Summer 2008 Reflection by Lyla Berg It has taken me a very long time to be able to write my reflection on the principals’ professional development sessions that I facilitated in South Africa this past summer because of the cacophony of emotions, impressions, and thoughts that have been with me since I left Johannesburg on…

Summer 2008 Reflection by Jim Metz “You know what our problem is? We have too many learners. I have 124 learners in one class.” “What do you do?,” I asked. “Well, I must teach half the class while the other half waits, then I teach the other half and while the others work on problems…

Mr Yunus Chamda (Emfuleni), one of the co-founders of TWBSA, reminded us of the strength of grass-roots, community projects. TWBSA is a project funded and supported by local communities in Hawaii and South Africa and it has been growing in success for 8 consecutive years. Later in June, 130 educators joined TWBSA in Mthatha. The…

Date: March 24, 2008 11:51:39 PM HST (last one, I promise) Monday, March 17, 2008 – Florence, Italy As I browse through what I’ve written, I’m surprised at how much I’ve written in such a relatively short time, but as I think more deeply about what I’ve seen and learned, my mental rolodex stops at…

Date: March 17, 2008 4:48:12 AM HST Saturday, March 15 and Sunday, March 16, 2008 – Florence, Italy I arrived in Florence in the late afternoon of March 13 and though I have spent the past two days on a different continent, I don’t feel that I have really left South Africa yet. There’s still…

Date: March 15, 2008 6:10:34 AM HST Tuesday, March 11, 2998 – Port Shepstone Pauline invited me to spend another day with her and of course I jumped at the chance. “We’ve been to Nyandezulu; today we will go beyond.” She meant that we would go deeper into the rural areas west of Port Shepstone;…

Date: March 11, 2008 8:13:42 AM HST Thursday, March 6, 2008 – Port Shepstone I’ve been lucky enough to have spent the better part of another day with Pauline Duncan in the rural areas surrounding Port Shepstone. We returned to some places that we had been and met some people we had met on the…

Date: March 7, 2008 2:29:11 AM HST Tuesday, February 26, 2008 – Cape Town Years ago, there was a German language teacher at Punahou who would get upset whenever someone mentioned Hitler or the Nazis during a lunchtime conversation. It’s not fair – there’s so much more to German history than Hitler, she’d say, yet…

Date: March 7, 2008 1:49:59 AM HST Saturday, February 23, 2008 – Cape Town Though apartheid consisted of almost 150 laws and proclamations, I’ve noticed that certain museums focus on the effects of specific, especially odious laws (the Sharpeville Museum’s focus on the Pass Laws, for example). The District Six Museum in downtown Cape Town…

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 – Ixopo I visited two schools today, both in a part of Kwazulu Natal Province to which I had not yet traveled. Located about an hour’s drive inland from a point on the coast about halfway between Port Shepstone and Durban, Ixopo is another of those dusty frontier towns in the…