Monday mood board #6

Not everything is black or white. In life, most things are a shade of grey. That's not to say that there is no colour. It's just that when faced with a tough decision to be made, there is unlikely to be a totally correct or incorrect answer. Somewhere in the middle will be just fine. And that's where I am today. Somewhere in the middle, quite content.

Black and white, photo collage, April 2012, Lesley Beeton

Black and white does resonate with me, however, as I grew up in South Africa at the time of Nelson Mandela's release from prison, during the change in regime. My early life was peppered with references to black and white. As I grew up, the margins blurred, and have all but disappeared.

I was asked recently about the future for South Africa. I cannot claim to be able to comment on recent social history, having lived in leafy Surrey for a long time. I can say that women are the future in South Africa. Educate and empower women, and South Africa will have long term stability and prosperity. I am proud to support Thandulwazi.

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For the love of knowledge

Photo credit : Yousuf Karsh http://www.karsh.org/

Nelson Mandela said "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world".


The St Stithian Foundation was set up to provide support for a Saturday school for pupils struggling to find a way complete their school education. It also supports teacher training. The Thandulwazi Trust is a Maths and Science Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa.


We are pleased to support this initiative, and yesterday we received a short film on DVD, following the success of three amazing people who attended Thandulwazi. It brought me to tears, just hearing their stories, and seeing how they want to use the education they have been given.


I am often asked why I left South Africa, and 16 years on, I honestly don't remember the exact reason. I know my husband and I were fortunate to receive an excellent education in South Africa and attended University there too. We wanted to be citizens of the world, use our education where it was needed. I'm pleased to say that for the most part, we have been successful in this. No matter what happens in life, nobody can take away your education.


Thandulwazi means for the love of knowledge. Wouldn't it be great if all pupils could go to school with those words in their hearts? Instead, I still see students in their final year of BSc working so hard to complete all the coursework, study for exams and write a dissertation, that they seem to have forgotten that they chose Science for the love of knowledge. They came to university full of excitement and promise and over the three years have been worn down to just wanting to get a 2:1. Some, of course, will always be enthusiastic and will want to know more than the syllabus dictates. They are challenging and fascinating people.


I had a brief exchange with a blogger from Nature News last week about the challenges facing UK universities in producing biomedical scientists who are equipped to face the changing environment of life science research. We have only just got them up to speed with basic molecular biology techniques and now the technology companies are telling us we need to train bioinformaticians. These are scientists who will spend their post doc jobs sitting at a computer, nowhere near a lab, analysing millions of digital data points. Where's the love in that?

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