It’s all fitting together... :)

So my time has nearly come to an end. I have only 16 days left here at Thembelihle and I really can’t decide whether this year has gone quickly or not! I have a huge bucket list of things to get through before I leave, but don’t know if I will be able to finish them all in time for my flight!

I’m hoping to have one non-busy day before I leave where I can really enjoy the children’s company and reflect on the ups and downs of the year! I’m snapping up my last lot of photos over the next two weeks and sorting through all my stuff to decide what to leave to the kids and what I need to take home with me…hopefully not too much!

An update from Thembelihle Home School!

It’s so easy for me to talk about the big things that happen out here, but I forget to update you all on the everyday life out here!

Teaching has been going really well recently with the preschool now able to read short story books! It’s great to see their enthusiasm of their new found talent as they run up to me at break times with a colourful book in their hand. They can now correctly say English words using the alphabet I taught them, without saying words like ‘cabbage’ with a click at the start represented by a ‘c’!!! The two pre-schoolers with the lower ability are really coming on with their handwriting and can now spell their name! Dum-Dum’s words are less rarely spelt upside down (I still don’t know how she does it!). It’s amazing to hear them helping each other translate what they are trying to say to me in English.
Loli’s English is still poor, but we are getting there slowly. With his basic English and my basic isiXhosa, we make a great team trying to communicate…the smiles that spread across each of our faces when we both finally understand what each other mean is really satisfying, even if it’s taken 5 minutes, and a high-five to add to that smile reassure him I know what he’s trying to say! Amazing J

Group 1…the group who couldn’t add simple numbers at the beginning of my year out here, are now learning more complex maths and I have been teaching them how to add fractions! It’s crazy to think that calling a circle drawn on the board with lines segmenting it a ‘pizza’ makes so much more sense to the children than just the visual drawing itself! I have also been teaching them all about recycling, although I don’t think their knowledge on ‘re-using’ can be stretched any further…their use of old bread bags to make balls to throw around in the field or tie together to make skipping ropes never ceases to amaze me!

Group 2 are learning all about Biomes in Natural Sciences and are applying their new knowledge of reading bar graphs to determine the temperature and amount of rainfall in each main biome of the world! In Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) they are learning about how the economic environment is connected to natural, social, political and technological environments. They are currently looking into a case study about how the economic decisions of a company called Richards Bay Minerals is affecting the natural environment of Lake St Lucia!

67minutes…

So the 18^th July saw Nelson Mandela turning 94!!! Madiba says that on his birthday instead of gifts, he wishes for everyone to do something nice for someone else for 67minutes - what a legend! Why 67 minutes? To represent the years that President Mandela contributed towards bringing about a just society in South Africa.

So, on Friday we squished around 100 students from a local school onto the tiny Thembelihle lawn for their 67minutes. They read poems, sang and danced for us, before handing over a donation of clothes and food for our kids…this is now a partnership which we hope to continue with the school for the future and one which will help Thembelihle greatly!

Happy Birthday Madiba!!! xXx

South Africa…an island from the rest of Africa

I was once told by a lady I met on my travels that in terms of development, South Africa is an island from the rest of Africa…

My winter holidays (summer for you lot up there on the northern hemisphere) saw myself and a small group of fellow PT volunteers take a well-earned holiday which took us from Kruger through Swaziland and up to Mozambique!

Kruger saw us staying in a camp out in the bush with animals clawing around our tents all night! We were lucky enough to see the BIG 5 in one day on a safari trip - our best sighting being the leopard which our guide spotted lazing high up in a tree about 30metres away. I have no idea how he managed to spot it, especially whilst driving, but the vehicle behind us nearly drove into the back of us when our driver slammed on the brakes!

We also visited Blyde River Canyon, and spent 5 hours walking down and back up again. The waterfalls at the bottom were well worth it though!

Swaziland saw us visiting a small homestead in a very rural countryside where we were greeted by a family who showed us around their rondavels and home-made contraptions used to cure a cold. This involved sitting under a canopy made of bent twigs with rugs thrown over the top. The device acted in the same way as a bowl of hot water with a towel over your head would in order to unblock your nose, but instead chunks of metal heated in the sun were used to create steam when water was splashed on them! Ingenious! We also had a go at curing our sore backs from picking up little rascals at work and sitting on long combi rides whilst travelling with the horn of a mammal which was prodded around in the painful region…not sure if it worked or just made it worse!!!

We then headed across to the border of Mozambique where all our troubles started and every traveller’s worry of money, passport’s, visa’s etc kicked in! We eventually managed to cross the border after I run across no-man’s-land and into Mozambique without my visa in order to borrow money from our combi-taxi driver to purchase our visa’s – it seems our plan to travel the width of Swaziland to get one cheaper at the other side didn’t work and we ended up running out of money!
Once in Mozambique, we managed to reach our backpackers and pay our driver back…we accidentally gave him a huge tip as we weren’t familiar with the new currency! Mozambique is a fantastic country and one which I hope to visit again one day! The fish market in Maputo, the people, the trees, the beach in Tofo, and the general vibe of everyday life!

I think after spending days travelling on dangerous buses with crazy drivers and scary combi’s through 3 countries on the continent, working with exchange rates and different currencies, seeing varying landscapes and meeting people from diverse cultures, I can now see what the lady meant with the ‘island’ theory…just!