Chosa

I decided to volunteer at the place I really always wanted to, but thought it would conflict with classes. I’m in charge of teaching a group of eight six-year-olds who live in a children’s home in a township called Khayelitsha at a childrens home called Baphumele.

I’m working with my friend Talya (who can be seen as the second girl from the right in the wine-tasting-picture below). We decide on our own curriculum and have a lot of freedom to do whatever we want to, which is great, but also pretty overwhelming.

We met with the kids for the first time last week. The first class was a little rocky (i.e. one of the children held up her hand and told the other to “read between the lines” in Xhosa). I quickly realized that it was going to be much more difficult than I expected in many ways. The children come to Baph for a variety of reasons that spur from adversity, like being abandoned or orphaned or having parent(s) who have elected to send their children to a home that might better care for them. In addition to this background, our group also does not speak English and are all new to Baph so they have never had a school experience before. Getting them to sit quietly and follow directions is a great challenge in and of itself. However, the children have so much joy and fun and are really just normal kids—and should be treated as such.

I think today’s class went much better than the last. For the first 45 minutes or so we just play with all of the Baph kids. I was swarmed a couple of times and Talya literally had to pick children off of me. We went over some shapes in class, made drawings using the shapes they learned, then drew them on the ground outside with chalk and had them run around to each of the shapes we would shout out. This worked productively for all of about 2 minutes, which is about the length of their general attention span. Then we taught them the baby-shark song (for anyone that doesn’t know it, I’m sorry because you apparently did not have a childhood—or at least go to a camp in the last 15 years, which is slightly more likely). At the end of the hour they sat in their seats quietly, ready to learn more. Overall success. But it sounds like there are going to be a lot of ups and downs and it’s going to be very day-dependent. Really looking forward to what comes and to develop more meaningful, individual relationships with all of them. Pictures are forbidden for the first few weeks, but get excited because these kids are freaking adorable.