Wednesday 4 July 2012

Chicken's come knocking



Firstly sorry at my laziness at completing these blog posts, in all honesty spare moments have gradually become more sparse. I am now at the point when I can say that I am going home next month - exciting stuff, though I will miss the bizarre nature of a chicken pecking on the front step before it wanders in uninvited. Our sessions here seem to be running smoothly now where we're timetabled in to do various workshops, which run on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Following us tailoring our sessions to the community in Zozo and their interests, we're now running Arts amd Crafts, Taekwando and Sewing lessons to engage with the community, as well as to make the sessions seem fun to the local youth.   The younger children remain our most euthusiastic students, especially when the football comes out, (as I found out when I tried walking home with the ball and got followed by a group of younger boys). We're finding it harder to get the teenage youth more involved and interested in our sexual reproductive health and CV writing skills workshops, partly as an effect of it being the school holidays, coupled with the embarrassment some of the youth feel when tackling sex related issues. To try and bump up the numbers to this regard I have taken to  extending my friendly conversations with youth in the village from «Molo» (Hello), to «Make sure you come to the Community Hall, we'e running workshops on numerous helpful things» etc, hopefully this strategy will work and getting responses like «Hello Baby will you be there?» from the older boys, will all be worth it in the end. On the plus side schools will be reopening soon, and hopefully we can try pushing the sessions more to the older youth through the teachers in the local schools who we have already made contact with. On that note of sessions, I've been trying to work in every area exculding Taekwando (obvious reasons) but sewing has seemed to be the focus over the last two weeks. We get the older women in the community coming in which is great as it has been mentionned that some of these women will be hopefully starting their own sewing garments business in the future. It's been enjoyable  co-running these sewing session and teaching the locals  a variety of skills, but I will gladly be moving from that area these next two weeks before I go raving mental as the sessions can be quite stressful when there's temperamental machines and a continous stream of people waving in and out. In fact I am very happy to be moving over to career skills and teaching CV and interview skills in the next couple of sessions. With regards to recreational stuff we had a lovely weekend in East London a few weeks back where we stayed in the ever so friendly and upbeat (insert sarcasm) Niki Nanas backpackers with it's Zebra print roof. The highlight of that weekend would have to be the Port Festival we all went to which proved to be an entertaining event, particularly when we  volunteers were in the minority cheering on England in the rugby match with South Africa...which we also lost like the Football. On the Saturday just gone we all had a lovely time at the beach too! Though I can't say the same experience reflected itself at the tavern later that night which is the South African equivalent of a low market pub/bar/nightclub, too many groping men and too little personal space. Overall, however, things seem fine and the sessions seem to be on their way onwards and upwards, though I am quite pleased with their progress so far. This seems to the end of this post and I hope to update everyone soon, till then  Sunaina x

2 comments:

  1. Hello darling, please shoot me an email (todaymyway.blog@gmail.com) so I can send you your voucher code for $20 off sunglasses from Firmoo you won through my giveaway. xxx

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