Pics of the last days at the Haven and Pendla family night

The kids having some lunch

The "hands" painting.

Taking goofy pictures with Taylor's camera.  These boys were funny.

ha

Taylor and me with the gardener from Pendla

Our friend Alex.  I played sports with him all afternoon

The crowd for the class performances

The food line.  Soup, juice, apples, and pb sandwiches.

One of the classes performing

Filling sandwich trays

Cape Gannets, cormorants, and penguins at the SAMREC center.  These birds were found starving or slicked with oil and are rehabilitated in PE before being re-released into the wild.  There were also about thirty rescued chicks who were half the size they should have been.  The areas around PE are over-fished and the water is warming (possibly due to effects of climate change), so the adult penguins must swim about 65 km to find food and the food is fully digested before they can get back and feed the chicks.  African penguins are endangered.

This bird has had one bath, but he is still very dirty with oil. 

A big jelly we found on Kings Beach, in front of Langerry.

dancing along the beach

Taylor grabbed a pic of Laura and I walking back up to Langerry

Kings Beach

Rough day

Since the Fun Day on Saturday, the House kids have been seeking out specific volunteers to play.  Until Monday this week, I wouldn’t have said any of the kids were attached, but one of the House mothers summed it up well, “IF you give a child love they will love you and cling to you forever.  Love is what a child needs and they will like you and love you back.”  It’s such a simple concept, but I found it, in this temporary situation, heart-wrenchingly true. 

Connie, the Playschool teacher, left with some of the mamas and volunteers to get a First Aid certification.  We had the whole day with the kids on our schedule.  We sang their favorite songs, “Little Sunny Girl/Boy” and “Jesus Loves Me” with a cool “Telephone to Jesus” verse which the kids morph to sing for each child.  For instance, “Telephone to Kitha,” or any other the other kids, and they laugh and glow when their name comes up.  After singing we read them the story we wrote for them.  We had simple sentences and pictures to describe the situation we entered into and the situation we left.  We began by describing House with loving House-mothers and children. We wrote a sentence about each child’s favorite thing to do.  We ended by telling the children that we had to leave, but we still love them.  Annnnnd there is another CSB|SJU group coming next year.   We think that about four of the children were old enough to understand what we were saying, but I don’t want to underestimate all of the younger kids.  Maybe they got something out of the story.  I teared-up quite a bit, and a few fell.

During free time I chased Mvuyisi (Isi) and Nolutho, and threw them up in the air a bit.  I took kids off of tables and out of the stuffed animal bin.  I attempted to redirect them until snack time.  After snack we tied on some smocks and painted.  I took home five post-card sized paintings.   We also put our handprints and all of the kids’ handprints on a large piece of cardstock and hung it in the Playschool as a remembrance of our time with the kids. 

The Bongulethu Playschool

A clothesline pic, my fav.  And the African sky.  It really is different down here.

Kwe-Kwe.  He is a new kid at House.  We first met him at the fun day on Saturday, and he grew on us fast.  Can you see why?

Again, what a little darlin.

Isi bein' sneaky. 

They're a little confused....

Then they started to get it.  Anne gave them all a farm animal silly band as a good-bye gift.  For the record, a silly-band is nothing more than a fun thing to put in a two-year-old's mouth.  I hope they don't choke. But, according to the group I volunteer with, TIA (this is Africa).  They don't do "choking hazards" here.

Isi, checking his silly band out.

The "big kids" eating their lunches.

Armed with spoons and awaiting their lunches.

What a talent, eh Mhandi?

Our hand print pic.  All of the volunteers from House.

Right before we left, we had popsicles with the kids, said our good-byes to the staff, and read the story a second time.  I was holding Isi, and he was clinging tighter, like he knew I had to leave.  I tried to swing him around a little, and he wouldn’t laugh or giggle.  I tried to encourage him to run around with the other kids and he wouldn’t.  So, as the rest of the group started filling out, I set him down, and he started crying.   He was hardly taking a chance to breathe and I just felt terrible.  I felt guilty that I created this attachment, but I will be grateful for the knowledge he gave me.  #1.  So many kids need love, homes, and have so much love to give back = I want to adopt when I’m ready to be a Mom.  #2. Like Elisabeth said, “If you love a child they will like you.”= I shouldn’t feel guilty for loving.  #2 is the only consolation I have for leaving Isi crying on the floor today.

We had a quiet bus ride home, and we were back on a bus at 1:30 on the way to Pendla Primary School where the Pendla volunteer group planned Family Night at the school.  The classes prepared performances and CSB|SJU provided soup, PB sandwiches, an apple, and a juice to each person who participated. 

The plan was for extra volunteers to arrive early to help prepare the meal, but when we got there everything was done.  So, we had two hours to stall before the activities started.  My immediate reaction was to belly-ache because I have so many final papers and exams to prepare that I could be spending my time much more wisely.  But, I just thought, “There’s only one option: Have fun with the kids.”

I no sooner walked to the back of the schoolyard and was drafted onto a soccer team.  I played with the school boys the full two hours.  We played soccer, four square, volleyball, and even took a break to take goofy pictures with Taylor’s camera.  I felt like I was playing with my younger boy cousins with our seemingly endless Ping-Pong tournaments in Gma n Gpa’s basement.  The actual program that followed was all right.  It was pretty stressful to serve hundreds of people a meal and see all the trash thrown on the ground.

Trash is a big problem here.  There are mounds of garbage everywhere that municipal employees don’t collect garbage every day.  So… that means anywhere except where rich white people live, there is a lot of garbage.   People do not view it as their responsibility to dispose of their trash.  So, after the meal at Pendla, you could see kids walking away drinking juice out of a Styrofoam cup and just throw it on the ground when they were done.  This is not one child; it is true of almost every child at the school.  The schoolyard was incredibly messy after the night was done.

In any case, it is really important for the parents and other supporting family members and friends to be involved at the school because it is very uncommon here.  Despite disorganization, and at times chaos, tonight, I would call it a success.  Now I want to sleep, but alas, the homework.

A BIG day one

What a long day!  We started early, leaving for our service sites at 8am.  I know myself well enough by now that I prepared all of my things the night even to the extent of cutting up the peppers for my eggs.  Shadly, the driver, took us to House for our first day of service.  After some paperwork, we walked into the nursery and sixteen two to six year old attention-starved children clobbered seven students.  It was a zoo!  After a half hour of playing, which in actuality consisted of acting as a human jungle gym, Norma debriefed us a little as to our tasks and we followed the children to the play school.  We stood outside while the kids sang a morning prayer and did some counting exercises with the teacher.  There is only one teacher assigned to care for all sixteen kids including play time, snack, changing, and all of the other childcare tasks.  She has a big job!

When she sat the kids down for coloring, the teacher very sternly told them that if they ever want to go to school they must learn how to color in the lines.  The boy I was “helping” continually recited, “Color in the lines, color in the lines,” while he colored only outside the lines on a variety of pictures.  His artistic abilities earned him a disapproving look and snack dead last.  I guess we have something to work on.  One of the projects I would love to implement is a developmentally appropriate project for the younger children who cannot conceptualize coloring “in the lines” while the older ones practice pre-school-age appropriate tasks.  This would be a huge feat considering availability of resources and the lack of staff.  Not to mention, I don’t know if that is something the center even wants.  In any case I see potential for growth.  The potential for growth paired with the obvious love of attention from the volunteers assures me that the children will benefit from our service.  But Norma gave us a small piece of advice today in the debriefing in the bus.  She said, “She that waits in service is still serving.”  So, even if I feel at times that I am not doing anything or enough, doing whatever I’m asked, even if it doesn’t seem like a lot to me, is serving the organization.

The best part of the service was just getting to know the kids a little bit.  They wanted the attention so badly and they were so adorable it was easy to give, for the first two-and-a-half hours at least, haha.  They loved Legos, cars, toy guns, and stuffed animals just like kids in the US.  Of course there were some snotty noses and toy-stealing, but, in all, it was a fun time.  I shared with my fellow volunteers that I doubt I can sustain the same rate of activity with the little rascals for a whole semester (I know someone in the family who is much better at that, right Ali?).  But, there is hope to build endurance and even help out in other areas that need some attention.  I also wouldn’t object to spending some quality time with the youngest members of House, Shiloh and Sherman, five-month-old twins (girl and boy; respectively).  Although, Norma said that she was only able to get them both asleep for five minutes in the three hours that we were there.  She gets a strong grade for effort, but lacking on task completion, haha.

After three hours at House we had enough time to eat lunch back at the flats and walk to school (and get a little lost in the blistering heat) before our three-hour music night class.  Tonight we learned about Nguni music.  The Xhosa tribe is a division of Nguni.  We learned about the Xhosa instruments which are hunting bows played by plucking or by bowing a reed against the string.  Xhosa make use of overtones with the bows and their voices.  Some very talented Xhosa women can sing deep, guttural sounds and, through manipulation of their vocal chords, actually amplify the overtones, so they are essentially singing two tones at one time by isolating and amplifying different vibrations.  This type of singing was developed in Mongolia to imitate the sound of a mother camel calling her calf.  The culture of the camel herders is very animalistic, valuing the appearance, mannerisms, and sounds of animals as a way to connect with nature.  In addition to this two-toned singing, each Xhosa song includes music from the bow in two-count time and singing in three-counts with cannon-style repetition.  Singers can sing in one time and tap their feet in another baffling the Western ear and mind.  It is very complex, and surprising to most, there are no drums native to the Xhosa tribe because they are a nomadic cattle-herding people, and drums are cumbersome to travel with.

After class while walking home, we stopped at the grocery store and picked up Suvi, our Finnish friend.  We all treated ourselves to some Valentine’s Day chocolates (I got a white-chocolate with cookie pieces reminiscent of the four-wheeling days :D).  We eventually dragged our feet home “all the way home” and I made walnut and blue cheese salads and gnocchi with wilted spinach, pumpkin and cream sauce.  It was good, but quite heavy for such a hot day.  Suvi shared with us her adventures surfing at Jeffery’s Bay with her flatmates yesterday, and now we are all hitting the books.  Judging by home I’m feeling now, I will be getting up early to get my homework done. 

Nighty night.

Our first full day

This morning we toured Missionvale Township which is comprised of about 120 000 people with 60% HIV infection rate and 80% unemployment rate.  The service site located there is a community center with at least nine departments some of which include sewing, carpentry (for coffins), nutrition (similar to a food shelf), Father Christmas (gifts are donated and wrapped for a yearly Christmas celebration for THOUSANDS of children at the community center), and a school.  The Queen of England and Mother Theresa have visited the remarkable nun, Sister Ethel, at Missionvale.  She has received a whole wall of plaques for the last twenty-three years of work.  Her only condition on being sent to Africa only a month after she returned home to Ireland from another mission was that she be able to work with the poor.  Since then she has worked with the people of Missionvale to create a place that they can call their own, and it is very full of hope which one may not expect in a place so rife with poverty, sexual crimes, HIV/AIDS, unemployment and the like.  One of the ways that people contribute is that they must bring in recycling in order to get the components of a meal.  Missionvale never gives cooked meals, because they want the mother to still act as a provider so she can bring the flour, sugar, beans and whatever else is in the bag home and cook a meal.  There is also a lot of little, plastic bags, and trash all over the roads and hillsides, so picking up recycling allows the people to take care of their surroundings while earning something to bring in for their food.  There are NO handouts at Missionvale because the people have dignity, and they don’t need hand-outs, they just need access to resources.

Next, we visited House of Resurrection AIDS Haven.  This is a much smaller site dedicated to caring for orphans from AIDS causes.  There are thirty-nine children of which twenty-two are infected.  Because they have no parents or grandparents to care for them, House has six “house mothers” that foster these children as their own.  They live in the main building or cottages that surround the main building and receive government funding for fostering and for ARV treatment which costs $150 a month per child.  We stopped in the pre-school at House, and there were sixteen young children that we were able to play with.  Many of them don’t speak English, but they are so lovable, and that is what they need most.  Inside House we were able to see five-month-old twins who are the newest members of the community.  

We won’t choose what site we would like to serve at until tomorrow afternoon, but it would be great at either of these places.   At Missionvale we would have the chance to work in each department at an expertly-run facility.  We would even get to go with nurses into the townships to visit patients.  At House we would work with the children in pre-school, playing with them and working on development, especially English.  We could also do maintenance on the grounds and help with tasks in the main building as needed.  Tomorrow we will visit Pendla Primary School which is the third service option.

After the tours we got our student cards, toured the sports facility and asked about joining teams, and had a workshop on volunteering.  I had no idea what we were in for, but I learned so much this afternoon.  South Africa makes up 0.7% of the world’s population yet contains 28% of the people with dual TB and HIV infections.  Sub-saharan Africa holds 22.5 million of the world’s 33.3 million people with HIV/AIDS according to UNAIDS 2009 information.  There are still high rates of newly diagnosed people each year in South Africa and 5.6 million of South Africa’s 40 million residents live with HIV.  There are also 1.9 million orphans due to AIDS.  I know these are just numbers, but try to imagine the impact of those statistics.  The AIDS problem is HUGE here.  Just one million is big.  If it was your full time job to count to one million and each number took one second, it would take you 35 8-hour days to get there.  That is five weeks at a full-time job.  That is BIG!

Learning a bit about AIDS in SA helped to put the poverty and unemployment into perspective.  AIDS is taking out the most productive people in society, leaving children and the elderly to contribute to society.  So, we are here for four months, working only a few hours two days a week.  What can we do to make any kind of impact?  Natalie, our service mentor for the semester, brought us through some community development theory that can help us have the greatest impact at our sites and to give us some tools to problem-solve on site.  She told us that true perspective sees what people don’t have but also recognizes what they do.  And, the South African people are innovative and resilient shown by the informal work such as growing their own fruits and vegetables to sell (which they can do with plots in the garden at Missionvale) or any other way to make money.  The reason that this situation is not hopeless despite the poor conditions in the townships is that the people are motivated and talented and when encouraged and have self-confidence, they can break the cycle of poverty.

After a long day physically and emotionally, Taylor and I took a refreshing run along the boardwalk and came home to relax the rest of the evening.  I am getting somewhere on my lit project that I present on the first day, but the internet has become an essential resource due to the proximity of my last literature lesson (it was a LONG time ago… at least four years).  So, I am searching on the difference between literary analysis and literary interpretation and deciphering what the South African prof really wants not having met her before.  It will all be okay.  Buttttt, I am up a bit than I planned because of my loyal dedication to my blog and followers.  Love you all and pray that I make the decision that fits best for my service site.

Peace and bu-lessings!