First day at school

Parents have been busy buying school uniforms, stationery and ensuring that their children are ready to start their academic year. Excitement was written all over the parents’ faces whose children were going to start school this year.

The long queues inside the school uniform shops and the supermarkets that sell stationery was evidence that parents really strive for their children to have a better future.

The day of the schools’ reopening arrived and parents were seen around seven in the morning on the streets of Kwatsaduza accompanying their children to school, especially those who were going to school for the first day.

The love and and the bonding that I saw between the mothers and their children in Duduza reminded me about the joy that comes with being a mother.

Some children were happy that they were going to start school this year while others cried and did not want to go to school. To some of them, tables turned when they saw their parents leaving them at school.

Despite the fact that these children were hurt, crying and did not want to be left in the hands of people that they had never seen in their lives, seeing their different reactions during the first day in school was also one of the things that made me think of my little baby girl as she will be doing Grade One in 2017.

They always say, no matter how sad the situation may be, if you are doing what is best for your child that will never kill her but make her strong and start to understand that life is never easy but it is a struggle that if fought successfully it brings a better tomorrow.

While other children were crying because they did not want to be separated from their parents, in the township’s streets there were also children who cried because they did not have a chance to go to school.

As I was driving to another primary school from Thakgalanag Primary School in Duduza, I saw a little boy, who I think might have been eight years old, sitting alone at the corner of the street crying and I immediately jumped out of the car to check if what was the problem.

The little boy told me the sad words that I do not think that I will ever forget. I asked the boy what was wrong, he replied and said, all of my friends returned to school today to do Grade Three but I could not join them as my mother told me that she did not have money to provide for all my schooling needs and I was hoping that maybe this year things would have changed but it is obvious that I will never be like other children.

The first thing that came into my mind was that it is clear that the boy at the age of eight has never had a chance to go to school because maybe both parents are unemployed, but I also asked myself, what about the child’s government support grant?

As much as I was hurt about the child’s situation I was also angry at his parents as I believe that there are thousands of children from families whose only source of income is the Government child support grant, who go to school, live a normal life like all other children coming from families that get decent salaries every month.

Parents, we need to understand that every child has a right to education despite our family situations. Let us not allow our children to become the victims of circumstance because I also believe that the strongest weapon that we can use to fight poverty together is education.