I have a storm of emotion raging through me right now. It matches the torrents of rain that have poured upon us here in the last few days.
Storms of adversity, storms of uncertainty, storms of injustice...all around me.
I'm so frustrated for my students as they continue to face hurdle after hurdle after hurdle in their pursuit of further education. How can it be so difficult? Why does everything have to be so difficult for so many people here?
Stumbling block post-secondary systems here are so inefficient that students don't find out if they are accepted at institutions until it is too late to complete all the paperwork to get them to classes on time, to get them into residence.
Stumbling block institutions here don't bother to respond to email questions--don't bother to respond to telephone calls, or that just give students the run-around.
These systems that may finally respond after a student has taken a huge risk of traveling long distances to meet face to face. When faced with a REAL student, these institutions finally respond. Meanwhile these students spend over a month of their wages just to make this trip...
Then there's the poverty that has been a stumbling block for quite a few all along. They can't afford to apply to very many institutions so that limits their options. They can't afford to do a lot of things that would sooth the path.
Then there's this funding system and the High Commission that requires every T to be crossed and every i dotted. You can't apply for funding until you have admission from an institution and those come late, then you can't apply for a study permit until you have proof of funding which you don't get until it is almost--almost too late, and it IS too late to get down for registration or to claim your spot in residence... You can't get a study permit until you have proof of medical coverage which you can't get because you can't pay for it until you get funding... It just goes round and round and round, and at this time it is making me so frustrated and discouraged on behalf of my students, so frustrated as they come to me for help and I just feel so often so powerless...
Coming from a system, in Canada, where we believe in reducing barriers to success and access, and coming to a system that just places mammoth stumbling blocks in the way of students...
They are getting there, though. They are tough! But once there the stumbling blocks and frustrations don't end--not by a long-shot. There's the post-secondary institutions in a post-apartheid era that haven't really figured out that having white, Afrikaaner students conducting juvenile initiation activities on black students--screaming at them in Afrikaans and whipping them...just is totally politically ignorant and inhumane. To have these same institutions TEACH students who don't speak Afrikaans in that language is...well let's just say that is a very evident barrier to success for students who are paying the same tuition as Afrikaans speaking students, so go figure. I can't. I've tried to make sense of this in my mind and I am just reduced to storms of frustration.
Then there's the students who don't have their funding from the government yet and they have no--I mean no--financial resources so they have no text books and...it goes on.
So...I'm listening to this music right now and the lyrics happen to be...
The ocean so deep, the mountain so high
O Lord, You are the master of wind and tide...
Hide me in Your heart, O Lord...
Still the wind and calm the storm
Hide me in Your heart
Irony? Maybe, or maybe my divine God just knows everything!
I'm reminded that God says to me, "Be still and know that I am God."
I just need to be still and trust that God IS in control of all the storms of life.
I just need to put these storms into the perspective of a wider picture and
a wider scope of time and space.
After all, this place we are all in together--this life--is a place of storms and uncertainty.
So I guess I just need to decide if I will let the storm sweep over me and pull me down
or if I will rest in the One who stills the storms of life.
