Caroline Ngwenya, the principal of the Bloubosrand-based school Takane Academy turned her home into a school as many children in the community could not afford to attend school.
The school was started 18 years ago, in a building that Ngwenya and her family still call home. When Ngwenya started Takane, it was in response to the challenges she was going through as a young parent who was not working and had no funds to pay for basic things such as school fees at the time. As a way to help her husband put food on the table, Ngwenya would sell plates of pap or whatever was available and was always on the lookout for construction sites around Witkoppen.
“I would put my daughter on my back after cooking and put the food in a wheelbarrow because then I didn’t have a car. I would sell pap for the day then after some hours I would walk back home and that’s the time I would use to teach my daughter,” said Ngwenya.
“But I guess, it was a training ground on how to stand amid a storm because a financial storm is something we all go through.”
Before selling food at construction sites, Ngwenya had done art courses and learnt how to draw, doing graphics was part of it but she didn’t realise that the teaching course that was part of it would be a door to something bigger.
“With the teaching course that I did, there was a part that carried child psychology and over time I used child psychology and painting to help first, my daughter, and slowly as my daughter and I would take walks down Agulhas Road, we’d meet some parents that would ask, ‘Why aren’t you taking your child to school?’, and I would explain to them I can’t and I don’t have the means.”
Over time children would come to Ngwenya’s home and she would spend time with them, and they’d do basic reading, and writing by the time she knew it, she grew from one child coming in regularly to three children coming in regularly.
“The word started spreading that I was helping children with learning difficulties. So, we divided my home in half. Half of it my family and I squished ourselves into and the other half was a huge room, which is now the Grade 1 classroom.”
Ngwenya says they have grown from Grade R right to matric.
“Whenever the children enter our school, we greet them with a hug because you can detect whether a child is going through something emotional. We’ve had to work with unspeakable emotional and physical challenges. Children come to school because they want a place where they can be safe, a place where they can confide in you as their teacher or principal, so before I am a principal, I need to be their friend.”
I would not be able to do this alone. I would not stand bold or brave without my staff of teachers.”
The help always comes at the right time,” said Ngwenya about the hands that helped Takane Academy be what it is today.
The Spar in Olivedale continuously provides Takane Academy with bread every Wednesday. Radio station 94.7 has helped with stationery and teaching equipment donations and community members come in to wash windows or sweep the pavement.
“They have all come with the belief that each drop has added to something bigger. There have been so many sponsors and I am just so thankful for them giving us what they could.”
COVID impacted Takane Academy negatively as they lost one of their staff members which was a painful experience for the school’s community. Some of the learners have lost loved ones as well, and for some, that was their only source of income.
“Many parents had lost their jobs so the little that we ask our parents to pay or to contribute in terms of school fees, whatever they were able to do then, many of them couldn’t continue.”
“We had to abide by the Department of Education’s rules of closing. We couldn’t close permanently, we still had to go on with the feeding scheme. Our children know that no matter if the sun sets or it doesn’t set, there is going to be food.”
As the world moved from contact learning to digital learning, this was and still is a big dream for Takane Academy.
“The challenge is that if someone is asked to buy data to be able to attend a class online, and yet use the same money to buy food, one has to be sensitive and understand that it is almost impossible but what was possible for us was meeting up with the staff and printing out some learning materials to give to the learners on Wednesday while we were doing the feeding scheme.”
Ngwenya said the two years that COVID had hit the world were quite difficult as some learners did not return.
Vision for the child
Takane Academy’s vision for their children begins when they enter the school, as they ensure that the children’s dreams become a reality by firstly building them up as an individual.
“Not everyone will get the opportunity to go to college or university, but we have mechanisms where we’ve partnered with organisations who will give the learners more skills. If a child is taught to make bricks from a young age, that almost becomes part of their DNA, but it shouldn’t just end there. So, we give them skills, we start teaching them that with what you know you can make a business out of it. We don’t want them to go out to be job seekers, we want them to be able to create jobs.”
Takane Academy’s vision for the female child is enhanced through the programmes they follow from the department’s guidelines regarding the subjects they teach. They build them to know and learn skills so that they could go out and make something of themselves.
“We want them to be individuals that are going to be strong, firstly for themselves and not to depend on another individual. If marriage is her dream, then we want the female child to be strong enough, and economically stable before she meets her partner. This is the same dream for the male child.”
Multiple organisations have programmes seeking to educate the boy children in the community living in fatherless households.
“I hope that we can be part of the solution that we can have fewer households that hold fatherless homes or even motherless homes. If we can start planting that seed now, by the time they leave here they will be whole because if they are not whole, they cannot give something that they do not have, just as much as if we do not teach them to love how do they love the next person if they don’t love themselves, it starts from within.”
Five highlights that Caroline Ngwenya has taken from her journey:
1. Love. I think love for yourself because I know whose image, I am made in. It starts with knowing yourself.
2. Never giving up is what will inspire the next person.
3. To be humble at all times.
4. To be tenacious in a sense of when situations beat you up, to stand up as a palm tree and know that you need to weather the storm.
5. To be focused moving forward. Knowing that you are not alone.
Ngwenya perceived bravery as an inborn thing or something that one learnt. “For me being brave is having that faith that you can overcome whatever storm is around you, and I’ve had my storms personally in terms of educating children that I work with. There have been many storms, but these storms have come and gone for a reason to sharpen my understanding, to build me as a person, and probably make me bolder than I thought. It’s been worthwhile in the sense that when the school came in, it was not my plan, when we started, we thought it would be a play centre.”
She added she was constantly reminded of ‘ubuntu’ and that we are who we are because of others. “It takes a whole village to raise a child, but in this scenario, it takes a whole community to raise a child despite the challenges that we’ve got, they are there to build us.”
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