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Developing
Education in Africa
Mrs D Hodgson
May 28 2009
Helped
by son and grand-daughters our speaker today, Mrs Doreen Hodgson, working with
and for the charity “Chameleon – Developing Education” built and
furnished schools in
South Africa
A
former headmistress Doreen went on a trip to
South Africa
organised by the vicar of her church and witnessed the poor state of primary
education in the shanty towns of the country.
She
was appalled at this lack of education and decided to help improve the
situation. This decision resulted in numerous visits to
South Africa
to work on the building and establishment of schools. She photographically
recorded her work and we were the recipients of a very interesting slide show
of these photographs that illustrated her accomplishments and the problems she
surmounted.
South
Africa
in the shanty towns and beyond is still a primitive third world country and
the problems are both physical and endemic. All the children have worms and a
large proportion suffer from Aids. Only about twenty percent of the children
in primary education go on to further education because it is not free and
also because of the Africans’ view of knowledge.
They
consider knowledge as power and in consequence information is not passed down
and as a result schools and teachers are still in short supply.
The
opinion of one of our members who has extensive knowledge of education in West
and
Central Africa
is that South African education is 50 to 80 years behind those regions. This
information strengthened our view that Mrs Hodgson has been doing a wonderful
job of improving
the life of young coloured people in
South Africa
.
This
was our penultimate meeting of this session, our
last will be on Thursday 11th June at 10-00am in Otley Civic Centre
when John Churchman will tell us about
New Zealand
. Following this we have our annual coach outing. On Thursday 18th
June we will be visiting Sledmere House and
Bridlington.
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