Dear parents

Welcome back to all our families, and a particularly warm welcome to Nandi Xaba who joins us this term in Grade 2P. When we reflect on happy times spent with family and friends at home or away, I ask that we extend our thanks to those members of the St Mary’s staff who worked through the holiday to maintain and upgrade the facilities and grounds of the school campus. We return to a clean, lovingly tended school and look forward, especially, to making use of the new learn-to-swim pool at Little Saints and the remodelled staffroom in the Junior School.

The contrast between our campus and other parts of our city and country ripped apart by acts of senseless violence is stark: in her letter to the St Mary’s community Ms Deanne King speaks of “a harrowing week in the recent history of our country” and appeals “to each one of us to work together to make a better country and future for our children”. Both Ms King’s letter and the pastoral letter from Bishop Steve Moreo condemning the xenophobic attacks have been published on the school app and I urge you to read them. The school’s commitment to instilling in the girls the values of truth, justice, service and duty, respect, trust and forgiveness as expressed in our statement on the Christian identity and ethos of St Mary’s takes on a new significance at times like these.

In our opening assembly attended by all the Junior School girls and staff from Grade 0 to Grade 7 we spoke, among other things, of the virtue and value of good neighbourliness with reference to the powerful banner designed by All Souls Episcopal Church in Washington DC that accompanies this article. While the younger girls emphasised the need to “play with your neighbour” and invite her to parties, the older girls spoke of the value of inclusion and the inhumanity of liking someone “just because her eyes are the same colour as yours”. Girls from all different age groups mentioned kindness, that St Mary’s is a kind school, and we reflected together on the daily work of being kind and showing kindness as an intentional, ever-renewable and, at times, effortful practice. In the words of a Grade 1 child, “Being kind is sometimes hard.”

The guidance and comfort we can offer our girls, some of whose lives have been touched directly by the recent xenophobic attacks, and all of whose lives are affected by the alarming rates of gendered violence in South Africa, can take on many forms. Direct, didactic intervention is seldom effective; we need to remember, as parents and teachers, not only the instructive value of daily acts, but also the transformative power of stories and the permission they grant us all to negotiate disturbing realities within psychologically secure boundaries.

Speaking to our children is never enough: read to them, tell them stories, and listen. Holding fast to the ideal of a world in which we play with our neighbour, and in which the Star-Belly Sneetches and the Plain-Belly Sneetches forget “about stars/ And whether they had one, or not, upon thars” is our duty – a duty undertaken daily, with love.

Dr Sarah Warner
Junior School headmistress