What is it like for a Japanese engineer to live in a town like Alice? “It’s quiet and laid-back,” says Tomokazu Konno, who comes from a city north of Tokyo with one million citizens.
What is it like for a Japanese engineer to live in a town like Alice? “It’s quiet and laid-back,” says Tomokazu Konno, who comes from a city north of Tokyo with one million citizens.
His only regret is that there is no place to go out. Konno arrived in Alice two months ago as a volunteer at the Forté School of Science and Technology (FOSST) Discovery Centre.
In basic English, he explains that he makes handson exhibits like pendulums and sound experiments with beer cans for learners to interact with.
The difference between teaching learners from a technologically-advanced country like Japan and the rural Eastern Cape, however, are vast.
In Japan, says outgoing volunteer Akishi Shimizu, children often take learning science for granted because they learn basic maths from such a young age.
They also have many opportunities to encounter science through resources like books and the internet. But in Alice, the thirst for knowledge is immense among learners who have only seen pictures of batteries and resistors in textbooks.
Shimizu, who speaks fluent English after two years in South Africa, says his own inability to study from a textbook has inspired him to teach difficult concepts through practical activities like building circuits.
Shimizu and Konno were both involved in organising the National Science Week in Alice from 2 to 7 August, when the Department of Science and Technology donated a mobile laboratory in the form of a van to the centre, so that volunteers can take their expertise to schools outside Alice too.
Do the volunteers miss anything about Japan? “Actually nothing except having a daily bath,” says Shimizu, who has been very conscious about saving water in the Eastern Cape.
Konno agrees, and adds tofu and Japanese noodles to the list. He has also struggled to get used to how people beg for money, which he says doesn’t happen at all in Japan. “To me it’s shameful,” adds Shimizu. “I can’t even ask my friends for money.”
He says begging is frowned upon in Japan, and he cannot understand why people do it here. “They seem to throw away their pride.
They don’t think of themselves as human beings,” he says. What they do enjoy about South Africa is cheap food, especially R3 ice cream which is “as good as Japanese ice cream” and that it would cost up to R50 back home.
For Konno, the variety of people is what gets him particularly excited. “In Japan, everyone is Japanese,” he says. And in South Africa? “Everyone is friendly,” says Shimizu.
In particular, he will never forget the delighted gasps of science learners who got to connect batteries and light bulbs for the very first time.
