Spring time in SA

September 1st is "spring day" in South Africa. I'm still confused as to whether this marks a national holiday, or the actual beginning of spring. I was under the impression that spring would begin in the Southern Hemisphere at the same time that fall begins in the Northern Hemisphere. Either way, the first 8 days of "spring" have proven to be as equally cold and wet as "winter." To this effect, I am spending my spring break week cooped up in the library research commons researching the first installation of my dissertation - so it really doesn't matter what's going on outside.

In other news...
This school year I've been working as a mentor with a UCT student-run organization called Inkanyezi. The program is in its second year and is premised on the idea of encouraging and providing local 11th and 12th graders with the resources to research and apply to post-high school programs of study or work training (in a country where the unemployment rate sits at 40% this area of work is pertinent). There are about 150 student volunteers and three times a week, groups of mentors take "information centers" i.e. lap tops, mobile internet modems and printers into low-income or township high schools around Cape Town. In addition to the information center, mentors are assigned approx. 8 learners to provide them with direct guidance and support.

Last Monday was my last meeting with my group of 11th grade learners at a high school in the township of Phillipe. The school year is not over yet but the learners will be going into a series of intense examinations over the next couple of months so we cut the program a little short. By working with the learners directly, I learned a lot about a lot of stuff - which I will not go into here - but mostly about the limitations of the South African education system to supply poor schools with the staff and educational resources that they need. However, I wanted to share this in order to relay a victory I've had this year:
I started this program being very cautious of the demographics of the organization. I knew we'd be going into predominantly black schools and I did not want to be part of a group that was comprised of white middle-class people showing the poor blacks how things were done in the capitalising, "real world" (South Africa and Africa in general is FULL of these organizations). That said, I found Inkanyezi to be a very diverse program comprised of international students, South African students who understand the challenges in post-Apartheid schooling and students who have come from "disadvantaged" backgrounds and want to help others get out of those situations. Despite all of this concern for diversity, I still found myself, a white middle-class girl going into the township school trying to encourage the youths. If you know me, then you know that this reality is almost painful for me - and it stiffened me like a board on my first day. I had 8 11th grade girls sitting around a table staring at me and I had completely forgotten what it was like to be an 11th grade girl. Instead, I let the disparity of economic and life differences get between us and I flailed - at least I thought I'd flailed. The next couple of meetings the same girls kept coming back. Despite the fact that there was the same painful silences in our conversations/me talking and posing questions, they continued to come back.
As other learners dropped out of the program, and our Monday group went from 60 learners to 12 on the last day of meeting last week, I can proudly proclaim that my group remained fully intact to the end. Other mentors came and went and switched around learners, but I showed up every week and so did my group. Why? it's still a mystery to me. As far as I could tell by their silence, they were bored stiff by me, but their persistence might prove that maybe they did get something out of it. I certainly learned that the youths today just need some consistency. I think they knew that I'd be there for them and that counted for something - I know it counted to me to see their faces every week.