Lovelife is South Africa’s largest HIV-prevention initiative and works tirelessly to promote the health and social well-being of youths all over the country. In addition to HIV awareness and prevention programs, Lovelife works to develop the potential in young people through youth leadership and self motivation.
On the 24th of April 2012, Lovelife honoured Nyanganites with another exciting, interactive discussion session on common issues facing township youths. The discussion focused primarily on gangsterism and teenage pregnancy. The Lovelife team, headed by Andisiwe Wenanikicked off the session with a high energy ice-breaker, which set the tone for the animated discussion that was to follow.
Gangsterism is a major issue Ikamvanites face in their schools and communities and the learners were very candid in their contributions to the discussion.
Phelokazi Mpapama said:
‘’Gangs have members inside the school and if you talk about it inside the classroom, you become a target.’’
Whilst acknowledging that such challenges are real, the Lovelife team however led the learners into discovering and agreeing that they can fight back and take back some of the power that gangs have usurped in their community. The team pointed out that learners should work together to fight gangsters, since doing nothing is a way of enabling the situation
Nyanganites also had their own ideas on how the situation can be helped. Mzukisi Gwegwe had this to say
‘’The school governing body should work with the community to stand up against gangsterism.’’
This shows that our Nyanganites are thinking and willing to engage in such issues, and this is a huge part of what IY seeks to achieve with all its learners.
On teenage pregnancy, some learners pointed out that it would be helpful for youth they had frank and honest discussions about sex at home.
Zolela Jamba said the following:
‘’Teenage pregnancy happens because children do not get enough information about sex, from their homes’’
Nyanganites were challenged to take responsibility for their sexuality by educating themselves and engaging in safe sexual practices.
Once again, a great big thank you to Lovelife for engaging and empowering ourNyanganites with such valuable information.
Makhaza and Nyanga branch assistants Zukile and Asanda attended an Effective Volunteer Management Training workshop which was held by Volunteer Centre at Claremont Library. This course is developed for managers/coordinators of volunteers to assist them in strengthening their management and support systems for their local and international volunteers. They also help organisations and their volunteers to understand their roles and responsibilities and expectations.
After these 3 days I realised that it is very important to treat volunteers well and make sure they happy. The value of the volunteers cannot be measured. Their contribution is critical to organisations operations and activities. One of the things I really enjoyed about the training is that our organisation IkamvaYouth is already doing all the things organisation should do to make sure that the volunteers are recognised. I learned the following things about tutor retention:
Training
Provide tutors with appropriate training, regular evaluation, and recognition. This means that all the tutors should get a training on how to be good tutor, what to do? And what is not needed to do.
Support and supervision
Regular opportunities for support and supervision are important and can help to identify, and even prevent demotivation which can result in volunteers leaving the organisation. This means that the branch assistance has to make sure that he/ she manages the volunteers, making sure that they get all the material they need to tutor. Also manage new tutors, by partnering them with old tutors. Also make sure that all the tutors have a group of learners to tutor. One of the things that cause tutors not to come back again is poor management. If they do not get the learners to tutor they get bored and do not come back again.
Recognition
Once tutors are working within our organisation it is essential to maintain their motivation and enthusiasm if they are to be retained. Care must be taken to treat volunteers in such a way that they will want to stay with the organisation. Developing activities that meet volunteers individual needs, provide recognition and appreciation of their work and celebrate a sense of achievement will promote self-esteem, strengthen commitment and develop a feeling of belonging and loyalty to the organisation. At IkamvaYouth we already are rewarding our tutors, such as end of year ceremonies with certificates, tutor outings and employment opportunities.
I learn a lot from the course and I’ll be bringing a lot of the lessons to our Makhaza branch, especial making sure that we retained our tutors and show how much we value them.
On the 30th of March 2012 IkamvaYouth learners from Nyanga had an awesome educational day facilitated by Andisiwe Wenani from Lovelife.
LoveLife’s youth programmes are structured activities and strategies that are designed to get South Africa talking about HIV and its underlying sexual dynamics, Inspire young people towards an HIV-free future and prepare them to cope with high-risk transitions, specifically school leaving, by building their sense of identity, purpose and belonging. Enable young people to understand the risk of HIV, decide that risk is not worth taking, and equip them with skills to avoid the risk. Develop personal enterprise and resilience and build an immediate and real sense of possibility by creating new links to opportunity. Expand the range of possibilities available to young people and build a sense of collective solidarity. Tackle social and structural inequality and strengthen institutional support aimed at the development of youth and the prevention of HIV and Aids among youth.
The workshop was mainly informative but also focused on participation. The learners had a huge input by asking lots of questions about Lovelife programmes and activities that will be implemented during the course of the year by Love Life with Nyanganites.
With a huge variety of programmes, learners showed a great deal of interest and excitement. What mostly triggered the learners was the mentioning of starting up a debateteam. Nopinki Mba a Nyanganite said “Being part of a debate team would help me to be able to speak in front of many people and to give me courage in taking a stand on what I have facts about”.
Big thanks to Lovelife for the time and an opportunity to equip Nyanganites about life and giving them skills so that they would be wise decision makers.
This will be an on-going workshop until all programmes are completed by Nyanganites then after the completion of the programmes there will be certificates handed out by Lovelife to all those who participated in all programmes.
Ikamvanites had an amazing opportunity to be part of a Write4Life workshop at the end of March organised by FunDza Literacy Trust. The aim of the workshop is to support aspiring writers on their literary journey and provide them with useful skills to practice their craft. All the learners who participated acquired skills to translate their creative ideas into accessible and engaging pieces of work. They also had a chance to network with other keen writers and learn from the group experience. They got the opportunity to practice techniques to communicate effectively in the written form and receive good tips for writing for a critical audience.
By the end of the two day course , learners got the opportunity to produce a short story that was published on theFunDza network. Check them out here or on Mxit at (Tradepost > Mxit Reach > Mobi-Books > FunDza). The learners also received a certificate of participation.
Nomie one of the participant said “Never thought that writing would be so interesting. In Makhaza branch we were asked as learners to write a short paragraph if we are interested in writing workshop. I wrote the paragraph then I was amongst of the learners who were chosen to take part in Fundaza writing workshop. In the workshop I learned how to write poems, autobiography, short stories. In my life I never wrote anything before but now I can write lots of things. The facilitators were very helpful. Now I can’t wait to share the information with Ikamvanites and help them to be great writers like me”
An example of some of the things written is:
Can I, and other poems
Poet: Zintle Nyathi
School: Harry Gwala High School, Grade 11
Can I?
Can I be who I am ?
Can I no longer follow instructions?
I want to be myself again.
Can I be intelligent, as I was?
I want to be who I was back then.
I’m tired of satisfying you.
Can I be myself again?
Can I ask you one question?
What does this mean to you?
I’m falling: you’re not helping.
I was walking, but now I’m crawling.
I’m inspiring, but you are not appreciating…
Why?
Where does this lead in future?
I’m tired of you.
Can I be who I was?
No satisfaction, but appreciation.
I’m tired of your games.
I want to be myself again.
My heart has been like a mirror
that has broken
When I pick up my pieces
I still see the cracks.
Can I be myself again?
***
If I never…
If I never grew
If I never knew
If I never do
If I never grew to see all the new experiences
If I never knew to listen to all the news
If I never did tell you that I do
If I never knew that living needs all respect due.
If I never grew to see these untold new stories
If I never did tell you that I do – where it was just doomed feeling.
If I never knew that life has all these new things.
I would never grow because I won’t do.
If I never grew I wouldn’t do because I never knew.
***
Impossible Mission
Why does it seem to be so cruel?
Why does it take time to reach the destination?
If we always say it’s impossible to achieve,
Day by day let them go by
Night by night watch the beauty of the stars
without observing the destination.
We let fear to our system of body
and let it bring fear to our imagination.
The most impossible mission – we all people surrender
Where this road is not taken
But you never gave it even a single try.
Why? Why?
Impossible mission. Impossible mission.
Let days pass by. Nights sleep not having a dream to take even one step.
Why impossible mission?
Mission is a destination to reach
But ups and downs are considered in this cruel world
you life or die but family is important.
For every story there’s success.
Behind success there’s a story.
Let impossible to possible be – strive for victory!
Big thank you to FunDza for this wonderful event, read some of the other works created here
The first day of the Basic Education Conference was pretty exhausting. Ikamvanites were there at the crack of dawn to put up our poster in the rather sad corner we’d been allocated. Thankfully, for those who may have missed us (and the many who couldn’t make it to Durban or pay the huge registration fee), it’s available here for download. We’re really grateful to @ideainaforest for making it so beautiful, and are proud to see our great results represented visually.
Andy Hargreaves’ keynote was great. While he wasn’t as funny as he was at Quest (the Canadian conference which put IkamvaYouth on the main stage and not in the corner ;P) his talk was insightful and smart. He spoke about the challenges of a target-driven education model, and the fact that it takes capacity to build capacity. He pointed us to the three things on which we should focus: (i) building human capital and capacity; (ii) building our sociap capital (how well we work together as a community) and (iii) building our decisional capital (our capacity to make judgements).
Most of the presentations detailed, as usual, how badly we’re doing as an education system. Whether speakers were talking about the matric results, the drop-out rates, the lack of parental involvement, literacy and numeracy results for lower grades or the South African system as a whole, the general consensus is that things are really bad. However, while it’s always useful to have a richer understanding of the challenges before us, I’m hoping the conference will move on from detailing what we already know, and focus instead on the solutions we need.
In my search for solutions at the presentations, I was disappointed to hear various academics describing small pilot studies which, while interesting, are not yet anywhere near the stages of replication or scale. More disappointing were speakers who spoke about their successfully scaled projects in very general and vague terms, without explaining their indicators for success, never mind their results.Equal Education’s campaign provided a successful short-term solution to the problem whereby 20% of learning time is lost due to latecoming. We need to look at how to scale and continue this success over the long term.
I began to feel a glimmer of hope listening to Martin Prew describe the dramatic transformation of the Soshanguve district, which achieved phenomenal results at a relatively low cost. However, the depression returned when I realised that the first presentation with a smack of solution was a story that ended over ten years ago. Martin explained the three reasons for the implementation being canned: “politics, politics, politics”. The many ways in which various forms of “politics” are obfuscating efforts came up a lot. It’s no wonder that Equal Education has had enough and is taking the big step to sue the DoE.
I had more luck in my search for solutions at the posters: Axiom is making huge strides in rural education, and TEACH South Africa is contributing to quality education in township and rural schools by providing high-quality, motivated and inspirational young teachers. The Manong Youth Developers outlined their results over a few years, and SAEP’s poster detailed the phenomenal results of its bridging year programme: 88.5% matric pass, 96% improved results with an average of 26.4% per student over all their exams. And 83% access to tertiary or FET. The poster explained that SAEP is currently doing a study and will be sharing the results to help others design similar programmes. The poster presentations also included tools for helping children learn language through guided play (Geordie Muller) and for teaching different forms of writing by linking the process to the methodology of cooking (Ms Jacky Steytler Lamer from Ugie High School).
Perhaps I chose the wrong tracks at the wrong times. Or perhaps day one was focused on setting the scene for the great collaborative effort to “open the doors of quality education for all”. With all the leaders in education under one fancy convention centre roof for two more days, here’s hoping that we’ll make the most of this great opportunity to build our social capital and get moving with smart solutions.
Over 320 abstracts were submitted to the SA Basic Education Conference from teachers, principals, academics, government, non-government organisations, and the corporate sector, and IkamvaYouth’s submission has been selected as a poster presentation on 2 April. Zamo Shongwe and Joy Olivier will be representing the ikamvanites at this event, and are looking forward to learning, sharing and connecting with the conference delegates from all sectors. Professor Metcalfe, the conference chair, said that “it is very encouraging to see the creative and innovative ideas coming from teachers and principals at the coal-face of basic education”, and we’re looking forward to being a part of it.
IkamvaYouth’s poster presentation will be uploaded here in the coming days, together with background information, references and acknowledgements. We hope that readers will engage with it and send us your comments and questions via the facebook comment functionality below.
Lloyd Lungu