Mpumalanga—Love and Attachment

Sithuthukile, in Middleburg, Mpumalanga, has been our most wonderful NGO experience to date. We don’t want to leave and they don’t want to see us go.

Middleburg is about a 40-minute drive from Witbank, the largest town in the area. Once again, the possibilities of getting lost abound, as SA is in the middle of changing road and town names from Afrikans/English to African names. So,

Warm Baths= Bela Bela
Black Creek Rd= Masekane Rd.
Witbank= Emalahleni

All this is well and good, except that, often, the old signage stays up while the new one appears (*@#%(@#%&(@??] leading to much confusion. I also got a perverse kick yesterday, when I responded to a phone call from an Afrikaner colleague. She asked where we were and “we’ve just left Emalahleni” rolled off my tongue. Ha! There was a pause, and I could hear her mental gymnastics at work. Actually, Emalahleni is a more appropriate name for the old Witbank area, as it means “place of coal”. A huge coal mine also sits outside of Middleburg as well (no name change yet) and I’ve heard multiple dynamite blasts. In Emalahleni, children’s eyes run from irritation and allergies run high, as they do in most mining areas. Between the smoke from the home stoves and the coal pollution, this once beautiful area is wrecked. In this dry season, too, multiple brush fires appear on the side of road.

Sithuthukile is the smallest NGO of the 4, yet they do such thoughtful work with their sites. This is exemplified in the quality of their preschools and as we found, the level of practice of the practitioners and parents in our training. Strangely, though, this group was hard to read at first. There was less overt enthusiasm for our learning games, and a bit less participation at first. Our experience in teaching has taught us not to let that faze us, and to keep faith in the program. This turned out to be true. Day by day, there were signs of deep understanding, as when we came to a differentiation of love and attachment. During all my 0-3 work in SA I have heard: babies need love, babies need love,” over and over again. When asked what that means, there is often silence. This group understood the attachment issues immediately, and most important, the link between creating quality attachments with children with how many children are in care. That aha moment and their enthusiasm for learning about early brain development put them in a quiet and solemn mood.

This is a site with a Working Group (made up of about half of the training group in addition to community members). This group in fact, is Sesivukile, and now you know why the blog is named after them. Their deep understanding of the new ideas has fueled a fire under them and they met yesterday to plan their work, which includes research on the number of 0-3 at-home and preschool crèches in all their areas, a web of workshops with the key ideas for parents, other practitioners and community members, and a long-term advocacy agenda that will roll out with some future funding.

Three trainings down and one to go. But that doesn’t really state the true facts. The truth is that we have a fun-filled day of meetings in Jo’burg on Wednesday on the way to our last training, where 5 observers will join the largest group yet. And when we are done with the Tshepang training in Bethlehem, we still have a week of debriefing and meetings with our new partner, the University of the Free State.

The wind is howling and last night felt like Halloween. We are sitting by a warm fire so don’t feel too bad for us, but we do miss home.

xxoova