Date: February 15, 2008 1:47:45 AM HST

Monday, February 4, 2008 – Port Shepstone

I probably should have mentioned by now that despite the impression I’ve given so far, not everyone in South Africa is poor. I’ve seen attractive houses, later model cars than I drive, restaurants and upscale hotels. In less than a week, I’ll cruise a high-end shopping mall in Johannesburg the equal of any in L.A. Moreover, almost forty years ago in rural Cambodia, I saw people living an even more basic lifestyle than most people here in South Africa do; none of those peasants had electricity in their one-room thatch huts, for example. They didn’t seem to be depressed or angry about what they didn’t have, so I wasn’t depressed or angry at seeing what they didn’t have. So why did I think “traditional” rather than “poverty” when I saw those huts? Because there are no “haves” and “have-nots” if everyone has roughly the same amount of wealth and thus lives the same lifestyle.

In South Africa, the gap between rich and poor is huge, and the effects of that gap became obvious to me today as I taught three classes at Port Shepstone High School (PSHS). The best way to explain this is for me to go back a few days to January 30, when I did my first guest-teacher gig at Siyapambili School. A rural school several miles outside the small, dusty town of Harding in Kwazulu-Natal Province, Siyapambili, meaning “out in front” or “leader,” packs twelve hundred students from grades seven through twelve and a couple of dozen teachers into two long, narrow buildings (class size ranges from seventy to eighty). I didn’t count, but there could not have been twenty classrooms in the school. Aside from the classrooms, there is a faculty prep room, and a few offices, and that’s it – no science labs, no art room, no music room, no gym, no cafeteria. The classroom I visited has no fans or air conditioning (it was a hot day), no maps or posters on the wall, only a chalkboard at the front of the room. To state the obvious, this is a poor school, and judging from the dwellings that we saw within walking distance, the students who attend it are poor. (By the way, walking distance in South Africa equals driving distance in the U.S., but more on that later or in a future entry.)

I was asked to present a class on American history and politics. That being a rather broad subject, I decided to give the learners (students are usually referred to as “learners”) a brief introduction to American geography and democracy, then let them determine the focus of the class according to the questions they had. I drew an outline map of the U.S. on the chalkboard, located New York City; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and Los Angeles (putting “Hollywood” in parenthesis next to Los Angeles, because given the worldwide popularity of American films, everyone’s heard of Hollywood, right? Wrong). I then mentioned that I live in Hawaii, and asked if anyone knew its location. One student tentatively raised his hand.

The students were attentive and polite for the rest of the period, but they were very tentative and asked few questions. I found myself lecturing on what I thought they might want to know rather than responding to questions about what interested them. After class, their teacher assured me that the learners had been interested in what I had to say, but that they were so unfamiliar with the U.S. that they didn’t know what to ask.

Skip to today, five days later. I’ve just finished guest appearances in three classes at PSHS.

Built as a “whites only” school, located in a formerly “whites only” neighborhood, the vast majority of PSHS students are now black. The three-floor building easily contains twenty times the classroom space that Siyapambili has, although PSHS has only seventy-seven more students (with fifty-nine teachers, approximately twice the number at Siyapambili). In addition to science labs, gym, athletic fields, and nicely landscaped grounds, there’s an indoor garden.

When I mentioned, upon introducing myself, that I live in Hawaii, the student sitting nearest the world map immediately pointed to its location. The class happened to be studying the Cold War, so the teacher asked me to talk about the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I proceeded to do in the same detail and at the same academic level as I would have done had I been at Punahou. Students were not shy about asking questions, and I felt much more at ease with the give-and-take in this class than I did with the one-way nature of the class at Siyapambili.

The next class was even more fun – and the students even more impressive. The teacher felt comfortable abandoning her planned agenda for the day, so I introduced myself and opened the class up to questions. What’s the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties? Does Obama have a chance to win the Democratic nomination against Hillary? (In every class in which I have spoken, including the one at Siyapambili, there has been intense interest in Obama). What is the Bush administration doing to help with the AIDS crisis in Africa? (When I complimented Bush for increasing AIDS funding for Africa, the student who had asked the question responded by claiming that the U.S. is doing less to help than is Canada.) Why did Bush refuse to sign the Kyoto Agreements on global warming? And so on. (I had less time in the third class, but the students were similarly forthcoming with their questions.)

Yunus did not sit in on any of my classes, but as we discussed them afterwards, he pointed out that the students at Siyapambili School are no less talented or intelligent than those at PSHS, but that the academic gaps between the students result from a gap in opportunities. Teachers at PSHS are better qualified. Students at PSHS don’t walk miles to and from school each day, and when they do arrive home, they have books from which to study and electricity to enable them to study. (Most rural students have electricity in their homes, but very few have books of their own to take home.) Just as important, while the students at Siyapambili (and other rural schools, of which Siyapambili is representative) come mostly from families which have not yet reached even the first rung of the socio-economic ladder and may not even know the ladder exists, those at PSHS come from families and associate with peers who have had the ability to climb the ladder and have the tools and self-confidence to continue climbing even higher.