The Sunday News
MARTHA Sibanda (16) has to contend with the daily routine of waking up at 4am. She does not wash her full body but only takes care of the essentials, since time is never on her side.
Just as the first cock crows, she takes on a long and arduous three-hour journey through bush, forest and valley, to the nearest secondary school, Phumelela.
Martha has to be there in time for the school assembly at 7.30am.
Phumelela Secondary School lies 280 kilometres north-west of Bulawayo, in Matabeleland North Province’s Lupane District, Lusulu area, in a little village called Ngcono, under Chief Mabikwa and right on the border with Midlands Province’s Gokwe North District.
For Martha, a Form Two pupil at the school, going to school is not so much of a pleasant experience but one she has to endure nevertheless, as it seems to be her only gateway to a better future.
Geographically, Lusulu is not so far away from the metropolis and development, yet the backwardness and underdevelopment that underlines the area, puts it so many miles away from civilisation as we have grown to appreciate it.
One can be forgiven for rechristening the area, St Elsewhere.
Martha dreams of one day becoming a lawyer, a profession she has only read about and remains abstract in her wild imagination; yet her circumstances do very little to inspire the kind of social mobility she envisages.
Nonetheless, Martha remains optimistic, and for five days in a week, during the school term she treads about 30 kilometres to and from school, in pursuit of her dream.
“My dream is to become a lawyer. I know lawyers have a lot of money and I want to be one when I finish school so that I can take care of my mother and father, as well as my siblings,” said Martha, with an innocent face, beaming with optimism.
For her, and many others in similar circumstances, access to education, a basic right, comes at a price wrapped with a myriad of challenges, some which our minds, blinded by ignorance and a blinkered worldview, may struggle to fathom.
Martha stays in Gokwe North District’s Lupaswa area and Phumelela Secondary School, which is about 15 kilometres from her home, is the nearest secondary school she and many other children from her area can attend.
Walking long distances to the school is not a circumstance that is peculiar only to Martha and her colleagues who stay in Gokwe. Even some children who stay in Lupane District, where the school is located, also walk long distances to and from school because of the spacial, random and sporadic pattern in which their villages are arranged.
Some walk close to 10km to the school, which services nine primary schools in the district and beyond.
However, for Martha and many others who come from Gokwe, going to school takes much more than just waking up in the wee hours and enduring the long distance. It requires an extra deal of determination and courage to cross the crocodile infested Khana River which lies between Lupane and Gokwe North districts.
Fortunately for the pupils, two benevolent villagers only identified as Mr Maphosa and Mr Shumba from Gokwe, constructed a makeshift bridge using logs to enable the children to cross the river to and from school, without the risk of being attacked by crocodiles or being washed away when the river is flooded.
However, it takes a great deal of skill, courage, determination, agility and dexterity akin to that of a cat, for the children to scale the bridge, aptly named Umtengatenga (shaky bridge).
The bridge dangles from side to side like a pendulum, hanging precariously on untreated poles dug into the ground to support the walking platform, it crackles and threatens to collapse each time the children trudge across it, hence the name Umtengatenga. Yet Martha and her colleagues have to endure such a heart-stopping experience twice everyday as they pursue a basic right, education.
Perhaps the Umtengatenga, its dangling nature and ever-existing threat of disintegration, symbolises how precarious and delicate the path that Martha and many like her have to walk as they seek to escape, the poverty and underdevelopment that have become synonymous with their area.
Sometimes the children hold each other’s hands as they negotiate their way through the crackling, dangling makeshift bridge — probably the kind of gesture the Lusulu community needs from other well-to-do communities for its children to glide up the social ladder.
During the rain season, Martha told Sunday News in a tone denoting dejection, Khana River sometimes floods from shore to shore, with water covering the Umtengatenga such that no one is able to cross.
“We sometimes miss school if the river is flooded and the bridge is covered in water because we won’t be able to cross. We sometimes have to wait for two weeks for the water levels to subside before we resume going to class,” she said.
Sadly for Martha and other school children from her area, business would continue as usual at school during their absence and they would need to work extra hard to catch up with their colleagues.
The name Phumelela means to succeed, yet the school, riddled with a cocktail of challenges does not inspire anyone to succeed. Martha and her colleagues have to live in this paradox, and pray that fate will reward them.
O-level results that have been produced at the school over the years run parallel with the school’s name and do not show any glimpse of success.
Since its establishment in 1985, the school has recurrently produced a zero percent pass rate at O-level and it was only last year when the pass rate improved to six percent in the November 2013 Zimsec examinations, a milestone achievement by the school’s standards.
The headmaster, Mr Dumisani Mbambo, attributed the low pass rate to a number of challenges being faced at the school, among them demotivated teachers and pupils, lack of resources, lack of support from the local community, a high school drop out rate and a broken down communication system that has isolated the area from mainstream society.
“The kind of teachers we have here sometimes act like residue from the mainstream community because they lack motivation, hence do their job half-heartedly. Most of them are on standby of a kind, waiting to be transferred to better schools.
“There is no communication infrastructure to talk about here. There are no telephones, cellphone signal is bad. Transport to and from is scarce and we have to rely on one bus which comes here three times a week only from Bulawayo. That has enclosed everyone in a set up so remote from mainstream society. We live in a sector that is so far behind from everyone else.
