An Englishman has found a home next to an abandoned railway line in Grahamstown, among motivated school children who are challenging society’s and the social system’s attempt to cast them aside.
An Englishman has found a home next to an abandoned railway line in Grahamstown, among motivated school children who are challenging society’s and the social system’s attempt to cast them aside.
Saint Felix, a private school in the United Kingdom, bears very little resemblance to Amasango Career School for extrinsically disabled learners in Grahamstown.
But Martin Coombs tied the schools into a bow when he decided his 30 years teaching secondary-level maths classes, and the energy he devoted to running a hostel of 40 teenage girls, had warranted him “giving a year to something somewhere abroad”.
When Mama Jane (Bradshaw) visited Saint Felix to fundraise for her school, Amasango, Martin found his something and his somewhere. Her visit transported him back to the 1970s, when he was a fireman on the footplate of the steam engines in Port Elizabeth. “I thought, ‘right, that fits’,” he says. “I was earning money back in the old South Africa. Why not give a year back to the new South Africa?”
And it fitted in more ways than one when he arrived to volunteer at a school perched alongside an old railway line. Martin has spent nine months being useful in any way he can.
In between the two or three maths and English classes he leads or assists with each day, Martin is fixing shelving trolleys for the school library and cataloguing books; he’s packaging parcels of oil, rice, mielie meal, sugar and stock cubes for pupils to take home with them over the weekend; he’s sitting under a tree teaching pronunciation of the alphabet to particularly weak pupils; and he’s driving pupils to their homes in the location when the school day ends.
He’s also helping to decorate the old railway offices now functioning as classrooms, and that’s his favourite part. “I try and show them how to use a brush and roller, first with emulsion paint on walls, but one or two of them have graduated to being able to use gloss paint on door frames,” he says.
“It’s a useful skill for them, either for work in the future, or for their own homes when they grow up – but it also helps to make them feel they’re important here, that they’ve done something useful in the school.” The variety of Martin’s duties doesn’t overwhelm him. Instead, its a refreshing change.
He no longer gets tangled in the unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy of management. “You don’t have to have it,” he says. “You can still do a good job of teaching… You just need your kids and a blackboard and hopefully a classroom.” In its place, he appreciates the significance of the specialised teaching Amasango provides.
“If you’re teaching a five-year-old the multiplication tables, it’s easy to get them reciting it by heart because there’s no embarrassment at that age,” he says. “If you’re teaching a 14- or 15-year-old the same thing, you’ve got to do it in a different way, and that’s why it would be great to see every town in South Africa have a school like this.”
Because Martin’s not often preparing lessons, another stimulating change is being able to walk away from the school in the afternoons and switch off his role as teacher, lending him time to be a writer and a friend.
