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Roslyn Narain-Mohan - 2008 Education Winner

Mrs Roslyn Narain-Mohan is a teacher at the New West Secondary School in Durban who can truly be seen as the Mother Theresa of her community where she has looked at the scourge of virtually every social injustice that have affected them and have launched campaign after campaign to make a difference.

The community of Newlands West where she lives and teaches is really a microcosm of the broader South African community where HIV/Aids, crime, racial conflict, poverty, age and individual suffering has ravished social interaction and existence.

Ms Narain-Mohan took a stand and as passionate teacher decided to not sit back and see these social injustices continue to destroy her community. She took up the cause and decided that she will use her skills as an educator to teach her community how to engage and help seek answers for those social problems haunting her people and the people of South Africa.

Since she started her campaign she has made a tangible difference in the lives of many hundreds of individuals across the cultural spectrum. Ms Narain-Mohan is a role model in her community who firmly believes that she needs to provide a holistic education to her pupils, inclusive of academic, social, spiritual and moral values to prepare them for the real world.

In her daily teaching and actions she displays respect for her pupils and she encourages them to focus on the positive and seek solutions for the problems they and their community face daily. Solutions for her does not only mean reaching out, it also means further education, understanding and identification of the real need and support that would help those being helped to help themselves in the long-term.

When she tackled the fight against HIV/Aids she first obtained a qualification in HIV/Aids care and counseling and now provides voluntary counseling to her pupils and people in her community. She voluntarily and for no financial gain, writes an HIV/Aids education column in the community Newspaper “The Rising Sun”.

She broadened this with a HIV/Aids campaign at school in which the pupils of her school and those of another 30 schools in the area, community stakeholders, health professionals and educators got together for an educational week which concluded with a visit to the Siyaphila Mcords Centre and the Dream Centre, homes for HIV infected people where pupils came face to face with the realities of HIV/Aids.

This all enabled pupils to understand the consequences of sex without protection. The end result of this campaign was the formulation of a HIV/Aids Policy for the school in collaboration with pupils, parents, members of the School Governing Body, the teachers and the principal of New West Secondary. It was important to ensure that the lives of people who are infected and or affected by the disease would not be hindered by stigma and discrimination.

Another area she actively campaign is to promote democracy in culture. Under the banner of the Phoenix Inanda Coalition she has helped to unite the black community of Inanda and the Indian community of Phoenix through the medium of sports and cultural activities. She married the concepts for love and understanding in the two cultures, Satyagraha and Ubuntu, in her teachings.

Crime and its devastating consequences she took to the youth to campaign. A youth forum was established to empower the youth to be informed about crime, to take a stand against it and to ensure that their knowledge of crime in their community will prevent them from becoming crime statistics.

And so the list of social campaigns she has propelled just goes on and on with the benefit going to those who have been affected by crime, violence, abuse, poverty, age and ill health. It was a single individual, a pupil in her class who attempted suicide because he felt he had no fatherly love that was the trigger for her to become an angle of hope in her community and an example to the rest of the country of how one person can mobilise a whole community into action.