Back to the daily grind...

Its Monday again, the weekend has flown by leaving me with a touch of flu and 2 staff meetings to attend this week. Not looking forward to either. Yesterday I did my almost weekly trawl thru fleamarkets, looking for unusual stuff to stock my shop with. This is really fun, especially planning future trips into the countryside to buy stock. I have had the best news ever, that my family members, a brother and a sister are seriously considering returning to this country after 10 years abroad in the UK, in order to live and work here for 2 years or longer and then go back to the UK. Apparently sun-deprivation, lack of a life and the continous cycle of home-work-home has taken its toll! But back to my story...

Days of sitting in the staffroom, doing nothing was also taking its toll. Tempers frayed and the uncertainty of the future was getting to every one of us in the excess pool. Then one afternoon, my world changed. A phone call from the DOE stating that there were 2 posts available at 2 schools, both of which I was eligible for. The 1st was at Glenwood High School, an ex-Model C school in the leafy suburb of Glenwood, not too far away from where I lived. Ex-Model C schools were established during the apartheid era for the White population group. They are very well resourced and the facilities are pristine. Staff in these schools are mainly White. Explaining the Model C structure would mean explaining the separate development policy held by the previous Nationalist government. In those days of White supremacy and separate development, White children were allocated a hefty sum of money by the Nat govt to fund their education. All manner of sporting facilities were made available at these schools, in neighbourhoods that boasted parks, gardens, neatly trimmed verges, lovely cottage houses, bowling and tennis club and every other manner of recreation known. In contrast, a girl like me who had to grow up in an Indian township and attend an Indian school, had to make do with a dusty patch of ground on which drums had been set up to act as goalposts during soccer matches, a school that had no swimming pool and served a community that lived in tiny, matchbox homes, where priviledges of the other lighter-hued pupils, whom we were never allowed to come in contact with, were the stuff of dreams. Now suddenly, I was being offered a chance to teach at such a school! [More to follow...]