Girls Club

I (Sara) have had a number of girls clubs since the beginning of the year.  I do girls clubs with the high school boarding students, but my Grade 7 club is definitely my favourite.  The idea is to bring girls together in a safe, nonjudgmental environment to discuss life skills lessons.  For most of the year, I tried holding the club at school during a free period on Fridays.  Unfortunately, the learners often have to clean classrooms on Fridays, which interfered with my club.  A few months ago, I began holding the sessions at our house after school in Fridays.  The girls love the fact that they get to take over our house and evict Matt to the hospital office.

While we still do a short life skills lesson at the beginning of the session (e.g., friendship, goal setting, values), the main focus has shifted to baking.  Needless to say, the baking gets a bit crazy.  Imagine a group of 12-15 girls huddled around a small table, yelling at each other in Zulu, fighting over who gets to add the flour or beat the eggs.  “Too many cooks in the kitchen” does not come close to capturing the chaos.  I’ve had dough all over the floor and tortillas on the walls, but it’s been so much fun.  Luckily, the girls are really great about sweeping the floor and doing the dishes afterward.

School doesn’t officially end for a few more weeks, but we had Grade 7 graduation this week.  Most of the girls will be moving on to the high school to do Grade 8 next year (the boys are less studious, to put it mildly).  There have been many trying times in their classroom, but I’m really going to miss these girls.  While our first year in the Peace Corps dragged on and on and on, this year has gone by so quickly.  

Ngwelu Road Race

As we are apt to do, we have failed to update this blog in some time.  Oops.  Almost two weeks ago, we held a community 5K race with a kids’ fun run beforehand.  Although we didn’t get the enormous turnout we’d hoped for, it was still a success and a lot of fun.  Due to bad luck with the weather, we had to postpone the race twice.  And when we faced a conflict with the Grade 12 graduation, we were forced to run on a Wednesday.  Despite all the false starts, all the runners ended up having a great time, and we still ended up running in the rain and mud.

We managed to get a couple small donations from a friend in Pretoria and a local doctor.  This enabled us to charge very little money for the entrance fee and even give small cash prizes.  Whenever we wake up early enough to run in the morning we are joined by kids walking to school.  Two 6^th grade girls, in particular, run with us whenever they see us.  We were really excited with them because the younger one finished in 2^nd place in the kids’ fun run and the older one finished in 2^nd in the 5K.  When the older girl opened up the envelope and saw cash her jaw dropped, and the next day at school she sought both of us out to tell us that her mother was proud of her.  In a rural area with little in the way of entertainment, we were more than pleased that we could provide kids with something to do . . . at least for one very muddy afternoon. 

It feels very strange to us that the election is tomorrow.  While it’s refreshing to avoid the constant media coverage, it is simultaneously frustrating to be so oblivious.  Someone recently sent us an email chain from 2008 when we made election night plans for people to come to our apartment and eat pizza as the polls closed.  Tomorrow night we will go to bed long before the result is known and await a test message from Matt’s sister Courtney to awaken us with the identity of our next president.  And then a few hours later we will go teach English to classrooms of Zulu students.  How times have changed!