The Bulungula Incubator: Creating vibrant and sustainable rural communities

The Bulungula Incubator Team (photo taken from their website)

This week’s Womxn of the Week is Réjane Woodroffe, the director and co-founder of The Bulungula Incubator (see website here).  The Bulungula Incubator is a rural development NGO located in the Eastern Cape with a mission to create sustainable, vibrant rural communities through partnering with them, as well as through introducing external technologies and knowledge that can help people live much happier lives, without undermining local traditions and culture.  Their primary areas of focus are education, health and nutrition, sustainable livelihoods, and basic services.  This organisation utilizes an integrated approach to development in the area, with the consent and request of the community; it is a catalyst through which the communities take ownership of their own lives and implement change.  Réjane has kindly spoken a bit more about its beginnings and her involvement with the NGO, the work that they do, and how you can get involved.

A bit about Réjane and the Bulungula Incubator

I was born in 1974 in the Cape Flats in Cape Town, in the Lotus River/Grassy Park area. My family had been forcibly removed from District Six and relocated to the Cape Flats. I attended High School at South Peninsula High, where I was Chairperson of the SRC in 1987 and 1988 and part of the Western Cape COSAS Student movement which was affiliated to the UDF. I was active in the anti-apartheid struggle throughout my school-going years. It was gratifying to be able to see Nelson Mandela walk out of prison, be present for his first public speech at the Grand Parade, see the ANC un-banded and be old enough to vote in the first democratic elections. I proceeded to study Business Science (majoring in Economics) at UCT. In 1997, as I was completing my time at UCT I began to apply to study a Masters in Development but (unbeknownst to me), I had been selected by a professor for recommendation to an Assistant Economist position at the investment bank, Merrill Lynch. While it was by no means a dream to become part of the finance world, I needed to make money, I had no family resources to rely on and I had a student loan to sort out. So I thought, “Take the job, save some cash and then study Development.”

Of course years went by and my career grew, I went on to become the Chief Economist at Metropolitan Asset Managers, my second employer after Merrill Lynch.  However, I was becoming increasingly unhappy and wanted to get back to the business of community development and work. I had done some of this while working in finance, as a volunteer counsellor at Rape Crisis and the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE), but I wanted to go back to development full time.  I then applied for, and received, a scholarship to attend the University of Sussex in the UK to complete a Masters Degree in Development Economics in 2004. It was also the year that I met the person who was to become my husband, David Martin. Dave coincidentally had also studied Business Science at UCT but we hadn’t known each other then. He had searched for a community in which to do development work combined with tourism and travel (something he’d fallen in love with during an 18 month trip from Cape Town to London on public transport, walking across the Congo forests.. a tale in itself!).  So, once he’d returned from London, he took two weeks to walk from Kei Mouth on the east coast to Port Edward (essentially the length of the Wild Coast) and found Bulungula.  

By Easter 2004, when we’d met through a mutual friend, he had just received permission to build the Bulungula Lodge in partnership with the local community.  He used savings from a stint he’d done in London programming computers during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.  At that time I was still working full time for Metropolitan Asset Managers and making plans to take a year-long sabbatical in the September of 2004 to embark upon the Masters in Development Economics as planned. We stayed in touch – he beginning with the Bulungula Lodge (that was to become our first successful community project in the area) and me completing my studies. I returned in September 2005 and we promptly got married.  Metropolitan then offered to allow me to work alternate weeks from home so that I could travel to or from Bulungula every weekend.  With no roads and only a 4x4 track to the village, and flights to Mthatha only via Johannesburg, it was a 12 hour trip one way – I had a one day weekend for the 3 years I commuted this way. The Bulungula Lodge was becoming a success as a community upliftment programme, but we felt that we needed to do more.  Although the Bulungula Lodge was earning money for community members and providing jobs to half of the households in the area, there was a chronic lack of necessary services: no roads, no access to healthcare, no ambulances – ever, no functioning school, no portable water, no sanitation, no electricity.  In 2004/2005 a third of the babies in the village died from diarrhea due to lack of access to clean water. We have since done a survey and found that 53% of households have lost at least one child to diarrhea, and 1 in 9 have lost 3 or more.  We have since completely eradicated this problem. The local government school, a mud structure, had collapsed and we wanted to begin helping with at least these two issues.  We then launched an NGO: the Bulungula Incubator on 1 March 2007. The Bulungula Lodge was a community project, but it was a business entity and therefore not suitable for fundraising for water and education projects. The organisation has grown significantly from there in the past 11 years with the mission to be a catalyst in the creation of vibrant and sustainable rural communities.

The Bulungula Incubator aims to address the challenges of rural poverty.  We design and test the implementation of good rural developmental ideas that contributes to the creation of prosperous and sustainable rural communities. Our programmes have grown to cover a spectrum of interventions in Education, Health, and Sustainable Livelihoods: in partnership with our community, local government and traditional leadership through our ‘Conception to Career’ programme from health in pregnancy through to the support needed in the vocational stage.  We work with the community of the Xhora Mouth Administrative Area which is based in the Mbhashe municipality on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape.  In the last Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) census, the Mbhashe municipality was found to be the poorest in the country. Dave and I continued to build the work of the Bulungula Incubator while still working in our other full time jobs: him at the Bulungula Lodge and me at Metropolitan Assets Managers.  In 2009, I left the finance industry for good and became the full time director of the Bulungula Incubator.

Hopes for the Bulungula Incubator

Our goal continues to be the development of good rural development projects across the spectrum: Pre-conception to Career with our local community who are involved in all aspects of our work. We also actively partner other organisations, governments, foundations and individuals to increase the scaling and broader impact of our work.  Although Dave and I are both from Cape Town originally, Bulungula is our permanent home and, for as long as the community will have us, we will continue to live here as community members. There is so much to do in this sector of development that there will always be something useful (and interesting) for us to do, until our dying days.  An integral part of our work is to build the long term sustainability of the organisation.  Of the 120 employees of the organisation, only a handful are not from the local community; and only because they have skills that we need that are not yet available locally.  Wherever possible people from the local community are trained to be able to do jobs at all levels of the organisation – even in an area where the access to education is one of the most challenging in the country, we have had notable successes in this regard. It is my job to work myself out of the job as Director of the organization, and to build its long term financial sustainability – we are certainly getting there. My hope for the Bulungula Incubator is for it to achieve its mission as a catalyst in the creation of vibrant and sustainable rural communities, and for it to do with as a wholly run and led community organisation.  

How people can get involved

We accept donations of course - cash and in kind. But also by sharing their time and skills, both on site and remotely. If anyone would like to come and stay and help, we prefer stays of at least one year as it takes time to get into the rhythm of life and actually make a difference.  However, there are many skills and pieces of work that can be contributed remotely.  The best would be to contact me and see how we can match your skills with our various projects.

Watch a short video here, here or here to see some of the incredible work that they are doing.

Get hold of them at the following numbers:

Landline: 047 577 8908

Cell phone: 083 395 1691

Fax: 086 527 8277

Books of the Week 3

Educated by Tara Westover

(by Amy Bunce)

I could not put this book down. It was an eye-opening story about a world so vastly different from the one in which I grew up. Tara Westover writes about her own life growing up in a house of survivalist Mormons in Idaho. She is one of seven children. Her mother is a herbalist and a midwife. Her father owns a scrapyard. Westover’s parents had no belief in the Government nor did they register any of their seven children. Westover registered herself at the age of nine. Her father’s survivalist beliefs meant no doctors, modern medicine or hospitals. Despite some of the horrific accidents recounted by Westover from the scrapyard, all ailments were treated by her mother at home. Westover’s father had the family prepared for the “End of Days” by stockpiling food and keeping emergency bags under their beds. She paints a picture of an unusual, and at times disturbing, family dynamic influenced by her strong-willed and dogmatic father.

At the age of seventeen Westover decides to pursue an education. She takes on this challenge having never been exposed to any formal education, let alone a classroom. She grapples with balancing the obligations she had to her family and the obligations she has to herself. As her determination to pursue education becomes stronger, so her understanding of the world grows and she has to deal with “coming to terms with the depth of her [your] own ignorance” (see interview here). I am in awe of what Westover lived through and how far she has come against unusual odds. She writes with complete transparency and respect for the faith and people who raised her. She explores the role that education plays in our lives and how it informs the way we make decisions in our lives. It struck me how easily education can be taken for granted by those who are privileged enough to receive it and how our understanding of the world is sometimes so much bigger than we think.

P.S. If you do enjoy this, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is worth a read too.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

A friend of mine recommended this collection of short stories by Carmen Maria Machado to me when I was having a reading slump.  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it as this is not typically my go-to genre of book.  Machado blends genres in this collection in order to create her own of fantasy, horror, romance and science fiction.  Her stories all have an overarching theme; the everyday violences that women encounter.  My favourite story was the first one in the book, The Husband Stitch- which is based on the children’s tale The Green Ribbon and holds an eclectic array of ghost stories and tales throughout it, all the while describing the relationship of a husband and wife, and his never being satisfied until he can uncover what’s under her ribbon. As I enjoyed the first story so much, the rest all fell flat for me; however from reviews that I have read online, everyone seemed to have a different favourite story. The novella in the centre of the book based on episodes of Law and Order: SVU felt too long and complicated, however I’m glad that I pushed through and finished it. I’ve felt that all of the stories have haunted and stuck with me for much longer than I thought they would, and it was great to branch out of my comfort zone in terms of new genres and different writing styles. I would definitely recommend this if you are looking for something different or subversive.

FemWash: Meeting Women in their Time of Need

This week’s Women of the Week is Nyasha Chimhandamba, the co-founder of a wash product called FemWash.  She is currently a Masters student at the Graduate School of Business (UCT) pursuing her MPhil. Inclusive innovation.  She holds a Bsc (Hons) in Molecular cell biology and is the Famelab 2017/2018 winner for her work on drought tolerance and salinity stress in plants. She is also a professional speaker and a consultant. Nyasha and her FemWash team have presented their work at ‘Map the System’ at Oxford Business School and at the World Entrepreneurs Investment forum in Bahrain hosted by the United Nations. She has kindly written about her social enterprise FemWash, the motivation behind it, and the current progress and aims of the product.

As I made the long road trip to Zimbabwe in 2016 I became aware of three things: 1) that what was meant to be a 10-hour trip was going to be a 30-hour trip because it was peak season at the border, 2) that I was suddenly more aware of my female body, and the potential odor that came with it because I would be without adequate hygiene facilities for the next day or two, and 3) that millions of women who travel across the border every few months to make a living endured this frequently. In this moment I became so painfully aware of how often I had felt as if my body was a liability within a public space. Be it when I am menstruating at work, or desperately waiting in a queue to urinate at a conference (whilst the men zip in and out past you). A leaking female body with odor is not tolerated in society, nor is it accommodated for. Never had it dawned on me that, “it’s a man’s world,” not only referred to equal pay, nor gender equity—  it also extended to public spaces, infrastructural design and how adequate sanitation and hygiene provisions are often catered to men because they are the decision makers.

This moment was the beginning of the product that we are developing, called FemWash. FemWash is a wash product designed for women, by women to restore comfort, dignity and convenience. Our product was created to provide the convenience of a water bath packaged in a sachet which can be used with or without the presence of water. It is particularly designed for women, because their key concern when washing is the ability to not only wash their bodies, but also their intimate areas with something that’s safe, but also absorptive for any bodily fluids. Our product has therefore catered to the delicacy of the skin, the sensitivity of intimate areas, and provides women with a quick bathing solution in the privacy of a toilet cubicle.

I have learnt that the female body, and its pains, is an issue that all women understand, irrespective of financial class. From the busy women boarding a 16-hour flight for a business trip, to the women in rural, water restricted areas; FemWash seeks to provide an avenue for hygiene. We consider our company a social enterprise, being a for-profit company with the intention of meeting social-impact objectives. As a social enterprise, the vision is to create an impact by subsidizing the product for women who need it, by leveraging those who can afford to pay for it. The future of FemWash now rests in successfully producing our formulation and making the final product.

Dignity is the inherent value that we hold as human beings. By not acknowledging the needs and desires of others, we deny them the opportunity to feel that they have value. Whilst the softer, intangible issues such as the emotions involved are often overlooked in societal debates, the right to dignity exists at the heart of feminine hygiene. Female bodies are often sidelined, and the pains and discomfort women go through are often silenced from public ears, even when we are in the presence of one another. FemWash is thus designed to accommodate women. The product is small, and discrete for women to use in the privacy of a bathroom. 

The feminine hygiene industry has gained a lot of backlash from women due to the breaking of trust. FemWash isn’t designed to stigmatize the female body and perpetuate the idea that women must smell like flowers and berries. Rather, FemWash is intended to meet women in their time of need, and to provide cleanliness and comfort. This product has alerted me to the fact that, depending on age, ethnicity, socio-economic status, body shape, and body type; women have different needs, and experience their environments differently. By silencing female bodies, especially where their intimate areas are involved, issues such as menstruation, and incontinence are dealt with in silence and unaccommodated for in public spaces and in many work environments. Discomfort is a feeling that very often restricts women in both confidence and mobility, and I hope that this product will help to eliminate some of that.   This knowledge has lead me into my research on the female embodied need, and how it can impact comfort, mobility and confidence for women, particularly in the workplace.

It has taken me over two years to formulate, build a team, and get financial buy-in for the product; and in doing so I have had to learn a lot about perseverance, grit and patience. Our biggest hurdle now has been developing relationships with the right suppliers and manufacturers to produce this product and bringing in more investments to get to the finish line of product development.

I have had the privilege of presenting my work to students from Harvard Business School and Duke’s medical students. My most prestigious event this year was presenting at Oxford's Saïd Business School on Menstrual Hygiene Management and the barriers of water, sanitation and hygiene. Social enterprise is about activism just as much as it is about entrepreneurship and meeting the bottom line (driving profits and making revenue). It’s about the ability to tell a story and selling a cause that people feel drawn to buy into and support. By writing, speaking and even pursuing a Master’s at a business school around this, I get to impart my knowledge, my passion, and to share the many stories of the women I meet with around me.

If you are an expert in product development, manufacturing or supply chain who wants to share their knowledge, or just an investor with an interest in social impact, get in touch with us at: FemWash@gmail.com

Nyasha and her business partner, Runako Mzwidzwa

In Solidarity

This week’s news has left me reeling, drained, and feeling physically ill.  If you are not aware of the atrocities being committed against women and children around the world then you should be informing yourself.  If you are not angered by this news, then you need to ask yourself why; because women and children are suffering every day.

In South Africa, the headlines this week have been of the ex-teacher (change the word ‘teacher’ to rapist and sexual predator) who received a sentence of 8 years in jail, and then appealed and walked out smiling; and the 20 year old man who raped a young girl at a restaurant in Pretoria; who was protected and had the restaurant call it an alleged rape when he was caught red handed (I think the new meaning of red handed should be naked because he was actually caught with no clothes on).  These are just the cases that are news worthy.  There are countless horrific acts that are committed daily in South Africa.  Nearly every woman that I know has a story of sexual assault or abuse; we consider ourselves lucky that it was just groping or someone pushing up against us when it could have been a lot worse.  The entitlement, and toxicity of men, and the violent behaviour and feeling that they can treat anyone how they want to needs to stop.  For anyone thinking that this is just a problem in developing countries, the news speaks volumes this week; and this is not a matter of race, or class, or religion: this happens all over the world.

The story headlining the world at the moment is of Dr Christine Blasey Ford who just testified against Brett Kavanaugh (who is the president’s first choice for the empty seat on the Supreme Court).  Dr Ford has spoken out about Kavanaugh’s sexual assault, and had to testify in front of 17 male senators, and only 4 female senators.  She has been praised for her courage.  She is not doing this to become famous; she was terrified, received death threats, and had to put her family into hiding.  She originally wanted to remain anonymous, but after her story was leaked she felt that it was her civic duty to speak out (Link here).  She was criticised because she waited so long to testify against Kavanaugh.  A piece of text that I saw making its rounds on social media said, “I never heard ONE person ridicule ANY men for coming forward with allegations about Catholic priest molestation after 35 years. Not one.”  As a result of this many women and celebrities from around the world are sharing her picture in solidarity and saying that they believe Dr Ford.  Her bravery and courage has been notable, and she has encouraged women around the world to speak out too.

What about the others though?  What about women who can’t afford to have their reputation ruined, or to put their family into hiding.  What about women that have abusers in their family?  What about women who can’t afford to testify? What about women that don’t have a plethora of celebrities saying that they believe them.  What about a judicial system that protects white men?  This news has been traumatising for so many women and victims for so many reasons, but especially for the backlash and abuse that victims receive for testifying and telling the truth.  And people wonder why women don’t come forward sooner.

So for every person who is brave enough to share their story and to testify, and even those that don’t wish to – you are not alone and we are all in solidarity with you.  No one should have to endure such pain, and carry it alone.   

Jessica Breakey: Still, we live by the Sea

Photo credit: Nick Jaussi

This week’s Womxn of the Week is Jessica Breakey, who recently completed her second Masters Degree at Cambridge University, and shortly thereafter attended a sea rescue school in the United Kingdom.  She has kindly and openly written about her experiences, and the paths that led her there.

I seem always to be drawn to the elements; that being air, earth, water and fire. Shortly before I moved to Cambridge University I completed my Masters Degree at Wits University on the symbolic and political uses of fire in protests.  For more than a year I was obsessed with the burning, the anger that ignited it, and all of the possibilities that the ash left behind. However, the process of writing my dissertation, and all of the coinciding personal consequences, was a kind of fire that I needed to go through myself; the letting go of a relationship and a nasty break up, and grieving my father’s long and painful illness.

I left for Cambridge a year ago with my insides burning and a very charred heart.

Since I have been back in South Africa I have often said that although I didn’t find a deep intellectual mentorship in Cambridge, I was constantly learning from my peers, my fellow course mates and my housemates. I was truly blessed with three of the best housemates and somehow, amidst these three very different people from three very different contexts, I found myself thinking not about fire, but rather of water. 

I like to think of myself as someone who is up to date with what is happening in the world, and as someone who engages with the challenges facing humanity; but I quickly discovered one of my biggest blind spots- the European Refugee Crisis. Sure, I had read a few articles in the Guardian and had seen the horrifying images depicting the mountains of life-jackets abandoned in Lesbos, but I feel ashamed to say that I had not yet thought deeply enough about one of the most pressing humanitarian crises of our time. In reflection I think this is because I dismissed it as a European crisis, thinking of it as something that European leaders and activists needed to deal with. I no longer hold this view, instead I very much believe that this is a Pan-African issue; that those who care about the continent need to be thinking about.

I smile as I try to think back to the initial trigger; I didn’t read a book from the library or attend some big public lecture, rather, sitting at dinner one night I scoffed in disgust at the number of warts on my housemate’s hands. Bill wasn’t too bothered by our revulsion and explained that it was from his time on the Sea Rescue Boat, the Luventa. He began to share his stories from his last mission on the Mediterranean Sea. I was completely overwhelmed- with his bravery, the immediacy and importance of the work, and the desperation that leads so many to make the horrific journey across the sea.

Let me break it down for those who are less familiar with the situation. In 2015, over 1 million migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea, most fleeing the active slave trade in Libya, but many also moving up north from the middle of the African continent desperate for safety and seeking a better life. The movement of people across the Mediterranean has continued and, in many ways, worsened over the last three years. The situation is far more complicated than the space I have now to explain, but in many ways, it is also incredibly simple- no one deserves to die at sea.

Libyan smugglers are one of the worst cogs in this awful chain of inhumanity; charging those fleeing huge amounts of money to get onto a “boat” (picture a dinghy boat suitable for 20 people crowded with over 100 people) and then pulling off the engines as soon as the boat leaves the shore, so that they can use the same engine on the next boat and maximise their profit. Now we have a boat loaded with over a hundred people (including babies and unaccompanied minors), with no belongings, no water and no food drifting through the ocean, praying that somehow, they will reach the Italian shore. With the European Union willfully refusing to engage in this issue, international NGOs began to send out Search and Rescue vessels to help those refugees lost and dying at sea. It is against International Refugee Law to send a refugee back to a country where they may be in danger, so the Search and Rescue teams would take the refugees to a safe harbour in Italy where they would then be moved into the refugee camps.

Although I do consider myself an activist, I have spent the majority of my life engaging in the beauty of ideas. I love to write and think, and could happily do nothing but sit in a library for days. Of course, I want to live consciously and make some sort of meaningful contribution, but I had always thought that my way of doing that would just be through research and writing. The problem with being a researcher, I have found, is that given enough thought, everything becomes problematic. Refugee camps, state borders, the EU, volunteering- all incredibly easy to critique, yet no matter how hard my brain tried I could not find a problem with sea rescue. To me, it was incredibly urgent and necessary work that had a tangible and direct form of action.  I knew I needed to do it, that I needed to get on those boats.

I knew I was intellectually on board of course, but I had to think deeper about whether I was emotionally strong enough to handle it. I wasn’t naive, I know that what rescue volunteers see on sea missions is incredibly destabilising and haunts you long after you have returned to shore. I found it incredibly frustrating to talk to my family and close friends about it. I have a history of mental health problems and I felt like I was constantly being undermined and patronised by those closest to me. Of course, these are the people that love me the most and are simply looking out for my well-being, but I interpreted it as, “you are not strong enough”; which infuriated me and made me just want to scream. I had lost my father to cancer a few months earlier, I had endured the most terrible loss imaginable and I was still waking up every morning. To me, I was invincible, and I knew I could do it.

The next step was attending rescue school. Atlantic Pacific (AP) is a sea rescue NGO that runs training programs at the United World Colleges Atlantic College in Wales. Although AP is intentionally non-political and not specifically directed towards training volunteers for refugee rescue, many of the people that found themselves on the course in June 2018 were focused on the humanitarian crisis. I met the most amazing people at rescue school; doctors, nurses, paramedics, lawyers and scholars from all over the world, all united by our concern for the atrocities being allowed to happen at sea. For me, an eternal library goer, the exhilaration that came from using my hands was euphoric. It may sound silly, but I feel as though I had always been typecast as a girl who didn’t know how to tie knots, and here I was learning every knot needed on a boat. I felt capable and useful.  I learnt to drive a rescue boat, how to perform basic casualty care and how to locate and help a man overboard. I knew, more than ever before that I needed to get on the refugee rescue boats.

However, while we were at training school everything changed. Following the recent Italian elections and a change in policy for the EU, Italy closed its ports to Search and Rescue vessels, taking away the most utilised safe harbour available. Soon after, Malta did the same and went on to charge the captain of one of the biggest rescue boats with human trafficking. It was clear that the political situation for Search and Rescue had radically altered and that search and rescue teams were now being criminalised by the EU.

I am now back in South Africa, unsure of what is next for me professionally and desperate to get on the boats.  I know that my chances are slim, many of the boats aren’t allowed to operate and some have even been charged and compounded by the Italian government. Although I may not be on the boats, the whole experience has instilled in me the value of thinking with my hands. Of thinking and doing. I am filled with respect and admiration for all those putting their bodies on the line for a just cause. I live inspired by the courage not just of the search and rescue teams but of those prepared to step into a boat with nothing more than hope for a better life.

No one deserves to die at sea.

Together for Rescue.

(Image from Reddit)

Books of the Week 2

The Lost Boys of Bird Island: A shocking exposé by Mark Minnie and Chris Steyn

This is the book that has been in the news recently in South Africa; an exposé of a paedophilia ring during Apartheid that involved various cabinet ministers of the National Party government.  This was both an easy and difficult read; easy in that the writing was very accessible (in my opinion a good thing so that more South Africans read it) and impossible to put down.  It was difficult to get through some of the content, because the acts in the book are horrifying; and the fact that it was all covered up and that no justice was received for the victims was even worse (although it did end with a call for victims to come forward).  It was not what I expected, as it was written in more of a narrative form rather than the factual exposé that I anticipated beforehand.  I felt a bit frustrated reading it initially, because I felt that it was sensationalising something that was already traumatic enough; however I think this narrative approach was done in order to paint a picture of Apartheid South Africa, and to see the inherent privilege of a white policeman at the time, even one who wasn’t a ‘typical’ government employee.  The fact that Mark Minnie devoted his life to trying to get justice for these victims, and so recently lost his life because of this is a testament to his character, regardless of the social and political status of the country at the time.  Chris Steyn’s account of the story, as a journalist, provided great insight into the censorship that surrounded South African media at the time and the frustration of having stories and truths pulled from publication that she had been working on for months, or even years, at a time as they didn’t fit the motif of the political party.  Steyn uncovered much information about Bird Island and the ministers involved, however had to write watered down versions of this, as all of the newspapers were not allowed to report on anything that might have hindered the upcoming elections (which were obviously a landslide victory regardless of the dirty politicians).  It highlights the legal costs associated with wanting to write about the truth, as she was exiled due to fear of imprisonment for not giving up the name of one of her sources.  Her journalistic and ethical integrity was very remarkable and inspiring to read about.  I wanted to focus more on the people who wrote this book, and not so much the content because I don’t feel that I have the privilege or authorship to accurately deconstruct it (I’ve attached a better article from the Mail & Guardian here), but it is harrowing and horrifying and infuriating and I would recommend that everyone becomes more in tune with the evils of Apartheid and the men behind it.

Who was Sophie? by Celia Robertson

I picked up this book at a second-hand bookstore in Durban and fell in love with the blurb, a female writer in the 1920s with mental illness- all of the things that I love (I studied Psychology to give this some context).  This book was written about Joan Adeney Easdale (later Sophie Curley, and then just Sophie) who sprung to fame in her teenage years after Virgina Woolf published a book of her poetry through the Hogarth Press.  The book is written by her granddaughter who was intrigued by her life and how she transitioned from an established writer to being a vagrant woman completely out of touch with her surroundings (later established as being diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia).  It follows her life from childhood to her death, incorporating letters that she wrote to family and friends, along with some of her poetry and extended works.  It was a very interesting read as it highlighted the way that women, especially women with mental illnesses, were treated in society.  What I unearthed; divorce is not a new thing (and I can only imagine the stigma attached to it in the 1920s), mental illness is not a new thing (and I’m not sure how much better the way we treat people is in the present day), and that violence against women occurs across the world and across classes.  The book felt a bit drawn out at some points, mostly because it highlighted everything in Sophie’s life in order to portray that a person is the sum of their experiences.  I am always shocked at what women have to endure, and also how they are other-ed when they don’t cope with experiences in their lives in a typical way.  Sexual abuse and violence is prevalent in the lives of most women, and how people with mental illnesses are taken advantage of is heart wrenching too.  It was a very enlightening book to read and although she is not remembered as a poet, she is a woman who can be remembered for always paving her own way and never letting society or anyone else put her into a box.  It couldn’t have been easy for her family to see her like this, but they let her take the reins of her own life to her death.

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

This book was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2016.  I have mixed feelings about it and so have my other friends.  A friend of mine perfectly summed it up for me when she said that she begrudgingly finished it but then couldn’t get it out of her head.  Another friend has read it at least ten times with notes in the margins.  It’s a great quick read, especially if you’re on holiday or at the beach.  The book is set in Almeria, Spain and centres around a strained mother and daughter relationship wherein they have travelled to see a specialised doctor for the mother’s many (many) ailments.  It is written from the point of view of the daughter and although the writing is quite straightforward it unlocks many uncomfortable truths that occur in family dynamics, and is definitely worth more than one read to fully grasp all of the underlying content.  It’s not a book that I necessarily thought much of at the time of reading, but it still lingers in my mind even months after finishing it; which indicates a good job by the author.  It also very accurately portrays the suffocating emotions present in mother-daughter relationships, as well as psychosomatic illnesses.  I would definitely recommend this for anyone looking for a slightly different easy read, or anyone grappling with the constant presence of a mother’s shadow.

The Korean Hagwon System

I don’t usually like to write about my own experiences here, but I often get asked about my time teaching English in Korea. Teaching abroad is becoming a more and more popular job option for people in South Africa because of all of the benefits that it offers.  It is always quite conflicting for me to talk or write about this, because the hagwon system was so profitable to me, both financially and personally, however it is also quite a stressful system for the directors and the children that attend these.  I grew so much in myself and met amazing people in my two years in South Korea.  It was an incredible opportunity for me and I really lucked out with my school, my boss and my students, but my heart also broke for the young students who endlessly devote their lives to education.  I’ve written a bit about the experience, and my friend Youn Seo has also written about her side of attending hagwons and what the Korean education system is like.

To put this into context, “hagwons” are private schools, also known as academies.  Students in Korea go to their normal public school (which is paid for by the government) until about 15:30-17:00 depending on their age, and then go to private academies afterwards for extra lessons for a few hours.  I taught students until 23:00 and my director taught until 01:00 at times if the students were preparing for exams.  The reason for this? To learn English and to have a competitive advantage over others.  There is huge pressure for students to get into the best universities, so from a young age children attend academies to have an advantage over others and to get ahead of their work at the public schools.  This has now lead to most of the scholar population attending hagwons while those who can’t afford them fall behind at public school.  

To put it into perspective, South Korea is the size of Kwa-Zulu Natal, however has the same population as South Africa; so their whole population fits into the size of one of our provinces.  My kids used to laugh at me when I said Korea was small and always talked about ‘tiny, tiny Korea’ and ‘HUGE South Africa’.  Due to this overpopulation there is enormous pressure to excel and to get into the top three universities, termed SKY: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University.  The whole schooling system is geared towards the university entrance exam called the SuNeung.  Children as young as elementary school feel the pressure of this exam, and I often had 12 year olds talking to me about it and saying that they were already preparing for it.  English that is taught in the public school system, however, does not seem to corroborate with this.  Teachers in the public school systems have to follow a guided set work that teaches the students more practical conversational English and skills.  This means that students were learning how to converse in things like, “What is your favourite food?” “My favourite food is pizza,” at public school, and were doing things such as adverbial phrases of time and place at their academies.  So depending on what kind of school you are placed in, you could be teaching very different things.  There is a huge juxtaposition to how English is taught, and some students could score 900/900 on a test but can’t hold a conversation in English.  So it is a system that is very complex, and because of the pressure for the Suneng exam English is taught in order to regurgitate it onto paper for a test.  So in a way I can see the merits of both of the approaches to teaching, but I do think that there needs to be a greater balance between the two.

Children also usually have academies on weekends (there are hagwons for all subjects, not just English), and have homework for each of them too.  Most students get very little sleep because they are up until early hours of the morning completing homework.  It seems strange that many Scandinavian countries are heading in the direction of eliminating homework, and that seems to be the echo in South Africa that students have too much.  I really think that our system here is far too easy, when I look back I can’t believe how little I worked at school.  My students couldn’t believe that I finished school at 14:30 and had the afternoons to play sport or do any extra-curricular activities of my choice.  When I look back I took so much of that for granted, that we had all of these options at a relatively low cost.  I think that many people in South Africa also take for granted how lucky they are to speak English, when you see what children in Asia endure to learn it and to have it as a resource.  So many westerners are also quick to judge Korean parents or ‘tiger moms’ for pushing their children to excel, and forget what a luxury it is to be a native English speaker.  Getting into the best universities doesn’t automatically guarantee you a job either, and a lot of hostility towards their previous (impeached) president Park Guen Hye had to do with the education system, and lack of opportunities for students after graduating.

The foreigners that choose to come and teach English are also a mixed bag.  Don’t ever trust anyone who says that their job is easy, because that means that they put no effort into it.  Anyone who cares about what they are doing will be putting their heart and soul into it.  It isn’t always easy to be dealing with students, parents and other teachers with a language barrier, and at times it can be quite exhausting.  I am the first person to admit that it’s a very lucrative and beneficial system for foreigners.  You get an amazing salary, your school pays for your rent and your flights, you have amazing healthcare, and at many schools you get a meal too.  It’s a great opportunity to save money, to travel, or to pay off student loans.  It was the first time in my life that I didn’t have to think twice about spending money, and I was afforded the opportunities to travel abroad in my holidays and pay for university courses that I was taking.  Like anything, though, there are people who take advantage of the system.  Foreigners often come and put no effort into their work, and blow all of their money on alcohol.  This is quite a cause of contention for citizens, because for the public school programme the government pays for the teachers’ salaries, which means that tax payers’ money is going into funding a very cushy lifestyle for teachers.  This is, of course, a generalisation.  There are lots of teachers who love what they are doing, and give it their all.  I just realised that as I started to spend more time there I understood more why some locals did not like the foreigners.  If it is something that you are considering doing, I would recommend doing the research before and making sure that your reasons are sound, as your actions affect the locals of the country.

                                                                           *****

I was 10 years old when I left South Korea and I began my life in North America. Since my time in my home country was cut short, so was my experience with the regular school and hagwon life of most Korean students of all ages.  However, I did get firsthand experience of what would be considered a brief amount of time compared to the students who progressed in the education ladder into college.

The education system and expectations to study in South Korea place huge pressure on every student and hagwons are a large part of this discussion.

“Hagwon” is an umbrella term for a lot of different things. It includes sport related activities, learning how to play an instrument (or two instruments), debating, math, languages, and on and on. You name it, there’s a hagwon for it. 

Children start attending hagwons as early as they enter school, or even earlier. My first hagwon experience was swimming. I was 4 years old when I started. I would come home from school, wait for the swim hagwon bus to pick me up in front of my house and off I went, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays I would walk to piano hagwon after school, sit in a small room with a piano and practice my scales. The piano hagwon also ran an art hagwon which I attended twice a week, drawing with color pencils, crayons, molding clay, and learning origami.

Years later I picked up learning to play the violin because playing piano had become too common and I needed a different and unique instrument in my repertoire.

When you’re young, hagwons revolve around learning instruments, sports, art classes, and other non-academic activities that would be considered extra-curriculars. As you get older more academic hagwons get added to your schedule.

I started going to English hagwons when I started the first grade. Because my peers in kindergarten had already learned the alphabet before we started kindergarten, I was much too behind. English hagwons were only considered good if they had white English teachers. It was uncommon to see black teachers or even Korean American teachers. I learned as an adult that white teachers were preferred when it came to the hiring process.

My first day at English hagwon my teacher asked me what my English name was. When I told him I didn’t have one, he wrote down several girl names on the white board for me to pick: Sarah, Sally, Hannah, Mary, Laura, Jessica, Katie. I picked Jessica, my first year, then two years later I decided that I hated it and my new teacher wrote down some more names and I picked Kelly (I still go by Kelly to this day). English hagwon became a regular in my schedule, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I would hop on the ECC hagwon bus after school and then went to piano practice, if I didn’t have piano, I would go to my speed-reading class.

Hagwons for school subjects were popular and common. I went to hagwon for math (I was always weak in math), speed reading and English. Going to hagwon wasn’t really to fill in the weaknesses, but to get ahead. I remember learning fractions in hagwon a year prior to learning them in school. This was relatively common for most young students. If you weren’t ahead, you were already behind. I imagine this was difficult for students from families who couldn’t afford to send their kids to multiple hagwons because it was impossible to keep up with students who had already mastered fractions a year prior to getting to them in school. It was impossible to compete with students who had already learned the basics of the English language with a fluent Won-uh-min (Someone who speaks a language as their first language) teacher when they started learning the English Alphabet in school.

When I first moved to Canada at 10 years old, I was shocked that none of the other kids at school knew how to read music, most of the kids didn’t know how to swim, and none of them (with the exception of immigrant kids) knew how to speak a second language. For the first time I was 3 years ahead in math at my new Canadian school. I was also unpleasantly surprised how little English I actually spoke once I got to an English-speaking country. I had attended English hagwon after school every other day for four and a half years and I was barely able to pass my 5^th grade spelling test.

Even though I lived most of my life in North America, during the summers I went back to Korea to spend time with my family, and of course, go to hagwon. It was important for my parents that I was academically inclined. Especially because that’s why they had sent me abroad, because it is considered an advantage to be studying in an English-speaking country. When I was in high school I started going to SAT hagwons during the summers. The methods taught in these hagwons were effective and I truly believe I wouldn’t have gotten the score that I did if I didn’t spend time at SAT hagwon.

Life as an average Korean student is exceptionally stressful compared to the average Canadian or American student. As you get older you have to give up a lot of the extracurriculars you love but don’t necessarily excel in, because if you don’t excel, it’s not useful and if it’s not useful, you can drop it which frees up time for a different hagwon to get a head in a subject in school. I didn’t know anyone in school that didn’t have hagwon after school at least every other day when I was in Korea. It’s just part of that life.

When you’re older, unless you’re going to be a professional athlete, a professional musician, or professional artist, the sports, the instruments, and the drawing lessons were no longer a part of your life. All of your time and attention went into hagwons relating to school subjects or when you’re old enough, for Suhnoong (the Korean University entrance exam). Unlike the SATs in the States, Suhnoong happens once a year and this, and your high school grades, determine where you go to college which determines where you get a job, which determines your salary, your status, and your entire life. 

If you’re interested in living the English teacher life, from what I hear it’s a great experience. If you end up teaching children (which is a majority of the English teacher jobs available) make sure you’re there for the right reasons. Please care about the fact that these kids are there to learn. Please understand that if they aren’t learning at hagwon, it shows at school. If it shows at school, their parents are wondering why their child isn’t doing well even though they spend all this money sending them to expensive English hagwons. If students come to class and they’re cranky, it’s probably because they’ve already had three hagwons before ending up in your class and they’re tired. Just be understanding.

It’s not easy being a student in Korea.