Just over a week ago I began touring with the Standard Banking Rocking Future Road Show that visits over 32000 SA Matrics each year and gives them advise on study opportunities for when they finish school. My job for the Cape Town leg of the tour is to use the last ten minutes of the show to chat to the Matrics about living their dreams and then sing them a song. We visit two schools a day - one at 9am and another 12pm. It has been quite an education into the various schools around the city I call home and I have had to make good friends with my map book while trying to navigate backstreets looking for schools I have never heard of in suburbs I didn't know existed.
Apart from being an incredible opportunity to speak the youth and share a bit of my journey, vision and music with them, it has been humbling to see the conditions that some students have to try and succeed under. My own priviledged schooling is in harsh relief against the backdrop of some of the schools we have visited, and yet it is in these very schools that I have encountered the greatest sense of spirit and possibility. Every day I am amazed at how different each group of matrics is, and that in some schools there is wild enthusiam pulsating through the student's veins, and then at the very next school we can hardly raise a cheer out of them. Some of the more priviledged schools have shown me students with hardly any spirit or permission to be free, and it has led me to wonder if priviledge perhaps robs us of the hunger to be more?
I have another three weeks and 30 schools ahead of me and have no doubt that each one will show me new aspects of what the next generation has in store for it - what hopes and dreams and what apathy. I am learning so much about standing up on stage and being present to what they need to hear and not just what I want to say. I have to trust which song is going to be best for them and then go boldy with that choice. It is an education in letting go of preconceptions and learning to be present to the room and the people in it and what they need. I am loving it and feel very grateful to have the opportunity to even share a part of it with them.
