Union of schools a world apart: Fundraising making all the difference after humbling visit to South Africa

Published on Wednesday 22 October 2008 09:55

FRANCES BENTON let the tears slide down her cheeks and drop on to the dusty ground below. It was the last day of what should have been an exciting two-week stay in South Africa, accompanying her 16-year-old daughter and ten other pupils from her Edinburgh school.

Instead, the crushing poverty of the squalid township of Umlazi, near Durban, where six million people cram into makeshift homes, had proved a deeply humbling and life-altering experience for the whole Scottish party.

The final emotional blow came just hours before they left Zwelibanzi School, twinned with her daughter's school, James Gillespie's. The 16-year-old head boy, Sibo Shezi, asked if the Scots would give him their spare change, any rand that was not worth converting back into sterling. "It will only cost 5p to buy an apple or a banana for the children," the boy said.

It was only then that the 54-year-old former teacher discovered more than 100 of the children, some of whom walked seven miles each day to school and worked in temperatures of more than 40C, had nothing to eat all day.

"It costs 30 to send a child to school for a year in South Africa. That doesn't sound like a lot to the Western world but it's a king's ransom over there," explains Frances, of Newington. "The children there know they need an education to get out of the poverty. These mothers had decided to send their children to school rather than buy food.

"I sobbed my heart out over what Sibo had asked, but only after I had collected all the spare change from the whole group – and most of their remaining paper money too. What we gave fed 112 children for nearly a week. I have rarely felt so guilty about what we have."

That was back in 2003 and since then the city school's links with their South African counterparts – begun by headteacher Alex Wallace – have blossomed, with regular pupil exchanges and fundraising. The money raised in Edinburgh has led to the creation of a James Gillespie's wing, named in honour of the school and housing a library, as well as buying vast quantities of equipment.

For Frances, perhaps the most important aspect was making sure the pupils weren't running on empty all day.

"When I asked my father, who was a headmaster for many years, what we should do, he said: 'You have to feed the children. If they are hungry, they won't learn'."

And thanks to a small soup kitchen built by the Gillespie's fundraisers, pupils no longer go hungry. "We supply the gas, pans and corn and the mothers are the cooks," explains Frances, who is now volunteer development officer of the James Gillespie's Trust. "It means the children get one small warm meal a day."

Now she is hoping to persuade Edinburgh businesses to help fund a second soup kitchen, this time at a school called Amauti. Through the Edinburgh businesses club, Promise for Business, around 1800 has been raised, about half of what is needed. Frances is hoping businesses will come to an event at the Lyceum Theatre on November 6 to find out how they can raise the rest.

One Edinburgh businessman who has been inspired is Terry Burns, who runs office furniture business, Nu-Trend.

Terry, who is also a coach with Spartans FC youth section, persuaded three coaching colleagues to travel to South Africa with him, taking football strips for the youngsters at Amauti.

"We were all blown away by what we found," he says. "Some of the children had come to school without any shoes and they didn't eat until they got home at night because there was no money for food at school.

"They were playing football barefoot – some of them in underpants and wearing just one shoe.

"There's only one toilet for 850 kids but the children were packed into classrooms, they were so desperate to learn."

That passion for learning also stunned Frances. "You have 80 children sitting in a classroom, all waiting patiently for the teacher." Some days, though, no teacher arrives as funds have run out. Frances stood in as a teacher, talking to pupils about Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken – because it happened to be one she could remember. "The next day, there were eight students standing at the school gate with poems of their own which they had written on scraps of paper."

The trip also had a profound effect on Frances' daughter, Lucy Fagan, now 21 and a student at Glasgow University.

Her mother says: "The school obliges the children to have a uniform. You should see the threadbare things they have to wear. Often they don't have shoes and the ones that do have been handed down from many people, but you could see your face in the front, they were so well polished.

"Before, my daughter would buy a pair of new sandals and think nothing of it. You think Western children have the upper hand with all they have going for them but these children taught my daughter about pride. I saw things in her I had no idea were there."

And her daughter, along with many other pupils, has continued to fundraise for the project since leaving the school and plans to return after university to teach.

As for the African pupils, attendance at the school has risen dramatically since the introduction of the soup kitchen. And Sibo, the head boy, is now 22 and studying international law at Pretoria University, the first black township boy to do so.

"And that's thanks to Scotland and Alex Wallace," says Frances.