Schools, Buildings, Paint, Flowers and the Smell of Human Poop

Today we visited two schools. The first school was a cinder-blocked building built buy the Apartheid government. It looked like a prison. Garbage was everywhere, as was the smell of human excrement. The windows were broken and students stuck their hands through the broken glass to wave at us as we passed.

As we came near the classroom door, students wearing white collared shirts and black pants streamed out of the rooms and surrounded us, laughing and smiling, giving us a thumbs up. One of the children grabbed my sunglasses and tried them on, pressing the glasses on to his forehead comically, sticking his small hands under his arm pits and posing, as if for an album cover. I handed them to every single student that approached me. They all posed like rap stars. The glasses are now resting on my forehead, a thousand little-kid fingerprints obstructing my view of the outside world.

I did not get the sense that the teachers in this school felt any sense of ownership over their classrooms, or ownership of their role as teachers. We walked into the classroom and they let us interact with their students freely. They did not get angry at us or tell us to leave.

The second school was located 15 minutes away from the first school, still in the Port Elizabeth township of New Brighton, one of the poorest areas in all of South Africa.

The building was painted a beautiful green and yellow. Here, the principal was a woman, an institution of a woman. Bright and boyount, she took us from classroom to classroom and we watched the quiet children studying from their textbooks. The boys wore uniforms with green and yellow striped ties and navy blue vests. The girls wore a similar outfit, except they tied their ties around their waists like a belt. The children looked at us as we passed by the classrooms, but they did not get up out of their chairs to yell and dance.

The inside of the school smelled like hand sanitzer, the outside like freshly cut grass and flowers. The teachers wore beautiful beaded African jewelry and spoke softly and excitedly. There was a garden patch, and space had been cleared for a new computer lab.