When Susan Fraser was a little girl in South Africa, she lived for a time with her grandmother.
"I became her pupil in a class of one as the two of us walked for miles on the African veld, sketching the scenery and the animals," she says.
At home, the two spent hours recreating in miniature all they had observed. They built clay models of hippos, antelope and leopards, and placed them outside the Bantu villages and European-style farms they constructed on a landscape made of papier mache.
"I was a funny little girl, my mother told me, interested in things other people weren't. I'm the last one who spoke to the grandparents. I'm the last one who remembers," she says.
Sue's family goes back six generations in South Africa. On the maternal side, they were medical missionaries of the Methodist persuasion.
She was delivered into the world by her grandfather, Dr. Ernest Daniel. His father, known as John Daniel the Missionary, guided David Livingstone from the Orange Free State to the Zambezi River. Sue's father, James Thompson, was a founder of the 1820 Settlers Museum in Grahamstown. All its contents vanished when independence came to South Africa.
By the time apartheid divided South Africa, Sue was in England where she met and married Hugh Fraser, whose own family history in Africa goes back seven generations. The couple returned to their homeland in 1955 to take up farming.
Sue and Hugh's farm in East Africa was "miles from anywhere" and soon the time came for their children, Sally and Ian, to meet other children and begin their education. Sue found a school in the little town of Nakuru, 15 miles away. It functioned according to the progressive principles of the British Infant School, which encouraged learning through play and exploration.
"The distance was too far to go back and forth again, so I stayed with the children and helped out. That's how I found my life's work," she says.
In the 1960s, East Africa's progress toward independence could turn violent. Two ambushes on the daily drive to the children's school convinced Sue and Hugh to find a new home, somewhere in the British Commonwealth. A letter from a friend describing Christmas celebrated with champagne on a Gulf Island beach made the decision easy.
By 1964, the Frasers were settled in West Vancouver. The children, eventually numbering four, attended West Bay elementary. Hugh went into business and Sue embarked upon her life's work. She enrolled at the University of British Columbia in the emerging field of early childhood education and founded West Bay Play School, which operated for 23 years along those British Infant School principles first encountered in an East African school.
Sue was one of the first Canadian delegates to visit the preschools of Reggio Emilia in Italy. The freedom of expression and creativity that arose from the interaction of children and adults transported Sue back to her own childhood, walking with her grandmother under the hot African sun.
"I realized the importance of listening closely to children's conversations and collaborating with them in realizing their ideas," she says.
The Reggio Emilia approach to children's education was the crucial piece in Sue's pedagogical puzzle and inspired her influential book, Authentic Childhood: Experiencing Reggio Emilia in the Classroom.
Sue received the Child Care Award of Excellence for Lifetime Achievement from the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development in 2013. In October of this year, she became the first Canadian to receive a lifetime achievement award from the North American Reggio Emilia Association.
Sue Fraser has lived in West Vancouver for 50 years. It seems long, 50 years, though the span of time is within living memory. Time to raise a family with husband Hugh. Time to build a distinguished career in early childhood education. Time to be welcomed into, and contribute to, a close-knit community and time to witness its transformation over 50 years.
Sue is a greatgrandmother now, reading stories with her great-grandchildren. The time has come to record, for future generations, her own story and that of the Daniels and the Thompsons over six generations in the vast continent of Africa.
"I'm the last one who spoke to the grandparents. I'm the last one who remembers."
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. 778-279-2275 [email protected]
