Orientation

Today our hosts took us new volunteers on a tour of the projects that we would be working on. It was quite an emotional rollercoaster of a day – I heard some harrowing stories but I also had a lot of fun.

Our first stop was the Sinethymba project which is a centre for street kids. These children don’t go to school for various reasons: some of them have been expelled for bad behaviour, some can’t go to school because their parents can’t afford the school fees, some have run away from home because of abuse, and some have been excluded simply because their parents can’t afford to buy them a school uniform. The Sinethymba project gives them a place to go during the day where they can get help to improve their numeracy and literacy skills, they get access to computers, they learn life skills like sewing, cooking and general taking care of themselves. They also get two proper meals per day, without which they would go hungry. This is a fantastic project and has done a lot of excellent work in the community, but the sad thing is that when the centre closes for the day the kids go back to the streets and have to sleep rough.

Next we went to the MAD about Art project which helps children that are around 10 years old to talk about their problems in an open and caring environment. The children are encouraged to express themselves through art and write a ‘Hero book’ to express the things about their lives that they like as well as the things that frighten them or make them angry or sad. One of the children had written the following in their book:

 “And the bad things about my community are when people stab each other and they kill each other”

I can’t imagine having to deal with that at the age of 10 years old.

We visited several other pre-schools for children up to the age of 5. Here the children all seemed to be very happy and they sang songs for us and got so excited when they saw us. At the Judas Square preschool, the children ran over to us and literally jumped on us as soon as they saw us wanting to be picked up. My camera and my sunglasses were a big hit. They all wanted to try on my glasses and have their picture taken. These kids were so happy – laughing and smiling and playing the whole time even though they really have very little.

Tomorrow I’ll be going back to one of the preschools in the morning to help with an English lesson and then in the afternoon I’m going back to MAD about Art, so more about them soon.