Life in the township

On the second week of our stay in South Africa we got the field work phase of our project underway.

NSN has adopted a few public schools around Pretoria. This means that they assist these schools financially in various things from acquiring study materials to general maintenance. The mobile learning project will be piloted in these adoption schools.

So far we have visited one of these schools in the Mamelodi township area, where we did the inquiry for the students of a local Secondary School. Luckily quite a few students were willing to fill out our inquiry form even though they had just finished their last exam before summer vacation. It was very interesting for us just to meet them and to get to know them a bit.

We also got an introduction of the school facilities. The school was in a surprisingly reasonable condition compared to the township area surrounding it. Especially the computer lab was quite up to date, having relatively modern PCs with Internet access and was protected by a thick steel door. The school library functioned as one of the three public libraries available for the use of half a million people and 58 other schools in Mamelodi. Considering that the library has that many users, it was very modest.

Driving through the township gave us a better picture of the living conditions in these poor regions. Having lunch in a thereby restaurant was a great experience which introduced us some of the specialities of a township kitchen and food culture.