Stimulating Minds in Alex

“Why do we read?” I asked the combined fifth-grade classes at Rose-Act’s Saturday’s Cool. This supplementary educational program for grades five through twelve serves the desperately poor township of Alexandra, near Johannesburg.

“To learn new things,” a boy said promptly, and I knew this was going to be a fun class.

“To find out about the world,” another said.

“To learn to spell.”

“It stimulates the mind.” (That one I definitely was not expecting.)

“To learn better English.”

“Hmm. Why do we need to learn English?” I asked.

A Zulu boy on the front row raised his hand. “To talk to people from other parts of South Africa,” he said. This country has eleven official languages. Several were represented in the class. Without English, that Zulu boy would have trouble communicating with the Tswana girl sitting next to him.

I told them about Litt-World last week and how people from Indonesia, Brazil and Nigeria could communicate because we understood English. “When you know English, you can’t just talk to people in South Africa. You can talk to the whole world!”

I had brought a stack of books, many from their library, to have a contest between the two classes. “Which book would you use to find the meaning of a word?

"I want to know if the tree growing in the yard of my new house will have fruit. Which book will I use?

"My neighbor has just found out she has HIV and she wants to know—” They had grabbed the book before I even finished the question.

After class the kids took my camera. (I get the best pictures that way!)

Later I went to the bookstore with Anneke, the Dutch woman working for IBM who is the volunteer librarian for the program. We had money to spend! It was given by the Vacation Bible School of First Baptist Church, Webster, Wisconsin, USA. Books are expensive in South Africa—especially the nicely illustrated information books we wanted. The money didn’t go as far as we would have liked. But the enthusiastic readers in the fifth grade were excited to know there would be new books in their library.



***Please note*** I will be discontinuing this blog after this trip to South Africa. You can continue reading about My Not-so-ordinary World at http://leannehardy.net/blog.htm where I am already posting.  I hope to hear from you there!

Snow

Last July (winter where we lived in mile-high Johannesburg, South Africa) it snowed for the first time in twenty-six years. My friends called each other in the middle of the night. “Look outside! It’s snowing!” Long before morning the wet, white stuff had stopped falling. The children at our church’s Holiday Club made muddy snowmen imitating the ones they had learned about in books. When I first saw the dusting on the ground, I thought it was heavy frost. On closer inspection, I realized, “No. That’s snow. I knew it was cold in my house!”

Now I am ‘home’ in northern Wisconsin (with central heating.) Saturday morning I skated on our lake. Even though the ice was thick and solid, it was disconcerting to watch the sandy lake bottom glide by a meter below my blades. Late morning it began to snow—not a couple centimeters, but inches and inches of white powder that draped the pines and made our woods look like we had just stepped through the back of a magical wardrobe.

Last year it never snowed until we had returned to Africa, so I was very out of practice Sunday afternoon when I clamped on my skis. The sky was a deep blue-gray with the promise of more snow to come. The only sound was the swish, swish of my skis along the trail and my verbalized instructions to myself when my inexperience landed me in a heap. (I’m a librarian by training. We all talk to ourselves.) I came home to colored lights on the porch, a glittering tree between the windows, a fire on the hearth and the promise of Christmas to come.

Several years ago I wrote a book entitled Between Two Worlds. Will I ever stop feeling caught in that place? In Johannesburg now it is warm and sunny, and my friends sip coffee outside Mug and Bean and plan their Christmas braai (barbecue, to my fellow-Americans.) In Wisconsin the snow is falling again, adding another three to five inches to Saturday’s unmelted six. My greedy soul wants both worlds. Whichever continent I am on, I feel perpetually left out of what I am missing on the other side of the world.