Things Are Good

Wow, we’ve been waiting a long time to be able to write those words. As most of you know, between being frustrated by not having much to do and having water drip on our heads while we try to sleep, our first few months here at site have been fairly challenging. This week, however, was actually great.

First of all, we’re now teachers. Or at least trying to be teachers. We visited the primary school in our village a couple of weeks ago, and the principal was very enthusiastic about having us help. We taught two Life Orientation (sort of health+life skills) classes this week, as well as a short math lesson. On our first day, we asked the 17 5th-6th graders which of them knew where we lived. All 17 of the students raised their hands, which made us laugh. The hope is that we’ll go to the school for a couple of hours three days a week. It’s definitely not going to be easy, and a number of the kids struggle with English. It is a national requirement, however, that classes past grade 3 be taught in English, and it is extremely unlikely that the kids will be able to pass high school (the Matric exam, which is an exam needed to pass high school, is in English) if they don’t learn the language, so hopefully our presence will be beneficial. Plus, the kids seem very excited to have us there, at least until our novelty wears off.

Secondly, our NGO co-hosted a community Women’s Day event this week, which was really fun. The majority of the people in attendance were kids from area schools. We watched kids play soccer and played with a number of kids from the school where we are teaching. There were performances by school choir groups, traditional dancers, gospel singers and way too many speakers. A man we are friendly with emceed the event and embarrassed us by making us stand up in front of everyone. We talked to tons of people and actually felt like part of the community for the first time.

Also, as we may have previously mentioned, the man who emceed the event works with Sports and Recreation and wants us to help develop a softball program for kids. He actually invited some members of the Eastern Cape Softball Association (or something like that) to the event. Our friend may have touted Matt as some softball expert, which of course meant the 20 year-old female softball player (who previously played on the under-19 national team) wanted to pitch to Matt. It was too late for Matt to explain that he played co-ed D-league slow pitch softball in Santa Monica. So Matt, wearing jeans stuffed with keys, wallet and cell phone, had to dig in against this South African softball whiz. The first pitch was inside and almost hit Matt in the kneecaps. When Matt swung at the next pitch it was the most pathetic imitation of softball, or athletics in general, these kids had ever seen. Matt was determined to make contact with the next pitch no matter what. And Matt certainly made solid contact, as he fouled the pitch off to the right …. directly into a boy’s forehead (luckily it bounced once). Fortunately, the boy is fine, though he may not be interested in softball anytime soon. The next day, our friend the emcee with a good sense of humor, told Matt that he had been fielding questions all morning from the police because the boy’s mother was angry. He said he was kidding, but only after Matt’s complexion turned ghostly white.

The good news, however, is that the kids showed a lot of interest in softball, and we’re thinking about buying a wiffle bat and ball to start playing with the kids in our village. And we will definitely be playing SLOW-pitch softball.

Finally, the other piece of news that has made our week good is that our NGO has funds again (after a huge delay from the gov’t), and our coworkers want to have a meeting on Monday to discuss putting a number of OVC (orphans and vulnerable children) program back in place (yay!). We are hoping to reinstate an afterschool drop-in center at the organization. Basically, kids would have a safe place to come for a couple of hours after school to do homework, play games and have a small meal/snack. Our NGO had such a program about a year ago, but the Department of Social Development (our primary funder) had them stop it for a number of reasons that we’ve never really been able to get to the bottom of. We are hoping to develop a proposal that will convince DSD of the value of the program and start having kids come next month. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, we realize that there will continue to be ups and downs, but we are more hopeful than we have been in a looong time about everything working out at our site. Plus, it was warm enough to sleep without our sleeping bags two days this week. That also helped morale.