Fresh Footsteps Across Old Education Boundaries

My name is Jasmine Dingley and I am seventeen years old. I was recently given the opportunity to visit Sierra Leone with my Nan, as she wanted to visit friends and the school she sponsors. I attend a Steiner school, which is an alternative method of education which focuses on educating the whole child, not just the mind. The references within my reflection to ‘main lesson’ and ‘middles,’ are in relation to my experience of school. As a Society and Culture student, I believed that the experience would give me depth to my studies and an appreciation for other cultures, but what I actually gained was much more; I came back having truly gained insight and life experience. The following text is a reflection on my time in Sierra Leone.

I stepped out of the airport into a wave of dry heat. All around, bodies pressed in on me, smiling, laughing and talking in a language I didn’t understand. The lack of regard for personal space, so unlike the norms of western culture, unnerved me and I had to remind myself to refrain from judging a culture on my own values and beliefs. The feeling of truly being a minority, a lone white face in a sea of black, was alien. Over the next ten days, as I began to put aside the cultural mores and norms that form the basis of my understanding of the world, I gained insight into and appreciation for a culture that is so vastly different to anything I have experienced.

The Sierra Leoneans ability to be content and happy with what little they have is something that touched me, and something that I feel has long been lost in western culture. Consumerism and materialism are values so entrenched in our modern day society that the words ‘wealth’ and ‘status’ are essentially the same thing. The happiness that was evident in the face of so much poverty was truly shocking, I couldn’t comprehend that people could be content with so little.

This became all the more evident on our visit to Goderich Waldorf school in Rokel. The first Waldorf school in West Africa, it is little more than three tarpaulin classrooms held up by sticks and rope. With just over ninety students and three teachers, the school is located in a tiny village where the main trades are fishing and stone breaking. As I stood at the main entrance and looked at the tiny structure that supposedly housed almost a hundred children, I couldn’t help comparing it to my idea of a Steiner school, beautiful buildings, open land and shady trees. This became my main learning curve over the course of my trip, to fully understand that everything is relative to the culture in which it is located. To judge another society on the values and norms of your own is not right, although we subconsciously do it. You have to consciously think about it and make the decision to view everything with unbiased eyes, difficult though this may be. So I looked again, and this time saw the children’s faces, how happy and grateful they were to be there at all, how the lack of classrooms, of proper equipment didn’t matter to them, all that did was that they were there and learning. The teachers were happy to be there and to be working, though they received an incredibly low salary by our standards. Amongst all the vast differences I found many similarities. The days were structured in all too familiar ways, main lesson beginning the morning. The children enjoyed morning tea, and then began middles. This little oasis in the centre of poverty amazed me, and truly changed the way I view the world.

It is hard to describe the feeling of entering a completely different culture with little previous knowledge of the place, to be thrown straight in the deep end so to speak. The capabilities Sierra Leoneans must possess in order to live and survive in such a harsh social climate are hard to believe. Little or no water reaches most residential places, and electricity is temperamental at best. These conditions produce a different race of people, not just in nationality but in their incredible outlook on life. The incredible experience I underwent enabled me to get a glimpse of a culture so vastly different to my own. It truly did change the way I view my own culture. It was an amazing journey and I feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to take it.