TheLoving Classroom initiative ofDavid Geffen a”hseeks to create a new reality around the globe
Photos: Family archives
There was something wrong with Kagiso Mabalane. The school behavior of the young boy in Soweto, South Africa, had taken a steep nosedive — and nobody could work out why. He’d been a straight-A student, always respectful and conscientious. But now Kagiso was seriously slacking, refusing to comply with school staff, fighting with his peers, and facing suspension by the school’s disciplinary panel.
“The boy I saw at that hearing was not the Kagiso I knew,” says Mr. Mabaso, his teacher. “He was so rude and didn’t care what would happen to him. It seemed like he had given up on life.”
Was the boy harboring some secret? Some trauma? “I asked the panel to allow me to talk to him privately before they took action,” Mr. Mabaso relates, “because I remembered the Loving Classroom session we had about listening. I knew from the training that painful behavior comes from people in pain. I wanted to find out what his pain was.”
Alone with his teacher in a side room, Kagiso broke down, revealing his excruciating — but sadly not uncommon — story. He lived alone with his mother in the Soweto slums. A few weeks earlier, his mother hadn’t woken up to see him out to school. When he came home from school, his mother was still “sleeping.” At that point, Kagiso felt her and realized she was dead, victim to one of the many diseases that run rife in the impoverished sprawling shantytown. Not knowing what to do, the young boy left her body there and kept returning to school, crying himself to sleep at night while his deceased mother lay in the next room.
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