New cultures in our schools

In 1994 Mr Nelson Mandela became the President of South Africa. He was a wonderful leader better than any we had before him. He was such an example to everyone. He motivated especially sport to get different cultures together. This was an excellent way of motivating people, especially the rugby world cup. And in 1995 the Springboks won the world cup here in South Africa.

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It was so spectacular to see and how all the people started standing together. We have 11 different languages in our country as we have even more different cultures here. Because most of these people could speak English that became the other language we taught at our schools.

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 The new cultures now being admitted to all schools made my school into a parallel medium school where we had two classes taught in English and two in Afrikaans of the same level. My staff had some problems in the beginning because they always taught in Afrikaans but very quickly learnt all the English terms and “bobs your uncle”. There were other cultures in the Afrikaans class as well as some of them preferred to speak Afrikaans. Two events that I will never forget:

 The first one was a child from another culture was sent to the office for doing something wrong. Not knowing how their culture worked I phone the mother and said would she mind coming to the office as there is a problem at school with her child. I normally did this with all children getting the parents in but this was new to me. The child mother said it was no problem as she was the matron of the hospital about 3 blocks from the school and she will be here in a few minutes. She stopped next to me and the teacher, who brought the child to the office, the next minute without saying a word she grabbed the child by the neck and held her against the wall with her feet dangling in the air. After a little while she put her down and then repeated the same action, at this stage the teacher ran away very shocked and I was standing there alone with the mother and dangling child. When she wanted to repeat it the third time I said no, I think this is enough. The mother said to me in their culture they do not take any nonsense from children making nonsense they show them what can happen to children that have bad behaviour. I must admit I did not run away but I was in as much shock as what the teacher was.

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 I realised that different cultures had different ways of doing things and that we had to respect them all. I must say we never had any trouble with this child again and she turned out to be a leader in  Grade 7 so maybe they did something right just in a different way we were used to. 

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The next time I will never forget is when we took these kids to Gold Reef City where they could play in a theme park, go down a mine and see how their parents worked every day. This was really a very interesting day because some of all the children had never been to such a big theme park or seen anything like this before. I am going to put some pictures in here just to give you an idea of the extent of this place was and most had never gone down a mine before. 

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We divided them into groups of 20 and they had the time of their lives. Then they went down the mine the same way. At 13h00 we decided it was time to have lunch. Every child had brought his or her own food package and the boys sort of landed up in a group, the girls in another yet all the children of the other culture sat together in a group. They invited me to join them and I sat with them. I saw that they all brought their food to the middle and everyone ate of everything they brought. Here was something that I had never seen before. They knew that some of the children did not have much to eat so when they put it all together everyone including me had more than enough. Apparently this was part of their culture to share food with everyone.

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 I started visiting some of these children’s houses after this as I really wanted to know more about their culture I was always received very friendly and always given something to eat. I did not always know what I was eating but can assure you it was always very tasty. People did not like to go into those areas where the other culture was brought up but they started recognising my car and I really never had any problems and was well received. My staff always sent their best students to me so that I could praise them and give them a nice remark in their book or maybe a star, when they were still very small. I must say that these kids from another culture were there very often because they were so thankful to be in a good school. They always saw their school as a privilege and not as a right which really shows how thankful they were.