It is Thursday morning, 11.27am. It’s a sunny day and the Scifest programme Unpacking Human Performance at the university’s Department of Human Kinetics and Ergonomics.
It is Thursday morning, 11.27am. It’s a sunny day and the Scifest programme Unpacking Human Performance at the university’s Department of Human Kinetics and Ergonomics.
As I approach the 15 Grade 7 students here to learn about the skeleton and its different joints, I witness their willingness to join the conversation and to be fed knowledge.
One pupil raises her hand. “Did these bones come from a human?” she asks.
“Yes,” replies the instructor. In disbelief, the pupil asks whether people get paid for donating their bones after death.
The instructor shrugs the question off: “Who would the money go to anyway? The person would be dead.”
The 13-year-old says, “To my family or anyone who would really need it.”
This is when I realised how heavy the load is – how, at the age of 13, this girl was already concerned about how she would provide for her family one day.
I realised then how important it is to understand that pupils come to Scifest from various schools but also from different backgrounds and with different responsibilities.
Their teacher mentioned how important it is that we do not restrict pupils at a young from venturing into different paths and that society should allow black women specifically to “be whatever they want to be because the world is so diverse”.
In a country where there aren’t enough black women in science, it is imperative to understand that black women can be scientists.
That black women should not, at the age of 13, be worrying about how to provide for their families one day.
That black women can be…
