An African Week

I spent the first three days of this week working in Lifeskills, but then on Thursday I had to move down to the Junior class because one of the classroom assistants was away for her children's graduation ceremony.

On Monday we were honored by the visit of Debbie, a woman who has suffered from cerebral palsy her whole life but refused to let it get in the way. The Enrichment Centre asked for her to come and speak at assembly to give the college a better idea of the disease. She gave an extremely moving speech informing us about her early life, how the doctors told her she would never walk, talk or live independently. Debbie is now doing all three and also has two diplomas in Computer Studies and Business Administration - a huge inspiration not only to the children of the Enrichment Centre, but anyone who happens to meet her!

During my time in Lifeskills this week we visited the library to get some books on gardening. Hopefully the books will help the children understand the processes involved with growing vegetables, like planting the seed, watering etc. We also had our pancake sale in the playground on Wednesday, so we spent the morning making cinnamon pancakes and then set up our stall in the Junior Phase playground and sold them in the afternoon. After all the pancakes were sold we walked back to class to count the money. I think we made about R230 - about fifteen pounds, which goes a long way here.

In Juniors this week it was very hectic because it was one of the girl's birthdays, we had to set up for the staff function on Friday and prepare all the children's mother's day gifts for them to take home. By the time Friday arrived we were all pretty exhausted - Thursday and Friday turned into 14 hour working days trying to get things ready for the staff function.

Zoe, Kathryn and I were in charge of the function setting for the Enrichment Centre, so we turned a corner of it into a kraal - a traditional African cow keep. We outlined the perimeter with roughly cut branches and spent Thursday and Friday evening painting life-sized cows that we stuck on the wall. All the effort was worth it because everyone seemed to love the layout.

The function was African themed and all the Phases around the school (Junior, Intermediate, College, Admin and the Enrichment Centre) had to prepare one course of a meal. The Enrichment Centre were in charge of the starter so we made some soup and bread which went down very well. The setting of the function was quite fun because everyone had to walk round the school to the different phases for each course. We started in the Junior phases for cocktails, then walked over to the Enrichment Centre for starters, College for main, Admin for pudding and finally Intermediate for coffee and tea. Because the evening was African themed it meant that we all had to dress up in traditional African clothing - we definitely can't pull it off as well as they can... but we tried!

On Monday I start another five days in Juniors, it will hopefully be a little calmer than last week!

Our floating cows

Action shot

Kathryn looking fabulously African

The cow herders

Zoe serving soup