Desperate to get educated, says hurt young boy
12-year-old boy, his mother, two sisters, and a month-old niece all sleep on the floor
“Andifuni kuba liqaba mna — I don’t want to be uneducated.”
These were the tragic words from a 12-year-old boy who feels so humiliated by his torn trousers and broken shoes that he will not be going back to school.
Why should he? No one in his family has ever made it past Grade 7, he says.
He is broken. He sobs as he tells his story.
He hails from the remote Mzuzaza village in Port St Johns.
Last year, when his shoes and trousers wore out, he, too, felt worn out by school, and so he stopped going.
We speak as he walks back from his relatives’ home where he gets breakfast. He wears oversized, dirty old red and green tracksuit pants, and a faded T-shirt.
His feet are bare, cracked and swollen.
His eldest sister, now 17, dropped out of Grade 5 and his other sister, 14, left school in Grade 1.
His older brother, 16 years old, is in Grade 5.
His mother, who is 36 and unemployed, dropped out in Grade 1.
The boy said: “I passed Grade 3 but I did not have a uniform to go to school. Last year they were torn beyond repair.”
Amid all this domestic hardship, his dream is to become a teacher.
The family shares two crumbling rondavels. His mother, two sisters and a month-old niece all sleep on the floor.
The thatched roof is thinning. In one spot it consists of a single strand of grass. When it rains the family takes shelter in one of the huts. They feel cooped up and the mood is tense.
“I do not want to live like this for the rest of my life,” the softspoken boy says, looking at the dilapidated huts in the bush.
“Sometimes we go to bed with only water in our tummies. It saddens me every day when I see my cousins and other children going to school. That is what I want with all my heart. But how can I? My sisters are not educated. I do not want that happening to me.
“I have not had a single pair of shoes in my life. I can count my clothes on one hand. My father died while I was still young.”
The boy receives a monthly social grant.
“I have been asking my mother for a school uniform but she does not have the money.
“That saddens me because I am missing out on school.
“That is not something I imagined for myself because I grew up seeing the kind of suffering we go through here.
“We are not safe at home.
Sometimes we sleep with wet blankets when it rains. My fear is this rondavel will collapse on us one day. This is hopeless.
“I want to be the one that changes it.
“But right I now I feel really lost. I don’t know what to do next. My other relatives already have children that they are responsible for,” he said.
The boy’s mother said she had never thought of asking for intervention from departments such as social development.
“It is a lack of knowledge from my part. I use the money from his and his sister’s grant to buy food for the family that hardly last three weeks.
“When it runs out, I ask from neighbours. My firstborn dropped out when she fell pregnant last year, the other left school because she became anxious.
“It hurts me because in this world one cannot have a proper paying job without a good education. I feel I have failed my children because I was not an example to them.
“My fear now is that we will never get out of this cycle of school dropouts,” the mother said, weeping.