Kerry Kennedy and Chanelle Wilson - Restoring an Atmosphere of Learning

Fulbright English Teaching Assistants to South Africa
Host Institution: Walmer High School, Port Elizabeth
Grant Dates: 2010-2011

Located on the outskirts of a township ridden with high crime, unemployment, and citizens affected by or infected with HIV/AIDS, Walmer High School in Port Elizabeth has been in need of improvement. The school does the best it can to serve a population of 1,410 pupils, yet receives inadequate support and funding to do so. As a result, Walmer High School is not able to fill five teacher vacancies and few students pass the matriculation exams at the end of each year because they lack the necessary reading comprehension and writing skills.

Upon arrival at Walmer High School in late January 2011, Chanelle found that the school lacked a functional library. The space deemed the Umthombo Wolwazi “Library” was instead filled with unwanted, broken and damaged materials. In collaboration with Principal Lunga Dyani, Chanelle decided to revitalize the unusable library to create a welcoming learning space filled with helpful educational tools for Walmer’s students. Our main objective has been promoting a culture of literacy that encourages students to improve their communicative competence through reading and research. Through the promotion of reading – especially of multicultural texts – we hope to encourage a love of independent reading, combat xenophobic perspectives, and better prepare all students for their matriculation examinations.

From left to right: Chanelle and Kerry

With these goals in mind, Chanelle began working to restore the library. She reached out to the community to help make the much needed library building renovations with absolutely no budget. Kerry Kennedy, another ETA,arrived in the midst of these efforts, and the two ETAs, with significant assistance from the community, have made considerable progress in their library restoration project.

With the help of the local community and several organizations, the library’s building repairs have progressed well. The school’s grade 11 English Access Microscholarship learners were integral to helping with repairs. (Like Fulbright, Access is a U.S. State Department-funded program.) The grade 11 pupils’ involvement has given them a sense of ownership of the library.

Thus far, electricity and security have been successfully installed in the library building, several large holes in the ceiling have been repaired, and unusable, rotting books recycled. We repainted walls, doors, and baseboards using donated paint and supplies from Premium Paints, a local supplier. Local donors have installed blinds and carpeting. The firm Dimension Data will install wireless internet service to be used in the library’s new Information Resource Center that offers students 10 donated laptops for research. The Olive Leaf Foundation, a South African NGO, found a sponsor to fund the purchase and installation of a brand new projector as well, an exceptional tool for both teaching and learning.

Now that the physical repairs to the library’s structure are complete, our focus has shifted largely to the books collected to date. Through our visit to Cape Town in March, funded by the U.S. Embassy, we secured a donation of 200 new, culturally relevant books in both Xhosa and English from Biblionef and met with the director of the Bookery about partnering with the project. Both organizations specialize in book donations for township libraries. Telkom, the South African telecom company, and Scholastic, the children's book publisher, have contributed several boxes of reading materials.

The current inventory, however, reaches only about 1,000 books. While Kerry was awaiting her departure to South Africa, she organized a large book drive in her hometown of Monroe, NY, which has been in progress since February 2011. This drive has collected nearly an additional 1,000 new or gently used age-appropriate books to help fill the shelves of the Umthombo Wolwazi Library and be a significant educational addition. We are still searching for funding to ship these books from New York to Port Elizabeth and will hopefully succeed in obtaining that funding shortly through various grant applications.

In the meantime, together with library volunteer Zukie Bentele, we have been working on the classification, cataloging, and circulating systems that are a major part of daily library procedures. Throughout this particular process, we hope to work in collaboration with the grade 10 learners in the English Access Microscholarship program just as we did with the grade 11 pupils. By including the grade 10 students in our work, we hope to expand this feeling of ownership to more learners. We will teach library courses to grades 8, 9, and 10; these courses will emphasize how to use a library, how to become better readers and how to conduct research.

The work needed to complete our library restoration project will go on throughout the school year as we continue to stock its shelves, train teacher and pupil librarians, and ensure the library will remain sustainable for years. According to Principal Dyani, many people have said, “If you wish to hide something from a black person, put it in a book.” In revitalizing Walmer High School’s library, we strive to negate this statement. We sincerely hope to build an atmosphere of literacy and learning for Walmer’s youth. Reading is fundamental to a person’s success, and the learners at Walmer High School need all the tools they can get to reach their maximum potential.

Watch our documentary video about the library's restoration.

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