We recently got on board with a great outreach initiative by means of helping with two DSLR cameras to be used by an underprivileged school in the Transkei who are being exposed to a life-changing project.
We got in touch with the program’s Matthew Eaton to give our readers a bit more background into their outreach initiative and hopefully get some more sponsors on board…
“Every year, students from Rondebosch Boys High School (and this year a few from Rustenberg Girls, Springfield Convent, and Rhenish Girls) travel up to the Transkei in the Eastern Cape to teach the students of Isolomzi Secondary School and give back to the surrounding community.
The school is extremely under-resourced with most classrooms being filled with broken desks, lack of stationary and inadequate chalkboards. As for the kids, they live poverty-stricken lives with many of them walking many kilometers just to get to school on time. Despite this, they maintain a passion and motivation for school that I have never seen before.
The idea of the program is to teach the Grade 11 and 12’s just before they begin writing their exams. Due to the extreme poverty they live in, many of the teachers at the school have not been able to become fully qualified to teach and therefore students are left with huge gaps in their syllabus. That is what we help with.
The program was started in 2012, by Rowan Harmuth & Marion Wasdell. It started with only a few Grade 12 students but has grown in both numbers and financial backing. It is now an extremely effective and life-changing program for all parties. This year we were awarded the HeroSA award for the month of July 2018.
The students of Isolomzi take our teaching to heart and are so motivated to do well in school. They are kind and compassionate and I can guarantee that you will struggle to find a more welcoming community than the one we experienced.
On top of the teaching this year, we decided to take up two beginner DSLR camera’s courtesy of Jason Ormrod of Orms in Cape Town. The camera kits were donated to the school in the hope that they will be used in and around the school allowing the students a creative outlet, as many of them would never have had the opportunity to even touch a camera, let alone use one of that caliber.
The program as a whole this year was extremely successful and we are hoping the last year’s first ever, 100% pass rate will be repeated by the Isolomzi students again this year. A big thank you to Orms for being super generous with lending me vast amounts of world-class gear to document the experience.
I am looking forward to seeing the program grow even more in the future and for a prospering relationship between Orms and the Transkei Isolomzi Outreach Program.
If you’d like to find out more about this incredible program or better yet, get involved, you can contact Matthew here.
