Storms and Lifeboats

The last day of school and I am swept into an emotional storm of goodbyes to colleagues who are moving on and those who have just gone for the summer, hugs from my S1’s, goodbyes to others…and amidst all this, feeling huge sadness since I’d hoped to have some of my IB students stay over for the next couple of weeks so that they can attend a Rice University workshop…but that is not working out.

Sometimes things are so frustrating. An institution from the USA offers to come and provide a FREE three-week Biomedical Technology Session for our students. Almost thirty sign up because it’s a great opportunity to liaise with a North American Institution. The catch is that they have no place to stay AND the taxis here are threatening a ‘stay-away’. These students live a long way from campus and have been boarding at the school, but they can’t board for these three weeks. Now those ones who cannot get transport will have to give up this great opportunity. They are very disappointed, but stoic, as ever.

That stoicism is something that awes me. I call them ‘rubber balls’; they are so used to bouncing back. My IB’s work so hard for their future; and they work against so many odds—all the time! I just wish that we could make the path smoother at times instead of adding more bumps. Life is bumpy—very bumpy here (or as one of my Poetry Club students writes, "...Life is a crooked path...".

Here are a couple of stories among many, many that represent my students…

One student writes…
I have been working very hard since my primary level so that I can succeed in the future. My parents abandoned me when I was still a child and I was brought up by my late grandmother who passed away when I was doing Form 4. I worked very hard to pass C.O.S.C and I was living with my younger brother and he was expelled for school fees, so he is not attending school due to financial problems. Right now I am living with my brother and two of my uncle's orphaned kids. [Here, if students can’t pay fees they are expelled, so lots of promising students lose huge opportunities due to lack of finances.]

Another one writes…
First of all, I am from a local disadvantaged school and the student motivation there is very low, so I have been looking for a way of motivating them and the only thing that I think will motivate them is when they see me as a former student of their school gain grounds in my career. In this way they will see that even though their school is low-rated, there are still some people from their school who succeed due to
determination and dedication, having been given an opportunity to further their studies. So, Mrs. Fath, getting a scholarship maybe, to study abroad, will serve as the best tool for me to go back and update them about my career in that moment. This is because I have always believed that what keeps people going is when they see the people ahead of them prospering in terms of their careers.

So the storm is raging, and I’m trying to build lifeboats. I’m researching more scholarship ideas for students here. This year I was able to find and get one excellent scholarship for a student. She will be heading to UBC in Vancouver this August with full scholarship, including accommodation and air fare. There’s NO POSSIBLE WAY she’d ever be able to go overseas to school without this opportunity. How grateful I am to institutions like UBC who have a strong global perspective. Perhaps they have a sense for the overwhelming poverty and lack of resources for most people in countries like Lesotho. I’ve found a few more good scholarships so hopefully the number of students who receive them can be at least doubled next year.

Another lifeboat would be finding laptop computers with wireless that could be donated for student use here. I’m stymied: my students will spend a good amount of their winter vacation working on some major research papers that they must complete to graduate. The catch is that they need Internet to research. If they were to rely only on the State Library here—HA! What a joke! The books are all woefully old, limited, AND they cannot even be signed out. Using Internet Cafes? Cost prohibitive. Lack of technology and lack of resources here just make the challenges huge, and the college is not doing too much to help them in terms of making research facilities available during this time. I'm stymied, but I'm sure THEY'LL figure out a way to deal with it.

So, as you can tell, I’m in an emotional storm at the end of this school year, but I would not trade it. It’s been a very rewarding year!