Double Whammy!

Week 3 AND week 4's reviews here-finally up to date!

Week 3 Review

Again, late with this one! Only getting to the internet once every 4 days or so.

Monday 25^th July

Vhutshilo day! Stayed on site today, did activities with the children at break. When they were in class, all the volunteers planned their lessons for the coming week at jumbo! We got a visit in the afternoon by the head teacher of a local secondary school who is good friends with Suzi, and helped her get the Vhutshilo school up and running in its current form. He told us how much of a struggle it was for Suzi to start the school here for various reasons. It was very inspirational to hear how hard she fought for the school. He also told us all about the problems with the education system in this area. The big problem is a lot of the kids don’t know why they are even at school, they don’t receive any career guidance. So they may say they want to be a doctor when they grow up, but have no idea of what that actually entails, and what subjects they need to study. In addition to that, they stay in school until they have passed their exams, so in a grade 5 class which should be children around the age of 9, you could have a 12 year old, or older! We agreed to visit his secondary school and do a few talks on careers, and why studying is important! They hope that by hearing it from young people like us, it will have more of an effect than hearing it from teachers.

Tuesday 26^th July

This morning we began our day at Jumbo by calling a meeting with mercy and the other teachers of Jumbo school. We all felt the behaviour of the children in the first week of teaching had been unacceptable, and we could not control the younger classes without a teacher. Mercy completely understood and took it all on board, there will now always be a teacher in the two younger classes, which we were very happy with. Mercy then went on to tell us that after 10 years of writing to the government asking for financial help for the school, she had finally been given a lump sum! Brilliant news! She had plans of how to spend the money, however we felt it could be better used in a different way so called a volunteer meeting after dinner and wrote up an alternative budget for the money to show to Mercy tomorrow.

Wednesday 27^th July

We called another teacher-volunteer meeting this morning to discuss how to spend the lump sum she had been given by the government. They listened to how we thought the current plan was a bad way to spend such a generous sum of money and they totally agreed with us! Mercy said that she trusts our advice on money over anyone else’s so we agreed that she could leave the construction of a new fence (what we felt needed urgent attention on safety grounds) in our hands. Calum and Sam headed into town to go round all the construction shops to get quotes while the rest of us got down to teaching! After a productive morning at jumbo (the behaviour has VASTLY improved) we headed to the bus station to meet Sharon of the CPC (Centre for Positive Care) who was taking us all to a resource centre which we will be working with every Wednesday afternoon for the rest of the project. After a sweaty bus journey we arrived and met a large group of OVC’s (orphans and vulnerable children) and their care workers. We had a great afternoon of playing games then headed back home!

Thursday 28^th July

Vhutshilo day! Matt and Calum taught their first computer literacy class to the older children this morning which was great! In the afternoon we met Sharon again to go and visit anther resource centre that is run by the CPC. This one wasn’t as far away, but had over 200 kids! It was great fun. We split up into different age groups. Julie, Sam, Calum and myself took the large group of young children aged 2-5 who we read with, sang songs, and played a lot of games! Matt and Hannah took a maths lesson with older children, and Rebecca, Katie, Erin and Ruth did a life orientation lesson on puberty. We all really enjoyed visiting this centre and the care workers there do such a great job to provide for so many children!

Friday 29^th July

Jumbo day! Full day of teaching today which went really well in all classes! As it was my birthday on the 30^th, all the classes made me birthday cards as their art activity for the day, which was wonderful! Lots of bits of paper to take home! Mercy also told us today that the government has agreed to subsidise Jumbo school in the coming future which is more great news! Mercy had arranged a meeting with the parents who all told her that they would like the new classroom for grade R’s to be built before we do the fence, so that’s the plan! Grade R is the grade in between pre school and Grade 1, and it is growing week on week! So they really need a classroom of their own. It’s wonderful to see Jumbo school growing so much! Only problem is there is no space for new pupils. But this new classroom will change that! Mercy took our new fence quotes, so she will use the government subsidy to build it once the new classroom is all finished!

A very positive week J

Non project stuff

We had a great weekend celebrating my 21^st! Ended up in the VIP section of a local music festival on the Saturday listening to one of my favourite bands, perfect birthday!

We finally gave in and had our first junk food binge on Friday for dinner. 12 large pizza’s between 9 of us! Big yum. (ps. 12 large pizza’s only cost the equivalent of £56! Bargain)

We learnt how to dance, Venda style, and can’t wait to whip out the moves in Glasgow!

Having watched 2 Julia Styles movies in the past week, we can confirm she is a terrible actress.

“Is that an elephant?” “No it’s a cow”

Thinking you’re tanned, then showering and realising it was actually just dirt is so depressing.

That’s all for now!

Jen

Week 4 review

Halfway!aaah!!

Monday 1^st August!

This morning Sam and Ruth headed off to their first Love Life session, organised by the CPC. Love Life is a nation wide programme in schools which educates the children about life issues, mainly HIV awareness. Sam and Ruth met with Lufuno (who runs the programme on a daily basis) and visited a local secondary school for a couple of hours! Back at Vhutshilo, Hannah and Rebecca accompanied Khatu, Suzi and the American volunteers to the local HIV ward at Silom hospital. Monday is the day that the children go to collect their ARV drugs. The clinic was very busy so Rebecca came home, while Hannah, who studies medicine, stayed to talk to the doctor. At the school, Calum and Matt took computer literacy, while Erin, Rebecca and Katie took small groups for reading help while they were waiting to get on the computers. A quiet day!

Tuesday 2^nd August

Full day of teaching at jumbo! Matt’s not very well so me and Julie took his place in the grade 1 classroom with Erin today, very tiring! A new teacher, sent by the government, started today at Jumbo! He is there purely to teach maths to the two older classes which is great, the kids seem to really enjoy it! Julie and Hannah headed off to Love Life today and came back feeling very positive! The one worry is that next week we will be teaching classes on our own, and the English level in some of the schools is not very good. It makes us realise just how good the standard of English is at Jumbo! We began practicing today for an event we’re running at Jumbo at the end of the project “Phiphidi’s got talent”. It’s going to be a sports day/ talent show day at the school which will be a lot of fun! We practiced some races in the morning with the oldest class. Then in the afternoon we tried to get them to make up acts for the talent portion of the day but that ended up with the whole class (and us) up dancing to Party Rock Anthem (everyday i’m shuffling...) The children are all so good at singing, dancing, and rapping! We can’t wait to see what they’ll pull out the bag in the coming weeks.

Wednesday 3^rd August

We had a great morning at Jumbo today! Erin and Calum left at break to go off to their Love Life session. Ruth’s unfortunately coming down with tonsillitis, but luckily she has antibiotics with her so she took the day off to get some badly needed rest. We’re dropping like flies!  The government inspectors arrived today to have a look round the school before they give jumbo the subsidy. They were very nice people and we spoke to them about our continuing work with Jumbo and how the money would make such a difference! Our sweet talking must have done the trick as they agreed to give Mercy more money in September to fix the fence! The good news for Jumbo just keeps coming! Over the moon!! In the afternoon Hannah, Matt, Katie and Rebecca headed off to the resource centre, while Sam, Julie and myself had lunch (Nando’s – amazing) and got the group shopping and headed home for a yummy stir fry dinner. We’ve come to realise that we spend 90% of our day talking about food, even while eating our dinner!

Thursday 4^th August

Everyone woke up full of the cold today! Suzi says it’s due to the switch from the winter season to the summer season. This morning Calum and Matt taught their computing class and the girls took small groups for reading. Katie and Rebecca headed off to their Love Life session, then in the afternoon Sam, Erin, Ruth and Calum headed off to the Ngoudza resource centre! Busy busy. A past volunteer from the 2009 group, Eilidh, arrived today to stay for a few days! Nice to have a visitor! Tonight we discovered that soy mince is definitely the way to go. Another recipe we can add to our collection “How to feed ten people, 3 meals a day on £1 per head”

Friday 5^th August

As it was Mercy’s birthday yesterday, we bought a big cake to take in today as a surprise! We went straight into teaching in the morning. We witnessed a rather hilarious lesson being taught by one of the school teachers to grade’s 4 and 5 on puberty. They had to draw the male and female body, oh my goodness I wish I could have taken photos of some of the stuff they drew! At break time we sang happy birthday to Mercy- she cried! Then tucked into yummy cake before activities time where we got the classes to practice for some of the races for sports day. With the grade’s 4 and 5 we were trying to come up with an act for the talent show, despite their determination to do Justin Bieber, we found out that Ruth knows the dance to the chorus of bad romance by Lady Gaga! We had such a fun afternoon teaching them it! They all got right into it-even the boys!!  Grade’s 6 and 7 practiced singing for the talent show and came up with the plot line for a drama they will perform.

We had a 4 week evaluation meeting tonight after dinner as I wanted the group to fully evaluate everything they had done in the past 4 weeks at Jumbo, CPC, and Vhutshilo. It was a very productive meeting, and the conclusions we came to were that all our current projects are running well, and no changes need to be made apart from finding something more to do on Monday afternoons. We then celebrated with a halfway through project cake! (we love cake)