First Day

Today is the first day of school, along the coast at least. Today is also the first day of service for my shiny new group of American service-learners. Walking to their 'dorm' this morning, I wanted a drink and a smoke and at least another 48 hours to resolve the various surprises of the last couple of days. While the centre we run here resembles a perfectly choreographed flashmob, our community partners have slightly more variables constraining their programming, and substantially less resources to deal with, well, to deal with reality.

The NGO funding crisis in South Africa (here, there, also here, oh and here) has meant that things are a little more turbulent than usual. As with every upsetting situation the world over, it's when the crisis seeps and sinks in between the electrified fencing around my middle-class life that I feel it most acutely. Two of our partner organizations closed last year, a number of them "restructured" or are running on a wing, a prayer and a bathtub of Ricoffy, and others are just ticking over steadily; unsure if they're sitting on a bomb about to explode or on an eternally reliable grandfather clock. Point is, to stay in sync with the uncertainty, my practice has had to change this last little while and my students have had to learn that adaptation is as valuable as any of their other well-honed skills. So, it's the first day of school for both traditional and unorthodox learners in Cape Town, and there are as many glitches in the morning as they are happy instances of things working out.

I arrive at 8:30 at a primary school in Mitchell's Plain to drop-off my two sports students. I can't get in the door. Parents, their school-going children as well as the smaller ones who couldn't be left at home, and an assortment of other people who seem as much interested spectators as anything else crowd the entrance hall. I step back outside where it is quiet enough to make a call and phone my partner: "Ya no, I'm in the principal's office," he tells me, "come through."
I wave to my students to follow me and I start elbowing people out of the way, gently ofcourse, but elbowing nonetheless. I lose my students in the milieu for a moment but we reach the principal's office and there are hugs and handshakes all round.
"Long time I haven't seen you!" the principal tells me.
"Ya" I answer, and we chat for a moment about our respective holidays.
"But tell me," I ask him, pointing to the rambling mass outside of his office, "is this normal?"
He laughs, and my partner replies: "You should've been here an hour ago, you couldn't walk!"
"I couldn't walk now," I say. "Anyway, here they are," I introduce my two students, "I'll leave them to you."
"Yes, yes, good," the principal seems chuffed and I'm waved out of the office into the cramped entrance hall once more.

About ten minutes later we're at a school around the corner (there is a school on every corner in Mitchell's Plain: if you look down on the area you just see little blocks of blue and green roofs breaking small clumps of red-roofed housing). I don't even try to see the receptionist, choosing instead to squeeze through the smorgasbord of entrance hall residents. One woman held a tiny baby with a tiny mouth that was pressed closed as it slept on her shoulder, on the otherside of the room it looked like a senior's club gathering. Obviously little bodies in uniforms far too big for them, shouldering school bags that overwhelmed them, ran and scattered constantly like a swarm of confused ants. Small children scare me at the best of times: when they swarm I am almost overcome with fear. I whisked my school-garden student to the upstairs office of my environmental education partner, greeted the familiar faces as quickly as possible and sprinted out of the school and back into the calm of the van.

"I wonder how everyone else did." I say to the driver after we've dropped off the third and last group at a high school in Khayelitsha.
"Oh no, we drove the routes yesterday, we all know where to go."
I smile at him. "No I'm not talking about the drivers, I know you know what's what, I'm talking about the organizations. I could have been talking to them every week for the last three months about today but the students can still arrive and be a surprise."
He laughs, but it's true. The nature of the crisis doesn't just mean that funding is tight, it means that organizations are tight. A small interruption to their daily operations can throw the whole show off-kilter. Is it right then, you may ask, for little ole Jen-Ben to throw students around like smarties? Well, it's a tricky one. Sometimes taking on a volunteer can build capacity, sometimes it can cost capacity, and usually my partners and I don't know which it's going to be until a couple of weeks into the placement.

For now though, it's the first day of school, and it's gone ok so far.