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Poverty
Hinders a Hunger to Learn
By
Moshoeshoe Monare, Sunday Times ( In
a rural corner of IT'S
"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 Salome
and 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 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.
Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |