Profile by haley jones

a n o Le

s r e p e e h c S ones

by Haley J

Making her mark in a South African Township

I

t’s 6am on a winter morning in the rural suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa. Frost covers the front lawn and barking dogs can be heard in every direction.

Leona Scheepers, bundled in layers of thick, black clothing, is busy packing the white, 1997 Chana truck with food for 18 people, paint, paint brushes, stencils, buckets and more. She is preparing for the group of volunteers staying at her home to travel into the township of Tembisa to refurbish a preschool. The teacher at this preschool is being rewarded for showing a passion for learning, curiosity and moti-

vation to teach while she attended one of Leona’s classes. Just as Leona fixes up the preschool, she does her part to try to fix the broken community of Tembisa.

Up until 1994, South Africa had a mainly white-run government. The blacks and the whites lived dramatically different lives. While the whites had complete freedom, the blacks were forced to carry a pass with them to go into town and were not allowed in the towns past 6pm.

Townships began to rise during this time, as the blacks needed to live close to the towns for work but were not allowed to inhabit them. In 1994, when Nelson

Mandela became president, the government turned completely democratic, yet townships still remain to this day. Most blacks living in the townships have no access to electricity or running water. Daily life for these South Africans is a struggle. Some can barely feed their family and most have little to no education. Leona Scheepers, who has always dreamed of owning her own preschool, lives next to one of these townships: Tembisa. She has grown up seeing the disparity in Tembisa; seven years ago, she decided to do something to help.

Leona has combined her dream of becoming a preschool teacher

and her unique way of thinking to allow her to touch hundreds of children’s lives, instead of just a classroom of children. Today, Leona works with over 60 preschools in the fifth largest township in South Africa.

Leona was born and raised in the province of Gauteng in South Africa. As the eldest of five daughters, she learned responsibility very early on in life as her family moved from the gold mines to the coal mines.

Her father treated his daughters

nately, everything changed seven years ago when Leona and Lucas’s third son, Lawrence, died of cancer. “He played a massive role in us questioning our motives for living. Why were we actually living? What were we doing every day that was making a difference to someone else’s life? Because in the end, if you come to the end of your life and you can say I made a difference in my own life, you haven’t really done much in life have you.” For this reason, Leona and her husband quit their

township. On our way there, Leona told me the story of how this preschool came to be. The land used to be a dumping ground for the community’s trash. Every day, Olga, the head of the preschool, cleared the trash little by little. After weeks of the effort, she had enough space to build a school the size of a bathroom.

At first, she had about ten kids, but as she kept clearing trash and building more classrooms, ten kids turned into twenty, and then thirty and then forty. Today,

as boys so Leona and her sisters quickly became independent and strong-willed girls. Her family was close knit and very much believed in the power of a family unit. Leona attended an English university in the center of Johannesburg to study medicine and then University of Pretoria to study marketing.

Leona never used either of these degrees and instead worked as a computer programer at a company where she eventually met her husband, Lucas. Unfortu-

jobs and started an organization called Community Outreach Program trust or COP Trust and devoted themselves to making a difference in others’ lives.

Every Tuesday, Leona travels to a preschool in Tembisa to do what she calls “brain gym.”

This entails Leona teaching a lesson, a song, or a movement class (and sometimes all three) to the students at the preschool. On this particular day, I traveled with Leona to a preschool in a squatter camp on the outskirts of the

Olga has over one hundred children at her preschool. As our car pulled through the front gates of the school, I was shocked. In the middle of a squatter camp, there was a colorful children’s haven. Leona was welcomed with one hundred smiling faces, eager to find out what she had planned. Today, Leona was going to teach the children about farm animals. The night before, she stayed up late cutting out pictures, organizing crayons by color, and writing down the

words to Old McDonald. First, she went to the three to four year olds’ classroom. She went over all the farm animals one by one, first asking what they look like, then what they sound like.

Once the kids mastered each animal, she pulled out paper

plates with pig faces drawn on them and instructed the kids to color them in. After about an hour, it was time for the five to six year olds. She went through the same exercises, making sure every student had the animals down. Then she taught the class the Old McDonald song. Leona’s patience and warm heart illuminated the room throughout the entire lesson. She helped each student individually while always maintaining a smile

from ear to ear. Leona was teaching children who could barely speak English, most of whom have never seen a white person and who don’t have enough food in their stomachs to keep them full. Needless to say, this was a difficult task, but to Leona, it was

“Poverty is within your spirit, its ' not in your

environment” simple, “To teach is just to be able to communicate, to share love, and to make a difference in someone’s life.”

Once a month, Leona buys 9,000 packets of tea, 500 soup packets, jars of peanut butter, bags of sugar, maize, and other various items. Thirty minutes after I got off the plane in South Africa, Leona put me to

work. We set up tables in a line and on each table, Leona put a certain amount of each food, making sure not to put too much as the tables would break.

We worked in an assembly line, counting each product so the bags would be even. I could

tell this wasn’t Leona’s first time doing this. In under an hour, we put together hundreds of food parcels for members of the Tembisa community. One parcel, the size of a plastic Safeway bag, will feed a family of four for an entire month. These food parcels were loaded into two different trucks; Leona drives one and Lucas drives the other. Lucas dropped off the food parcels to an elementary school, where the students nominated fifty of their

most needy classmates to receive the parcels. Leona and I stopped in front of a nondescript building in the middle of Tembisa. We made our way to the side of the building where we were greeted with the voices of almost forty gogos singing us a song. Gogos are grandparents whose sons and daughters died of AIDS and they are taking care of their grandchildren. Many of them have over five kids to take care of and they are surviving on little to no income. Leona referred to each of them by name, asking about their family, their hobbies and events in their life. One man had just undergone surgery and Leona hugged him, referred to him as “Bubba” and told him he looked strong. One by one, the gogos proceeded to step forward as Leona and I passed out the parcels. On the way home, I felt very proud of the work we did. Leona, however, didn’t show any sense of pride. To her,

she only helped forty women in a township of nearly half a million people in need.

According to Leona, she is living her “dream.” She will continue to work everyday, devoting her time and effort to help people living in a place of desperation; she believes “poverty is within your spirit, it’s not in your

environment.” Her passion for helping others and her respect for those she works with never fails to amaze.

From trying to transform preschool education, to building a community center in the middle of Tembisa, to feeding the hungry, Leona Scheepers continues to do everything in

her power to mend a broken community. She is working towards her goal of a level of interdependence between her and the community. “You know when you can see how just doing something differently, will make a person’s life so much better and you can’t force that on to someone you have to let them realize that how just making these little changes will actually get them into a better place. But the initiative has to come from their side, to just keep working, keep working with them even though you would love to just change their lives radically you cannot, because otherwise you’re going to take away their sense of selfworth, their integrity, and I must respect them for what they are, for what they have done with what they have. Otherwise, I’m not a good person.”