Investing In The Future Of Farmworkers' Children

Gelukwaarts School near Van Stadensrus in the Free State was launched by commercial farmers in the late 1990s to serve their workers’ children. Sunet Wessels spoke to Mike Burgess about the vibrant school that today educates 292 pupils on the farm Longlead.

- Mike Burgess

“You need to identify and deal with the small barriers that children have to learning,” says Sunet Wessels, the principal of Gelukwaarts School near Van Stadensrus in the Free State. “You just need to see what makes them tick.”

It has been this personal attention afforded to Gelukwaarts pupils over the past 21 years that has seen the transformation of a once small farm school of 45 children into a multi-award-winning regional school of almost 300 children.

During weekdays, the back roads of the deep rural areas of Van Stadensrus, Zastron, Dewetsdorp and Wepener carry a stream of buses ferrying these children back and forth from Gelukwaarts, where they are taught by a team of dedicated teachers, most of whom are farmers’ wives.

“It simply takes patience. You need to give wings to those with potential,” says Wessels, who with her husband, Piet, owns Longlead farm, near Van Stadensrus.

Wessels is particularly proud of two former Gelukwaarts boys, Nkosi Matuwane and Tshepo Thomas, who grew up on Longlead. They recently graduated as civil and building engineers respectively at the Central University of Technology in Bloemfontein.

FOUNDATIONS

Gelukwaarts was the brainchild of farmer and teacher Daan Wilken, who, after a number of farm murders in the area during the 1990s (including that of his uncle, Neels), decided to provide better education for farm workers’ children.

According to Wessels, Wilken believed that if you educated workers’ children and offered them opportunities, they would have a better chance at escaping poverty.