EPWP on the ground

I found myself yesterday in the rural town of Ingwavuma, located three kilometres from the country’s boarder with Swaziland. We were there to film the EPWP’s teacher’s training project.

The Expanded Public Work’s Programme was announced by Thabo Mbeki in his 2003 State of the Nation Address. Did you know about it? I didn’t. What he did was set in motion a mission to provide training and work opportunities for those who really need them.

So yesterday I met Nonhlanhla Mnguni and the women in her class who are all working in communities as pre-school teachers but have no formal training. They were sining and dancing because the lesson was on how songs can be used to teach language, movement, self-expression and culture. On all the walls are handmade HIV posters; 1 teacher has already died and another is off sick. Because very few schools have books, the teachers learn to make their own books as resources. The teachers take great care shading in the shapes with colour pencils.

Then we went to see how this training is actualized in the at the nearby Khungwayo crèche. Well it wasn’t actually nearby, it took us 45 minutes to drive there and even had to get out to push the car through a sandy patch- but it was the closest crèche to the training college.

On our drive I wrote, “through the dry heat she walks- the dust from our car sticking- the bars of the wheel barrow burning, her hands- the 2 twenty litre water barrels in the burrow, empty- the head of the baby on her back lolling- becoming accustomed to suffering early.”

The fact that the 140 children who attend the remote Khungwayo crèche are getting an education is remarkable and that it is of such a high standard is more so. They are in uniform, most of them, and as they gather under the shade of a tree holding hands and making an uneven circle- thick on one side and broken on the other- a lump forms in my heart. They are so quiet. Except for the one who is no taller than my knee and totally freaked out by me, a white person. I escape for a moment into the small classroom. The walls are alive with posters on children’s rights, parts of the body, and domestic animals. There is a ‘quiet area’ with puzzles which are magazine pages cut up and placed together again, and a corner where empty Omo washing powder boxes and Handy Andy bottles make up the ‘fantasy area’.

I wished I could give them something to make their lives better, but they have teachers and a pretty school, which means an education and the potential of a brighter future. What more could I give? When we left I wished we could all hug each other but they just weren’t that into me…