Playing fields

The chairperson of the Lavender Hill Development Trust showed me an aerial map last week. She pointed out a dilapidated structure on the boundary of Lavender Hill High. "They call it the pink house," she tells me.
"What happens there?" I ask.
She offers a short laugh. "No one really knows. All we know is that there was a separate entrance," she points to what looks like a gap in the school fence, "and people on foot and in cars would go to house, stay a while, and leave."
Now that the sports fields have been built, and a new fence constructed, access to the pink house is somewhat limited. Now you have to come at it from the east, from the side of the informal settlement, not the M5.

The Development Trust was set up to manage a sustainability fund for the management of the sports fields. "Why aren't the sports fields the school's problem?" you may wonder...

Couple of years back, the infamous Bottles and I were doing an internship with an urban development organization based in Khayelitsha. One of the activities with which I was tasked, was to increase the learners' interest in the sports fields that had recently been built on their school grounds. See, there were three schools in the area for whom these fields were built. Now, all that these three schools needed to do was to sit down and work out a schedule: who was going to use the sports fields on what afternoons for what sports. Months after the fields had been built, the schools hadn't got this right, and the organization hadn't handed over management of the fields. The idea was that if more learners had greater interest in the fields, and knew how to "participate" in the process of using them, the schools would feel the pressure to get their poultry aligned, and, quite simply, to sort their shit out.

And so, two years later, I'm sitting in the HQ/lounge of the Lavender Hill Development Trust drinking tea and joining the lament of the chairwoman.

The sports fields are not the school's problem, because, well, in many cases, the school is the problem. Not the whole school, no-no, and therein lies problem number one: often, schools do not work as one unit. Therefore, problem number two: management of resources like sports fields becomes a political activity. Which leads us to problem number three: between the internal politicking and the external politicking, the doing very often does not get done.

"Another cup of tea?" she offers.
"Ah, I've got to get back to the office." I tell her.

I drive back down the M5, past the primary school on the corner, there are a couple of kids milling around at the fenced entrance. I hope it's break time.