Message from our Head Girls: Term 1, 2021
The end of yet another term calls us to reflect on all the experiences gathered. Our first term of leadership has truly been one of growth and love. Some of our golden experiences include the Social Media Rosie Takeover and the Theme Launch, amongst others.
Rele:
Welcoming our new Grade 8 Rosebuds into our Rosie Community was the biggest goal for the Compassion Pillar, and we achieved this successfully through our Orientation Week. It was a week full of fun and excitement where meaningful bonds were created. As the Head of Compassion, I have had a term filled with many exciting highs and stamina-building lows. Looking back at my term, I am flooded with joy at the awesome things we have achieved as a pillar.
Kagiso:
The matrics of St Teresa's followed up with tradition by performing a theme launch for the rest of the school. This launch caused our grade to grow much closer during this difficult time.
With the slow start to the year, matrics agreed that our launch must be amazing so as to motivate the other grades and ourselves. This year's theme is very different from themes of the previous years. This is because the word that describes our theme was coined by the matric class of 2021.
The word is berdahsmurdagurda, it means making sense of the senseless. As we move into a new normal because of this pandemic this word reminds us not to fear uncertainty and not to be scared when things make no sense. This idea, that has never been done before, motivated us to perform our absolute best and therefore the launch was a huge success.
Many of the grades felt good after watching our launch and they were also relieved to know the meaning of the word. The week of the launch berdashmurdagurda was announced in every morning assembly and there were stories told about this word.
We knew that before the Launch, no one would know what the word meant which also helped us build the intensity and the excitement of our Launch.
Pia:
Lockdown has highlighted an ever growing need for a greater sense of global responsibility in society whether it be through environmentally friendly eco-habits, social awareness around important, and sometimes controversial topics, or even the following of Covid-19 protocols. The Global Responsibility Pillar has acknowledged this growing need and has endeavoured to increase awareness and action amongst the girls. The main environmental project, run by the environmental committee, running through the school is the collection of eco-bricks. Eco-bricks are 2 litre plastic bottles that are packed tightly with non-recyclable materials and these ‘bricks’ can then be used as the foundation for various structures. Alongside the environmental initiatives, the social awareness committee has placed posters around the school and have filled the various boards with information surrounding numerous topics. This committee hopes to have discussions with the girls in a more interactive environment next term in order to spread awareness. Lastly, the public relations committee has made sure that all the school regulations, as well as the Covid-19 protocols, have been maintained by the girls. We hope to keep the spirit going and to begin new and exciting initiatives in the upcoming term.
It is during times like these that the most innovative and solution driven ideas come to the forefront. At the heart of these innovations is the SRC (Student Representative Council), who have sought to bring about effective change within the school environment during these unprecedented times. One of the council's biggest achievements has been the academic tutoring program - a program in which students are able to tutor those in the grades below them in exchange for community service hours. Furthermore, the SRC has worked tirelessly to provide the girls with more opportunities for community service, environmental change, interactive events and monitoring of the general well being of the girls and is highly commended for their outstanding efforts in representing the girls with enthusiasm and insightfulness.
Conclusion:
It has been a term filled with challenges but it has also been a term filled with thoughtfulness, innovation and success. We owe many thanks to the mentors we had guiding us along the way! We look forward to the upcoming term and all the potential successes that lie ahead!
Highlighting our girls' outstanding achievements
The girls are hard at work every day. Here's a look at some of their outstanding achievements!
The Grade 9s have been hard at work this term with their close-up studies of animals. Each learner was given the theme of either earth/land/air/water and had to select a creature from their category. They then painted these studies on pieces of 16cmx16cm masonite.
Grade 12 Essays
An Ode to African Baobabs
By Leeyah Essa
Summer in Musina was always hot and dry, but it tasted sweet and juicy. From across their room Prim, sitting in front of the open window, breathing in the clammy air, watched her brother, Ngozi, fold white shirts and delicately place them in a leather rucksack. "Still visiting that old tree?” said Ngozi, nodding towards Prim’s drawings of a Baobab. Prim blushed and looked away; she was suddenly embarrassed at how childish the scribbled bark, and green mushroom-topped branches must have appeared to her brother. Ngozi, being her older brother, was sent on a scholarship to a private school in Pietersburg. It was here that he learned about algebra, Italian sonnets, and words like “meticulous”. Thrilled by Ngozi's seemingly endless knowledge, his opinion had come to matter most to Prim. However, this time he was wrong. The Baobab was significantly more than just some old tree
Musina, was desertous if not for the stretches of veld that were interrupted by low-lying and barren mountains. Prim’s gogo had told her from a young age what a miracle it was that land as arid and dry as Musina’s bore the most magnificent forest of Baobab trees. In the rainy season, when the veld wilted in the miry planes; the Baobab bore the velvety green Baobab fruit, when nothing else would grow. In the summertime, in sync with the lunar calendar, the Baobabs would flower at exactly midnight, frail white petals that coddled a dot of yellow. Each year, when the season of spitting tangy Baobab seeds had come to an end, came Prim’s favourite season. Summer was not only an important season for Prim, but also for her town Musina. Ever since the first Baobab tree blossomed, the forest had drawn in the likes of religious leaders, elders, and families from nearby communities, who year after year, hoped to draw from the fertility and strength of Umuthi Wokuphila - The tree of life.
On afternoons when the sun beat down on the town rendering its people weary, Prim would visit the Baobabs. From a young age, she had developed a special connection to the Baobab forest; their stoic trunks and exposed roots had made a comforting place to sit and sleep, and the faint whispers that were shared amongst the tops of the trees seemed wishful. Soon, Prim was divulging all of her hopes, dreams and desires to the giant Baobabs from the forest’s floor. To this day, Prim imagines that if a single Baobab were to unravel its mangled trunk, the secrets of a thousand generations of Africans guarded in its wooded meat would unfetter, panning themselves across the low veld for kilometers. Amongst those secrets, they would find Prim’s many confessions to her Baobabs, where she would reluctantly explain that despite how proud of her brother she was, she could not quite stomach the fact that if, with any luck, she had been born a boy, words like “meticulous”, sonnets and maths would come to her too, and she wouldn't have to wait anxiously for her brother’s arrival during the holidays to learn more. Deep down, however, Prim knew that as long as blood filled out her flesh, making her appear more and more like her mother each day, Prim’s future would be saddled with the same destiny as the Baobabs, her life permanently rooted in the confines of Musina.
Reaching the Baobabs was never easy for Prim; even when she was younger and could hardly sweat. To get to the leeward side of the mountain, she would have to wade through veld that stood rigid and upright, burning its tips in the sun, leap over ribbons of sun speckled streams that gleamed under clear skies. She would scale scorched rocks that blistered her stiff hands and blocked the view of the shiny tin homes behind them. Prim didn’t mind this journey though, as challenging as it was, because it would guide her to her beloved Baobabs. At sunset when she was returning from her trees and the yolken sun ceased its sizzling in the fiery sky, the yellow and red hues that appeared in its place would glaze the harsh earth beneath it, and when the sky finally took its last breath, she would find herself wandering through crumbling, undulating slopes of purple and black.
Prim went to bed. That night, she tried desperately to muster dreams of her beloved Baobab trees. Shutting her eyes tightly until she began to imagine thickets of forest beneath her. Prim saw herself gliding above the forest. Floating over the whispers of spekboom, and faint suggestions of streams, she saw the gestures of the crooked branches spreading out of the tops of her favourite trees. Their mighty trunks looked unimaginably small from where she drifted. Leaves that had otherwise seemed ethereal to her, brushed against the palm of her hand.
Prim blinked a few times, looked over at her paintings and felt ashamed for ever being embarrassed by them. No matter what her brother had said, she thought to herself, the Baobabs were hers, her most precious African gift.
Grade 10 Painted T-shirts
Being a Rosie
By Maleehah Fazel
By Shandra Sischy
By Onele Bam
By Rajeshwari Combedea
By Ceanna Foster
Grade 8D Bible Quotes
