"We grow them small here."

I ended the day by taking a photo of my students sitting on the pavement while we waited for our transport to pick us up. I was tempted to go to sleep right there, in between the taxis that dropped the sports teams off at the cross-country race. It was a long day, filled with small children. I don't trust small children; they move too fast. One moment they're standing in a straight row, the next they're in a pile-up. The transition so quick and smooth, it's like their little bodies are centred around powerful magnets that snap close to each other when activated. It doesn't help that here in Mitchells Plain, "we grow them small," as my students were told when they arrived at the school.

I thought that the morning's dance classes were going to be the messiest thing I saw that day. The smallest class had 35 learners. On a constant sugar high from the crappy sweets they buy at the tuckshop, they bounce constantly. While my student tried to teach some Grade 3s basic hip-hop moves, some boys at the back of the class did their own dance.
"It's the chicken dance," the one boy giggled, "the Chicken Licken dance!" His friends laughed and chicken-lickened with flapping arms and pecking heads for a bit before they lost interest and climbed underneath the semi-standing ping-pong table.

The school doesn't have a sports coordinator. There are volunteers, like my dance student, who run the physical education and life orientation classes. But,
"What happens on the days you aren't here?" I asked my student.
"The kids sit in their classes."
"And do what?"
"Well, the teachers go to the teachers' lounge because it's a free period for them, so the kids just sit."
"They sit?"
"Yeah."
They sit and make a noise, disrupting the classes around them. The teachers from neighbouring classrooms have to leave their own classes, come and shout at them for a while, go back, and try to teach with 35 children doing whatever the hell they want in the room next door.

Off to my other student's English class for the longest hour and a half of my week. It was as though the learners would get a small electrical jolt everytime they sat still for longer than half a minute. Turning around, sideways, in a few instances underneath their desk and upside down when looking for an eraser on the floor. The teacher who was meant to be here had to go and set up the cross-country track. If we hadn't been there his students would have sat unsupervised, replicating the problem above. Not that our presence seemed to encourage productivity.

It's 2.15pm and the school day is over. I'm ready to collapse. But it's off to cross-country we go. I'm in the school bus with the learners. The teachers are discussing whether getting a whistle and blowing it periodically to get the kids to sit down would be at all effective. As we reach the traffic lights at the corner of Spine and Eisleben, the intersection that advertizes itself as "Snoek Point", a police van rolls up to our left. A chorus of shouts goes up from the learners: "Dissie boere, dissie boere*! Sit still!" I laugh out loud, it's all too absurd. But the kids are momentarily calmed.

Our role at the cross-country venue is to separate the finishing runners into the "girls" and "boys" channels, and to keep them in the order in which they finished. The finish line is at the bottom of a hill, and there is no efficient way of noting down the names of finishers, so a queue of runners waiting to have their names recorded starts to wind its way up the gravelly slope. Runners run past the end of the line, have to be hauled back up to the top of the slope, some can't slow down in time so crash into the back of the line and push five or six learners over who rapidly reshuffle their places. I can shout with a volume comparable to a foghorn, so was positioned at the stop of the hill to scream directions to the jostling runners. It was like I was an orchestral conductor, standing on a tiny rock in the middle of an oncoming tidal wave, trying wave each droplet of water into the direction they should go.

I sat at my kitchen table last night after dinner, put my head on the wood and fell asleep for a while.


* It's the police! Technically, "it's the farmers!", a throw-back to the days of white Afrikaans policemen.