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
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
