3 Month Update

The past month has been yet another busy one, full of ups and downs! My work has been centred around exams. I had to write exam papers for all of the subjects that I teach, for all 3 ability groups. This was a time consuming task that swallowed up most evenings, but it is really nice to be in the examiners position for a change! It is challenging to phrase the questions in a way that the children will understand with limited English, and I resorted to a lot of “match the words to the pictures” questions. Then I had the task of preparing them for the exams. In lessons we revised all of the topics that we had covered, which is when you discover how many children were actually here for those lessons! Outside of lessons it gave me the chance to spend some one-on-one time with them to assist in their revision, which was actually very enjoyable and rewarding. They are much more focussed, receptive and eager to learn when there are not the distractions of the Thembelihle classroom! Some of the older girls have high aspirations to become midwives, teachers and accountants and have used this as motivation to stay focussed during exam time. It is brilliant that despite all of the setbacks they have had in their lives, they still can aspire to have careers such as this. And I hope that their time at Thembelihle home school will help them to realise their dreams. The past 2 weeks the children have been writing the exams, and we are getting busy with marking them and writing the all important reports. Many of the children will be leaving after exams are over to go back to their families either just for a ‘holiday’ or permanently. They need a report to be accepted into any normal school, so this is vital. 

But it hasn’t been all hard work! We threw the children a Halloween party at the end of October which was a great success. They don’t celebrate the holiday in South Africa so for most of the children this was a completely new and exciting experience. In Art and Culture lessons we made Halloween decorations and pumpkin masks for the children to wear at the party, even preschool got involved with some Halloween colouring! It was also a great excuse for baking cupcakes! Me and Maya decorated the classroom with the things that the children had created along with some spooky candles. We also prepared some Halloween games – apple bobbing, pin the bone on the skeleton, ghost hunting and trick or treating on our door! We also made each child a little invitation to the party to make it a little bit special. We even dressed up as witches! It was such a great night, with everyone enjoying themselves – especially Maya and I! 

We had our weekend off at Coffee Bay – again! Addicted to that place. I tried my hand at surfing again, though I don’t think I have improved much! It is a relief to be able to spend some time away from the project and be able to socialise. I think that is one of the biggest down sides to living at Thembelihle, it is very hard to meet anyone that you can become friends with, or find any spare time to socialise. So our one weekend off a month is precious! I’m looking forward to our 2 weeks off in January – we are travelling to Cape Town and then backpacking along to coast back to Mthatha. 

With school coming to a close we are all very excited about Christmas! We will have a lot of new arrivals around this time, and it will be nice to have a new start next term with other children. Although it will be very hard to say goodbye. You can’t help but form attachments with them.

In terms of everything else that is going on here, we STILL don’t have a light in our kitchen, but I have finally got the TV working after 3 months of living here! Really getting into all of the South African soaps like ‘Isidingo’ and ‘Rhythm City’ - so bad it’s good? I’ve played about a trillion games of ‘Happy Families’ and ‘Uno’. I think the children are beginning to trust us a lot more, as they have started to open up to us about their feelings and about what has happened to them in the past. But sometimes it is really hard to hear. 

Day to day rewards are slim, so it is about storing up all of the good little moments that make this job worthwhile. Yesterday two of the younger girls set up the classroom for us, picked us flowers and wrote a lovely message for us on the board. It’s these little gestures that remind me that being here is the most incredible opportunity, one that I am lucky to have. 

2 months down

I can’t believe that it has been over a month since my last post, time does seem to fly when you are so busy! Over the past month teaching has become a more natural, I am beginning to settle into life at Thembelihle and it definitely feels like home. Mthatha has become familiar and things that once shocked me about the city I no longer notice (whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know!). We’ve explored Norwood a bit more and have visited Sabalani Home which is a home for boys just next door to Thembelihle and also a preschool and study centre next to the field.

With teaching I have discovered that usually the more hours that go into thinking of ideas and planning lessons, the more receptive the children can be. Spending an hour drawing a picture of “John’s messy room” to explain prepositions to my English class for example actually paid off, with most of the children being able to tell me the exact location of John’s smelly sock by the end of the lesson! Teaching the children right and left has proved harder than anticipated, and I have resorted to writing it on their hands at the start of the lesson until they learn it. Although, I can hardly blame them as I don’t think I learnt until I was about 12! I have started to teach group 2 geography, which I love! Going back to my lessons on river processes has been fun and it’s great to see them hitting rocks together and shouting ATTRITION at me!

We also had the chance to take the children to a funfair in Mthatha. The Rotary Club let the children in for free along some snacks and juice. The night before we spent hours making dozens of scones for the day, only to discover that ‘scones’ in South Africa are what we call ‘cupcakes’ in England. But the children seemed to like them anyway! In the morning we prepared a feast of sandwiches, scones, crisps, sweets and juice and waited for the taxi (obviously running on African time, like everything here!) for two and a half hours to take us to the fair. The children were so excited, maybe even just as the prospect of going somewhere new for once. They all went on the swings and the waltzer before tucking into the feast we had lovingly prepared. All in all it was a lovely day, I wish we could take the children to more of these kinds of things!

We have started to take the children to a local church in Norwood every Sunday, the children love the singing and dancing, and just the different environment they get out of going to church. Although, services are strangely half in English and half in Xhosa, so they can only understand half of it. They have been invited to join the Sunday school and take part in the Christmas service which is run by the children. It is good for them to be around other children from the community, and be involved in a community event, and also to learn some new Christmas carols! Some of the children are very religious, and religion plays a huge part in all of their lives. I’m starting to get used to prayers every morning and evening, and I haven’t been caught out at lunch for a while for forgetting to say “God bless our food” before starting!

At the start of October we had a week of school holidays to fill with various activities for the children. I tried to teach them how to knit after finding lots of knitting needles and yarn in the classroom. Some of them are quite good! They probably would have been even better if 101 Dalmatians hadn’t there to distract them! We also played lots of games, set up an assault course in the field, made bracelets and baked shortbread.

My 19th birthday was on the 4th October and although it was weird to be away from home on this day the children did make a fuss of me and sang the birthday song for almost the entire day. At the weekend I visited a Café Lang in the suburbs of Mthatha for some amazingly good cake.
Recently a woman has been coming into Thembelihle in the afternoons to teach the children beadwork. It will be a good skill for the children to have and they seem to enjoy the challenge. Most have now managed to make a South African flag out of the beads and some have even moved onto making earrings. Although, this means that our afternoon lessons have been shortened to only one hour, stretching us on the lead up to exams in three weeks’ time. We have to write the exams ourselves and prepare the children with revision. We are supposed to be examining them on everything they have learnt since January, but this work has mysteriously gone missing and we don’t know what they learnt before August. Also many of the children are new, and therefore have not been in all of the lessons and so are not equipped with the necessary knowledge for the examinations. Hopefully everything will somehow fall into place! Usually, it does!

Our weekend off was spent at Port St. Johns which is a small town on the coast just 1 ½ hours from Mthatha. I must say that it was brilliant to spend some time away from the hustle and bustle of the Mthatha streets, and into a slower pace of life. A lot of lying in hammocks, eating of chocolate brownies, sitting around bonfires, stroking of the resident St. Bernard and sundowners on top of a mountain. We even had the chance to go out on a boat to see dolphins and whales, which literally surrounded the boat at one point. I know that this is a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life. We are so lucky to be living is such a beautiful country, it is just so easy to forget when living in Mthatha.

Apart from that our month has consisted of storms, heat waves, marriage proposals, worms medicine (for the children, not us, thankfully), rush hour traffic, the arrival of a KETTLE (this, I have decided, is my favourite invention),cooking lasagne with real life cheese,  shaving the children’s heads (which is possibly the most strangely satisfying experience ever), learning karate,  finally getting round to cleaning the fridge, discovered my love of samp and beans, mending two dozen shoes with superglue and spending hours trying to explain that South Africa is a country – not a continent.

Teaching river processes!

Sundowners at Port St. Johns

 

Me and my partner Maya at Port St. Johns

 

 Hard at work in English class!

 The funfair!

 Making bracelets

 Learning how to knit!

Shaving Vuyiseka a mohawk

One month has passed

So, a lot has happened since my first blog entry. I have been in South Africa a whole month now and have experienced a whole host of things, some good and some bad. Where do I start?

Teaching. Teaching is a challenge, mainly because the children’s first language is Xhosa and few understand basic English. Another challenge is that there are three lessons being taught simultaneously in the same small classroom, creating obvious distractions. For example, my English lesson involved the class repeating animal noises, much to the amusement of everyone in the classroom. The class sizes can also be quite large especially with new children coming in. The biggest number of children that we’ve had so far was 34, with the capacity for Thembelihle usually being 20-25.  But now it is back to a smaller number, a lot more manageable! I have begun to really enjoy teaching certain subjects. I am really enjoying teaching maths! It sounds crazy but I have missed maths after not choosing it as a subject to carry onto A-level. I also find that the children are more understanding of mathematical concepts, perhaps because it requires less English. I  have been teaching group 2 (the oldest group of children) about 2D and 3D shapes, including making some very good 3D models of prisms out of strips of cardboard from an old cornflakes box!

Our afternoons are spent with the children doing activities. When it is hot we take them to the field and play netball, rounders, football... sometimes a mixture of all three. We also found an old parachute behind some boxes in the classroom that we dug out and the children had hours of fun playing games with it (despite the fact that there are huge holes in it, obviously the work of the classroom rats). When it is cold, the children watch movies in the classroom, unfortunately for us the most requested film is High School Musical – I may have to invest in some ear plugs. Although, today was Heritage Day so we had a traditional meal of dumplings and Xhosa bread made outside on the stove and we painted our faces and the children danced to Xhosa music. It was a great day, the children come alive when they dance, I’ve never seen them so happy.

We had a lovely weekend off... we travelled to Coffee Bay with some other volunteers working at Bethany Home on the other side of Mthatha. Coffee Bay is astonishingly beautiful, just white sand and blue ocean.  We came home relaxed and rested after a well needed weekend off from the daily wake-up call at 6am, and with our first surf lesson under our belts! Plus, no pap for a whole three days! Yes! We’re already planning our next trip.

Mthatha is as crazy as ever. Unfortunately experienced the negative side of living here when we were attacked by some men trying to steal from us, but thankfully another man stopped his car and scared them off – there are many good people here. Now we know what the locals are talking about when they say Norwood (the area we are living in) is dangerous! I’m sure it was just a one off occurrence though. But we are more confident going into town now that we’ve explored and know where we are going/not going. Also I am getting more and more used to the staring, pointing, picture taking and constant hellos. I’ve even mastered driving in Mthatha! It’s really quite fun, the potholes make it like off-roading!

Overall, the work is exhausting but never boring! The children always keep us on our toes and seem to enjoy our company. I also know that teaching will become more natural with time, and the children will learn to respect us more as their teachers as well as their sisters. Mostly, I’m just enjoying them as much as I can, I know how lucky I am to be here and be a part of their lives... I just hope I can be a useful one!

Coffee Bay

Jumping off a cliff at Coffee Bay

Heritage Day at Thembelihle

Heritage Day at Thembelihle

Heritage Day at Thembelihle

 

Heritage Day at Thembelihle

Heritage Day at Thembelihle

 

Heritage Day at Thembelihle

1 week update

After a 7 hour flight from Heathrow to Dubai, then a 8 hour flight to Johannesburg, then a two day stay in Johannesburg visiting Soweto, the Hector Pieterson and Apartheid museums, last minute training and finally a 1 ½ hour flight on a rattling 27 seater plane into Mthatha airport. The plane journey was beautiful, soaring over the mountains of Lesotho and down into the outlying areas of Mthatha. The so called “airport” is just one small building in the middle of miles of just space and a few small buildings with corrugated iron roofs. Our host met us at the airport to drive us to our project. The open rural space quickly descended into a heavily overcrowded bustling town. First impressions of Mthatha: it is crazy. There are people absolutely everywhere, always on the roads walking alongside and in-between cars, there are no lanes and cars just weave in and out of imaginary ones, densely packed pavements, noise, traffic lights (or ‘robots’) that don’t work or are ignored and dilapidated buildings that stand beside structured colonial style buildings.  

Once we arrived, our host did everything to make us feel at home. The children also had painted beautiful welcome posters that were displayed in the room that I share with my partner Maya. We decorated our room with loads of pictures and cards and it already feels more like home. We met the children briefly during their dinner, all 28 of them announced their names, I have no idea how I am going to remember them all! I’ve been trying to write them down phonetically. They are all Xhosa names, which have clicking sounds as some of the letters which to us white westerners is alien but to them is completely normal! 

Our first morning we were woken up at 6am by the lovely, but loud, sounds of the children singing and screaming in the courtyard outside our door. We went outside for a reading from the Xhosa bible, prayers and singing. Then we had 2 ¼ hours to fill with games to get to know the children, we played all sorts, but it has been a while since playing children’s games, so I am a little rusty in trying to remember them! The children are beautiful and so happy, eager to please and catch your attention. They also have incredible voices, even the small ones sing in perfect harmony! I’m very jealous. Later on they played outside in the paddling pool, as it was 31 degrees (and it is supposed to be spring!) and taught us clapping games and songs. It is inspiring to see how despite their tragic backgrounds they are able to be so friendly, happy and inviting to newcomers and each other. Although, most do not speak English and those that do, do not speak it well. This was quite a shock we believed that they all could speak at least basic English! It means that teaching all subjects in English is going to be a struggle for them.

The next day we had a go at teaching a lesson, I taught the older children (11-16 years ish) which are in group 2. They made posters of their names and information about themselves such as how old they are and what they like to do in their spare time. I then taught them a game to assess their English skills by splitting them into teams (tigers versus angels), each team picks a letter, I then look up a word starting with this letter from a dictionary and read them the definition, and they then had to guess the word. They seemed to enjoy it!

Unfortunately when trying to cook dinner that night the light went off in the kitchen, so we proceeded to make our pasta in the pitch black with only two small torches! Also cutting garlic and onion with a blunt knife with no handle was an experience! 

We spent most of today planning our lessons (which start formally on Monday) using some books we found in the classroom. Unfortunately the work they have already done this year has gone astray, so we have no idea what their ability is or what content has already been covered. We have to set them exams in November on everything they have learnt from January, but we have no indication of what they know! This has been quite stressful and I hope the children will help us work out what has and hasn’t been covered.  Our afternoon was spent out in the field with the children opposite Thembelihle playing and making bracelets out of thread that I brought from home. They love them and can’t wait to make more. I hope to do more arts and crafts with them in the afternoons as all ages seem to enjoy it. The Bethany volunteers from the other side of Mthatha had a day off today so came to visit us from dinner, but we forgot how it gets dark at 6pm and it is too dangerous to go outside after this time. But thankfully our host was able to take them back on her way home. It is very disorientating how dark it is! 

I am looking forward to more lesson planning and starting properly on Monday! We are also  already planning and looking forward to our weekend off in September where we plan to travel to Coffee Bay on the Wild Coast and explore.

29 days to go!

It is only 29 days before I am going to be spending a year volunteering at Thembelihle, a place of safety providing critical love, care and rehabilitation for over twenty abused and abandoned children from 6-16 years of age in Mthatha, South Africa with the charity Project Trust.

The classroom!

It will be my job to provide home schooling for the children, as the option of attending local schools is denied them during the time they are under the protection of Thembelihle and social services. This schooling includes covering the national education curriculum and age-appropriate life skills and personal development. The school facilities are limited to one basic room with limited resources so I’ll need to use my creativity to make learning fun.  I will also be running extra-curricular activities for the children such as recreation and sport, play and group activities. In addition to the educational element, I will be helping the staff with the daily running of the home and ensuring the children feel loved and cared for in a stable and secure environment. I’m really looking forward to reading stories to the little ones at bedtime and hope to be able to take some of my old favourites with me to share.

I am very excited to have the opportunity to be involved in such a special project, and I hope overall that I can bring some joy to the children’s lives and ensure that their education is not affected by their tragic circumstances. I’m also looking forward to being able to immerse myself in the fascinating culture of South Africa. It is a complex country with a troubled history, but it’s an amazing country too, full of diverse cultures and traditions. Although I am anxious, about leaving my old life behind for an entirely new one in a developing country without the privileges we are so used to in the UK, this is counteracted by my enthusiasm to get involved in my project and really make a lasting difference. Once I have tasted life in South Africa I don’t think I’m going to want to come home!

I went back to the beautiful Isle of Coll (where Project Trust is based) for my training week. It was so exciting to find out all the details of what I'll be doing and meet my partner, country group and desk officer. Everyone gets on well, which is a relief! It was a very intense week, jam packed with talks and activities but I now feel prepared for what lies ahead.  They gave us a crash course in teaching and gave us many ideas and resources we can use.

Here is a picture of the South Africa country group! (yes, just one boy! poor guy!)

It is all very real now! Time to start packing!

South Africa country group!