Jesse Tutor, an Islesboro Central School sixth grade student, recently returned to his island home after spending a year of adventure and learning in South Africa.
Jesse’s dad, Tom Tutor, was part of the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program that sent him to teach math in the remote village of Herschel, a town at the end of a dirt road in the foothills of the Drakensburg Mountains in the Eastern Cape Province, almost exactly in the middle of South Africa. The village consists of approximately 500 residents, mostly of the tribe and language Xhosas, living in about 200 houses. The landscape is arid, with the region receiving only 22 inches of rainfall annually. Jesse and his family left for Herschel in January 2005, during a Maine winter cold spell, arriving at their new home in the midst of an African summer. The first few months in South Africa were tough, according to Jesse. He says that it was the different culture and language, not color, that made it difficult at first to fit into a South African community.
The Herschel Village Junior Secondary School, where Tom taught eighth and ninth grade mathematics, is a public school with an enrollment of approximately 200. Herschel residents are among the poorest in South Africa, and often the village family had a hard time coming up with the $17.00 yearly school fee. The school building was unpainted, the desks worn and shabby, and the teaching methods old fashioned. However, the students were eager to learn and very respectful of their teachers. Jesse spoke of the South African teachers as being very strict and “square,” not giving students a lot of room for their own opinions.
After a period of adjustment, Jesse found himself in a more conducive learning environment in the nearby town of Lady Grey, where he joined a home school program run by a family from Johannesburg. The Tutor family also moved to the town of Lady Grey, where commuting to school for the boys was easier and they were able to find a more sociable and language friendly situation.
Jesse’s mom, Sue Hatch, worked hard at establishing a communal vegetable garden, but found the constant watering necessary for the garden to grow to be a huge problem. Most people there didn’t have any kind of a garden, the concept being quite alien to them.
Other cultural differences Jesse noted included the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot of recycling going on. He said trash was everywhere, including broken glass. Sometimes people would just toss their garbage out the window. There didn’t seem to be an understanding that there was any other way to dispose of trash.
Jesse said dogs in South Africa barked constantly, which drove him crazy at first. Dogs take on a different role in this part of the world, where they are kept primarily for guarding property. No cuddly, fluffy pets for them – the bigger, the meaner, the uglier, the better. There were no mosquitoes in the area, but the Tutors’ had a king cobra snake in the back yard, and giant grasshoppers hanging onto the grasses. The grasshoppers were thick and colorful — red and black, green and yellow. They were odd and totally disgusting, according to Jesse.
It also took a while to get used to the South African concept — or lack thereof – of privacy. The people are warm and friendly, and think nothing of coming into your house all hours of the day and night. Jesse remembers that his dad was particularly disconcerted by his Herschel students’ habit of standing over his shoulder while he graded tests and papers.
Traveling throughout the country was a big part of the South African experience for the Tutor family. Jesse wrote in his journal of the family’s Aduu Elephant Preserve trip that after watching a group of warthogs, “we decided to go around and see if we could find a place to have lunch. While we were driving we heard a rustling in the brush and when we looked that way we saw a whole herd of elephants. They weren’t going at a fast rate so we decided to just stop right there and have lunch with them. (We later told this story to a friend of ours and he said it was a very stupid move because if one of the elephants charged we would be in deep trouble.) Luckily nothing happened and we drove away from the elephants with no injuries and full stomachs.”
Jesse Tutor says he’s happy to be home, but he’s also glad of the African adventure. Traveling to, and living in, a place so exotic and opposite of what he knows broadened what he thinks and understands about the world. He came home more confident, more understanding of different cultural views, and dreaming of a day in the future when he can return to an African summer day.
Bonnie L. Mowery-Oldham teaches on Islesboro.
