Bringing education to youngsters

Patience Tshabalala is an angel to the children of the Jumpers settlement camp in Cleveland.

38-year-old Patience is a mother of three and says having children of her own has opened her heart to helping other children.

Patience works for the Cotlands Early Childhood Centre in the Jumpers settlement.

Cotlands is a non-profit organisation that addresses the education and social crisis by establishing early learning playgroups and toy libraries in poor communities. These groups serve vulnerable children aged birth to six.

Patience says Cotlands found her in 2012 at a Baragwanath Hospital support group for HIV positive children, which Cotlands was running.

“The support group was taking place at the hospital and it was all about giving us support and telling us to love our children and what we need to do as parents,” said Patience.

Having an HIV positive child herself, Cotlands helped her to understand and deal with her emotions.

At the time, Cotlands’ focus was on vulnerable and HIV positive children.

In 2012 she started volunteering as a care giver with Cotlands and they gave her a learnership to study social auxiliary for two years.

She has not looked back.

In 2013, Cotlands started realising the need for early childhood development in informal settlements and Patience grabbed the opportunity to study to be an early childhood facilitator, which is what she is currently doing in the Jumpers settlement.

“I love working with children, especially the pleasure I get when I see a child understanding what he or she is doing,” said Patience.

Patience says the Cotlands early childhood playground has given the children in Jumpers an opportunity to develop and grow according to the milestones of a child.

“A number of children in Jumpers are foreign nationals and that is a challenge to parents because you find that most of the them don’t have proper documentation. This means the children do not go to school to learn. We try to help where we can, so that the child can learn the basics,” said Patience.

Patience said they offer free classes twice a week.

“We don’t run like a day care centre – we open at 8:30am and run until 12:30pm. Within these four-hour sessions, we structure around a routine of learning and playing opportunities that develop children’s language, mathematical, problem solving, gross motor, fine motor as well as social and emotional skills.

“Children also receive a nutritional meal at every session,” said Patience.

As a mother, Patience said she worries about the level of early childhood learning in the African community.

“African children don’t receive enough stimulation and parents don’t give enough time to monitor their child’s progress,” she said.

She added that many parents do not attend the birth to two year programme on offer.