Leaving

Robert Andrew McNeil

There are some days that spin around your conscious and touch the flavours of each day in some way. That last day in 2004 in the South African township where we were teaching and helping teachers was such a day. It burned. It burns still.

We had arrived all six of us and been dispatched to the black and coloured township houses. The latter community often regarding themselves as black come polling day for the ANC. We had shivered that first night. It was July but it was winter in Africa. When that sun went down it grew cold. I-and all of us were with a family in the townships. The Oma-the grandmother who only spoke Afrikaans was head of my household. I love her still. She embodied how time both could shave the body of youth yet give it a dignity and life the cold flesh of a Venetian Michelangelo statue could only dream of.

After days that had colour like years we got in a rhythm. In my school how white teachers were paid extra during apartheid for even being in the same school as non-whites. How the toilets were separate for them how the education they gave had a racist snarl and undertow that we could only being to attempt to scratch away.

We were six Scottish teachers and some weeks under a forever horizon, wandering goats on the main road and a red earth that looked blood when water leaked upon it. I loved it, my host family and the joy and tragedy that was part of the fabric of life.

Part of my work in the school was encouraging literacy from basic phonics to creative writing. Interesting as like Latin, Urdu and Romany I knew nothing about Afrikaans language and literature.

The school computer room where I worked had no heating like the rest of the school. On other floors they would often be no windows-they would be broken at night due to the poor security. No Devil's Tongue fence to keep the marauders out and classrooms or teaching materials safe.

I managed to get some writing from the kids who were around fourteen years of age. Some had sores but they had a lean-burn and hard edge that began to let me into their world. It was often a world of pain despite the respect, joy and humour they and the school brought to my and my colleagues' lives.

Rape, stealing and other violence happened in the night. It was something there but often little seen by me and as I would go jogging around the township or be taken round the fantastic night scenes of the nearby township.

But it was not that will colour the most frenetic of days teaching or trying to teach in a Scottish school community. What colours it and makes me always bring the millions who are denied education, water and life into the learning I try to encourage is the tears.

It was the tears of the boy who wanted me to stay. It was Kevin who had given most and said most-not much but a riches worth of giving in the class. He had known in the cold and bitter darkness things I could only read about.

And here I was leaving. What does a heart do when your eyes shut down? They turn inward and look hard at you. At birth and now.