My principal and I met with the planning board the Thursday before last to see about the future of the building that was in terrible condition that needs to be renovated in order to assign the educators to the classrooms. I found out that despite the condition of the building it was not scheduled to be worked on until 2012ish (They are still working on projects that are dated for 2005). They informed me that they do not have any drawings for the school since it was built during Apartheid by the Ndebele Government; this is understandable. Usually they would hire a consulting firm to come in and do the drawings but there is no funding for it and it would be best to do it myself; what?! They suggested that we set up a meeting with them and the Circuit Manager who is in charge of all of the schools in my area. We immediately went over to the circuit office to schedule a meeting and the manager wasn't in so we left a note with the administrative assistant to have him call us.
Since nobody in the Department of Education seems to like to follow up with anything, I asked my principal to call and follow up with him if she hadn't heard from him by Monday afternoon. I asked her about it on Monday to see if anything was set up; not surprisingly she hadn't followed up with him. She called and the result of the conversation was that we should call a week from Tuesday to set up an appointment since exams would be over by then. I voiced my concern with her-in private and calmly-about the absurdity of that request. She seemed like she was intent on heeding to the request so I resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't going to happen like I wished/thought it should.
I spent the rest of Monday through Wednesday following up with the principals about the parks project I'm working on. Not surprisingly, they hadn't gotten anything done either. By Wednesday night the idea that I had to wait until Tuesday to even SCHEDULE a meeting had me at my wits end. I decided that I doubted the circuit manager was completely unavailable so I decided to call him myself the next morning.
At 8:00 am on Thursday I called the circuit manager on his cell phone and he said he was tied up most of the day with exams but he would meet with me at 4:30. I knew he would have time to talk to me and I have a feeling that the principal never talked to him directly. Lesson learned: if you don't give someone the message yourself then it probably won't get to them and if it does, the message will be misinterpreted. I was extremely relieved because I felt like I could claim I accomplished something last week.
I went over to my school and took pictures of the horrible state of the buildings so I could show them to the circuit manager. I talked to each of the educators to collect any additional concerns to further my case. Since my principal wasn't there I couldn't communicate this to her to prevent her from feeling like I went behind her back again.
After 6.5 hours of painstaking waiting I finally went over for the meeting. Since we share the same last name (My South African name is Jabulani Skosana) I walked into his office and greeted him with "Skosana!" to which he replied the same way. After some small talk we started talking about what I wanted. I described the condition of my school while showing the pictures I took to him on my camera; as I had hoped, his jaw dropped!
Unfortunately, his wife called because she locked the steering wheel by turning it before putting the keys into the ignition. After 20 minutes of back and forth calls and then spending 10 minutes locating someone who he could send to help her we resumed our conversation.
I showed him the document that explained why educators should be assigned to their own classrooms and the schedule that I had arranged that would allow it to work and he was impressed. Then he showed me a document that confirmed my school would not be serviced anytime soon and informed me that there weren't any drawings of any of the schools properties or buildings in the office. This left me greatly disappointed and not very surprised. The more that I think of it, the more I suspect that some people just aren't doing their job.
I do have an old to-scale drawing that I'm going to use as a reference for the property size and am going to do the rest from scratch. Hopefully the Planning Office will let me use their computers to draw the buildings in AutoCAD. Even better, I am going to see if they'll buy me a copy of the program that I can use on my computer and give them any drawings I do related to the project.
In the meantime, I have begun doing surveying of Mnyamana's property and buildings with the intention of creating the drawings myself and finding private funding for the renovation. Fortunately the buildings are very basic so my degree in architectural engineering and minimal experience with building construction have provided me with enough expertise to do it. I am actually very excited that this is going to be more challenging because I will get to use more of what I learned and it will give me an opportunity to teach the learners about doing construction projects before moving on to the much larger parks project.
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