Siseko Makamba

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Due to the financial position of myself and my family, I intend spending the grant on my tuition fees. The grant that I have will help me to pay the first installment of my tuition fees which is R1050.00.

My name is Siseko and the surname is Makamba and I am one of the registered students of the University of Durban-Westville.

I come from one of the most remote and primitive locations of the homeland of Transkei under the district of Tsolo. This is the place where I was born and bred and I am still living there and will continue living in it in the future.

I come from a poor disadvantaged family of six children. I am the second oldest in the family. The first born sister is doing her final year at a teacher training college and a brother coming after me is doing his first year in a Technical school. Two others are at high school and the last in primary school. We were fortunate to have parents who are proud to see us educated though they had no means. Most teenagers in my community are illiterate. Our parents my father, recently a driver but now out of employment and mother an assistant nurse had to surrender all they had to get us educated. At my early years my mother was a shop attendant. But fortunately my father pushed her back to school and is now being an assistant nurse.

As I have stated that my father is presently unemployed because of retrenchment and having three kids in tertiary institutions, my mother had to empty her pockets to pay our tuition fees. I also made some contribution because at holiday I worked in a local wholesale as a caddy. Things went worse when my father was out of work towards the end of last year. My mother only managed to pay my tuition and I had to stay with a friend in residence. The grant has done something to fight this bankruptcy. For the following year I cannot make it without financial assistance. If I can be unlucky to get it I will be forced to break my studies and look for a job.

At my childhood there was no school in my location where I stay. I had to walk a distance of about five to seven kilometers every morning and afternoon with my brother and sister. The school was also poorly built where you had std. 1 and 2 sharing the same classroom. I studied there until I got my junior certificate (std. 7).

I was quite fortunate to get a government bursary from the department of education to get me to school for senior secondary. I was taken to Gaya Senior secondary which was a boarding school and completed matric there. After matric I came to study for a B. Admin. Degree trying to uplift the ambitions of my parents and now presently doing my second year of study B. Admin. II.

Before any step can be taken to improve my community education has to be the first issue on the agenda because you can take no further step without education being first. My main goal with some of my few colleagues who were fortunate to have access to education is to convince the parents who are conservative on the issue of educating their children on how important is education. What they believe in is that a boy had to look after his father’s herd of cattle and go work in the mines when he is old and the girl work among the family until she is mature for marriage. So we are trying to fight this perception, trying to show them how education is important in nowadays.

We also try to convince the adolescent youth to go back to school. We usually make social gatherings where we engage ourselves in discussion on the importance of education among the youth and embark on a programme to improve the social status of our community.

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