Retired teachers set to volunteer in South Africa

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In her 44-year career, Mary Garetson taught in her home state of Indiana, Texas, Hawaii and Hong Kong.

In 42 years as a teacher, her husband, Thom Garetson, taught in Guam, Saudi Arabia, Greece, his home state of California and Hong Kong.

In the summer of 2018, they both retired.

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They, however, just couldn’t completely call it quits.

On Tuesday, they will board a plane to South Africa, where they will spend a month volunteering at St. Peter Christian College in Middelburg. The preschool through high school facility is in the township of Mhluzi.

Both will be mission partner specialists with Mission of Christ Network, a Christian outreach organization devoted to making it possible for non-professional church workers to effectively work internationally in God’s mission, according to missionofchrist.org.

The organization focuses on facilitating individuals to do long-term international mission work, including recruiting, training, sending and supporting mission partners, and enables congregations to do international short-term mission work.

Mary knows one of the Mission of Christ Network board members because she worked with her when she was a principal. That’s how she found out about an opening in South Africa.

“After we retired, we knew we didn’t want to just sit around and do nothing,” Mary said. “We wanted to do some part-time things, and I intended to work with the organization, and then they had the people that were serving in South Africa were no longer able to serve.”

In February 2018, the Garetsons visited South Africa to see if they would fit in well.

“We saw that we thought we could do quite a few things to help the teachers,” Mary said. “Several of their teachers are actually older than we are, and they have retired, they are receiving a pension from their work in South Africa and now, they are working for the school at a rather low salary just so they can help keep the school going.”

The school receives support from a school in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and the plan is to build a science lab and a computer lab.

“Some of the other generations didn’t have any math background, and it was very unusual for them to get any kind of math or science jobs, so they are really looking into adding that,” Mary said. “We think we can make a difference with education, with teacher training and with society there also because they are stuck in poverty.”

The yearly fee to attend school there is $1,000 in U.S. dollars, which includes breakfast and lunch provided every day.

“For a lot of the kids, that’s their only meal, so it’s a big thing,” Mary said.

Thom said the exploratory trip helped solidify their decision.

“It looked like something that we would like to do and still want to go out there and make a difference in education,” he said. “It’s to keep our skills sharp. We’ve always been involved with service and giving back, and so this was a natural next step for us. We’re ready for an adventure.”

Mary will work with the preschool through third grade staff, while Thom will assist staff in fourth grade through high school.

Thom said many of the teachers they will work with grew up during apartheid, a political system in South Africa in which people were divided into racial groups and kept apart by law. He said their education was stopped at different places.

“You now have teachers that are teaching things to students, but the teachers were never taught that themselves,” he said. “With education oftentimes, you have people that teach the way they were taught, and then you learn the newer methods. One of the things that we’ll be doing is going in and hopefully doing workshops and things to just enrich their skills so they have a better ability to get things across to kids.”

Mary said the students are one of the first generations of children that legally will be able to get above a third-grade education.

“We noticed that the kids don’t understand English really well, so that’s part of the problem for them to teach because it’s an English-speaking curriculum, but they are Zulu-speaking children,” she said. “So we’ll be working a lot with helping them develop English and working with teachers. That’s Thom’s background, working with teachers in English.”

Because the school is connected to the Lutheran church, they also will help them develop a religion curriculum.

With someone donating computers to the school, they also will show teachers how they can use technology to help students. Teachers have been used to writing lessons on the chalkboard for each subject and students taking down notes.

“The school doesn’t have books hardly at all,” Mary said. “One of our goals is to provide more books for them and maybe use technology to show how buying one book, you can display it so that the whole class can read a book. One of the goals I have this time also is to train the teachers how they can teach more with books.”

After a month in South Africa, the Garetsons will return home to Seymour. The plan is to go back to South Africa in August or September.

“We will try to go twice a year until we feel like we accomplished what we need to do,” Mary said.

While back home, they hope to speak at churches in the area if people are interested in looking at mission projects. The hope is that they will consider supporting the school in South Africa.

“People that are looking for ways to make a difference in the world, give them an opportunity to support that if they want to, support some of the projects we have going there,” Mary said. “Mission of Christ is in many countries around the world. Most of it is all done by donations or people fundraising. The people that work there full time have to raise 70 percent of their funds by just soliciting money.”

For someone who knew since third grade that she wanted to be a teacher, Mary said she’s fortunate to have had a long career in the field and still is involved after retirement.

“It has been fun to see kids grow, and now, I’m Facebook friends with some of my students that I taught back in third grade. That’s really fun,” she said. “I’ve always been with a Lutheran school that has been somehow connected to the Lutheran church, so it has always felt like a ministry to me to help people. It’s just very fulfilling to see kids grow.”

Thom didn’t discover he wanted to be a teacher until college when he was a teaching assistant at an elementary school down the street from where he grew up. He said he liked it and saw he could relate to kids, and that was fulfilling.

It also was an opportunity to experience different cultures and learn about different types of people.

“Initially, it was an opportunity to travel and see the world,” he said. “My family didn’t travel hardly at all growing up. When I found out that there were countries and companies that would hire me as a teacher and pay my airfare and provide housing, I was ready to go.”

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For information about Mission of Christ Network, visit missionofchrist.org or email: [email protected] or [email protected].

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