The Amawale project is helping students here and in South Africa to learn about each other's culture - and to make friends, writes John Holden.
IN LESS THAN a year, the Amawele project has created partnerships between dozens of schools here and in South Africa. Project organisers expect these newly made friendships will turn into long-standing relationships.
All too often, African countries are identified by their problems. Poverty, disease and corruption are the mainstay of what we hear about the continent in the media.
We all know there is much more, however, and a new Irish organisation, Amawele, is hoping to demonstrate that. The project was set up in 2007 by two parents of students from Kildare Place School in Rathmines - Mark Fitzgerald and Frank Gormley - in an effort to forge links with primary schools in South Africa. The partnerships are designed to help students in both countries learn about a new culture first hand.
Seeing no reason to limit the scheme to primary schools, Amawele quickly began contacting post primary schools, and the scope of the project has been widening ever since. Now 52 schools are participating nationwide, which is pretty impressive after only 11 months in operation. "The target is to have 200 schools involved by 2010," says Billy O'Keeffe, chief executive of Amawele. "We work with the departments of education in the various education districts of three provinces in South Africa. We're trying to help improve the conditions of the schools we have created partnerships with. Most are in disadvantaged areas, where many live in shanty towns, families are headed by children and HIV/Aids is rampant.
"Teachers need more training and schools are lacking in many basic facilities such as doors, windows, pencils and even blackboards," he adds. "The government are pumping money into education in South Africa but it will take some time to catch up with the damage done in the apartheid years. This has only been a democratic country since 1994. So we want to help them catch up. We are also providing training to some school governing bodies in how best to manage their finances."
This is all happening behind the scenes. Up close, what you have are Irish students corresponding with their South African counterparts. The project is still in its early stages, though, so most are not past the introductions yet. "We did up some surveys with information about things like our name, age, interests, career plans, the size of our families, and now we're waiting for their responses," says Kim Butler, a TY boarder at Wilson's Hospital School in Westmeath.
Butler's school is twinned with Glen Edward School in Swartberg in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. "We've also sent an Irish flag and pictures of our homes and school," she says.
Students at Wilson's Hospital have been learning about South Africa in class. They are looking at the similarities with Ireland as well as the differences, as 16-year-old John Moran explains. "I know a bit about South African history," he says. "It was under apartheid rule up until 14 years ago, where segregation existed between blacks and whites. Now it is a democracy. The school we're twinned with is in a very remote place and the average income and general way of life would be quite different.
"We're a boarding school with 400 students. They're on a farm with no electricity, no phone, no fax and occasional running water. Some have to walk up to 22 kilometres to school. But most people are farmers, and we're boggers too here in Westmeath. So that's one similarity."
A big problem facing the schools involved is communications. As some on the South African side are lacking basic facilities such as blackboards, fewer still have access to computers or the internet. Amawele organises the transfer of students' correspondence, but it can take some time. Wilson's Hospital has found another way to make contact with their partners. "Letters can take months to get to our twinned school," says 15-year-old Emma Tuthill. "So we've organised a way to get e-mails to them. An Irish Catholic bishop lives out there and he has the internet. He brings our e-mails to the school. Someone collects them and then the bishop's assistant types their stuff up and sends it back to us."
As schools here look at the many similarities with their counterparts in South Africa, it is difficult to avoid the big difference: resources.
The Amawele project is encouraging Irish schools to help raise funds for their disadvantaged partners. Nadine Monaghan of Presentation College Currylea in Tuam, Co Galway, is on a five-member committee to help raise funds for their partners, Chibini School, in Maluti in the Eastern Cape.
"They need money to put a fence up around their vegetable patch in the school garden to stop the animals from eating everything," she says. "We would also like to help them tarmac their yard outside. That's going to cost €30,000. But we just finished a sponsored walk. One hundred and fifty students took part in the two-mile walk and we raised €413. We're now thinking of having a 24-hour 'stay-awake' in the school for TY students."
How long the relationships last between partnered schools is really up to them. O'Keeffe believes the next stage should explore common themes such as water or health. "Since the problems they had with water in Galway, we don't take it for granted as much as we used to here in Ireland. Clean water is a huge issue all over South Africa," he says. "So we could definitely learn from each other. The same goes for nutrition. Obesity in Ireland is becoming more prevalent, whereas malnutrition is a problem over there. It's up to the schools though, how they want to continue with their partnership. The scope is so wide that they can move in many different directions into the future."