairman of the Global Campaign for Education, says this is the reason why the campaign's international lobby group has been calling for the total scrapping of user fees.

"The state does not have [enough] machinery to monitor the situation on the ground," Mabusela says. "There will always be such incidents and loopholes."

It is a warning to Dolo's grandchildren that their education might be limited as tertiary institution's fees rise higher and higher.

Alternatively, says Firoz Patel, acting deputy director-general in the Department of Education, they might have to wait until a new funding policy is implemented. "We want to ultimately ban school fees in poor schools," he says. "This could be as soon as 2005."

In the meantime, Dolo will have to share her house, her pension and the income from her sorghum beer with her grandchildren - and hope they will somehow rise above the poverty that restricts their lives.




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