Making his Mark
June 15, 2023
Above: Lalela Senior Facilitator Mark Oppelt has gone from strength to strength as a team member and as a role model in his community. He’s also a talented artist in his own right – here he models a Lalela Scarf designed from his beautiful painting of trees.
Celebrating the success of all of our team members is something we do with immense joy and pride at Lalela, and all the more so when it’s a facilitator like Mark Oppelt, who has come full circle from being a student in our programme to his new role as Senior Facilitator at his alma mater, Hout Bay High School.
Mark Oppelt grew up in Hangberg in Hout Bay, Cape Town, very close to where Lalela’s HQ is located. These days, he’s widely recognised there, among children of all ages, parents, and a few proud teachers and school principals, as a community role model.
Hangberg is a small, tightly knit community caught between the mountain crags and working harbour of this scenic town, which is itself a kind of microcosm of the inequality in South Africa – here, struggling communities like Hangberg and Imizamo Yethu directly fringe the affluent leafy suburbs spread across the valley.
Hangberg itself has seen better times. but it’s still at heart a fishing village where families strive for a better life for their children. Although beset with poverty, substance abuse and gangsterism, it retains a strong and admirable sense of community. Hangberg is also where we established one of our very first Lalela programmes in 2011, working with the youth at Sentinel Primary School and Hout Bay High.
“I never thought I would see myself where I am today,” Mark explains of his promotion this year to Senior Facilitator for our programme at Hout Bay High, following his years teaching Lalela AG1-2 learners at the community’s primary school. “From my first day participating in a Lalela workshop as a learner at Hout Bay High School, and now leading workshops at the same school, in the same community, I can’t quite believe it!”
In his first few months in his new role, Mark has found it an exhilarating experience working with older students. There’s a difference between teaching older and younger kids, he says. “With the young learners I could be a bit like a child myself, have fun with them, engage with humour. With the older learners, I have to take on a more encouraging and motivating role, both in and out of the classroom.” It helps that Mark has known most of these teens from when they were little kids in his primary school workshops back in the day.
“I hope that, in my new role, I can be an example for the Hout Bay youth,” he adds.
“Lalela doesn’t only teach learners art skills, it also changes their mind set on how they look at their lives. It gives them an understanding that it does not matter where you come from but where you are going. Our curriculum helps them to better handle their circumstances and the abusive situations many of them face at home and in the community.”
Mark truly encapsulates Lalela’s values of inspiring with creativity, seeing challenges as opportunities, and being a trailblazer of change.
We are so proud of you, Mark!
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Your generosity makes it possible for Lalela’s educational arts programmes to create meaningful change that affects thousands of at-risk children in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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