Dear friends and donors,
this is last blog of 2017 which was written by Ruth Maria Kasper, our volunteer from Germany who spent the last three months with us. She has left already for Germany.
We thank all of you for your support, your donations, thoughts and prayers for the work of Tsibogang. We are fully aware that without your support we would have not made it. We are still amazed that there is even money in the Tsibogang account although we really had a tough time in between. We wish all of you a blessed Christmas and a good start into the year 2018, may God bless you !
Christel & Wolfgang Hermann
Report of Ruth Maria Kasper
The first question people ask me here is when they hear that I am from Germany: “Oh, how much do you like South Africa? Is it different to Germany? “And my answer is always:” It is a totally different world but I like it! ”
My three-month internship here in South Africa at Tsibogang Christian Action Group started on September 20 and ends on December 16, 2017. Three months is a quarter of a year, but in the end it felt like two weeks. Time is flying! During the three months, I lived with Hermanns and Undine Rauter in the community in Mafikeng and felt very well and protected. It was a good feeling to be able to return to a place where I felt safe and secure on days when I did not feel well.
I came to South Africa because I wanted to see the world from a different perspective. Sometimes I found it frightening and it made me think to see under what conditions people live in the villages. A family of six could live in corrugated iron huts or in two-room houses, sometimes without water or electricity. Our standards in Germany (always running hot water, electricity and a good school education) are a luxury for many people here. At times it really embarrassed me and made me feel guilty about my privileged life at home in Germany.
Most of my time spent in South Africa I worked in one of Tsibogang’s two Early Learning Centers. In the mornings, the kindergarten took place there with about 30 children, who get breakfast and lunch there. They learn according to the Montessori pedagogy in which they are also begin learning how to write. It was impressive to see with how much focus and how independently the children worked. Learning with all the senses and promoting autonomous learning and discovery through the Montessori education is very impressive and helps the children really well.
When the kids were picked up at lunchtime, after school, the schoolchildren came to the after school program, where we did math lessons with them. I mainly taught the fifth graders (around 10 children) and practiced multiplication with them. The joy of the students, when they were told that they had calculated the task correctly, was very touching and you could see that they had a lot of fun with arithmetic because of their success. But it is still shocking to see that fifth and sixth graders cannot perform simple multiplication, but rather count by using their fingers or a sheet of paper.
The first week of October I attended the Tshepanang Workshop for Peer educators, where I also got my Tswana name “Tshegofatso” which means Blessing.
The workshop was really interesting because it taught me the importance of teaching students values, self control and confidence through the lessons and stories that were taught and presented there because of rape, teenage pregnancy and especially HIV / AIDS such a big problem in South Africa.
It was an important experience for me to notice that people here have different social standards and values, e.g. privacy or the value of community, and also have a very different family understanding than in Germany or other Western countries. Also, the people are much more open and nice, the men sometimes a bit too nice, but the sense of community is much more cordial.
But you still notice that the history of South Africa is characterized by segregation and racial bias. Even after more than 20 years of democracy and the abolition of apartheid, there are unfortunately still big differences between rich and poor and also between white and black. And it is still funny for some, if a white person goes through the village or drives with shared taxis. Which is why it is even more important to override this thinking.
It has been an incredibly impressive and rewarding opportunity for me to have been able to participate in the community and work of Tsibogang and to see how important and futuristic Tsibogang’s work , and the value-oriented education and prevention work on HIV, is.