Project Trust always said there would come a time in the year where things would get very hard and challenging. I think I’ve just had that time. In my last blog I had said that we had signed up children for Injabulo and that teaching was about to commence. That didn’t happen. Instead, for the next 3 days, we turned up to Injabulo with a long line of parents, grandmothers and sisters waiting to sign-up even more children! By the end of the week we had registered 65 children, with all of them having paid the E10 we asked for. While this was absolutely brilliant, it also caused many problems. Injabulo Pre-School is a very small building, with no financial support apart from the E10 we ask for each month. It just can’t support that number of children! Never mind the fact that it is only Robyn and I teaching there, with Nelsiwe running between the two of us to help translate. The situation meant that some extremely hard decision had to be made. We were going to have to turn some of the children away. I can’t even begin to explain how it felt to have to look at the list of children and decided which ones we weren’t going to take and to have to know that you were going to be denying them their only chance at an education. After lengthy talks with Di and Liz and Kathy, it was decided that we would say to the 3 year olds that they were too young and come next year, and then hopefully come up with a solution to trying our best to keep the rest of the children, as without a pre-school education, they won’t be able to get into primary school.
On Friday the 3rd of February we held a meeting at the pre-school for all the guardians to attend. Kathy had kindly agreed to come and chair the meeting for us. She was absolutely brilliant at making the parents understand our situation, and encouraging them to also come up with solutions. In the end, after a very long meeting that turned into a full on community meeting, it was decided that 3 year olds would come next year, and if mothers from the community came and helped out, we would keep all the older children. Thank goodness we didn’t have to turn away those children that needed our help the most! And so this past week Robyn and I have both had help in our classrooms, making teaching a huge success! Thank you Nelsiwe and Thembeka! And Ayanda, from Sisekelo, who now comes and gives an extra hand on a Wednesday. These past few weeks have been very mentally and emotionally hard at Injabulo. With the prospect of turning children away, then having to actually turn away 3 year olds who I’d already grown to love, and having the pressure of a whole community on our shoulders, everything became just a bit too much at times. But we worked hard (VERY long days I’ll have you know) and managed to resolve the problem as best we could, and I’m very proud to say I managed it! Now I just hope that we can continue with teaching as successfully as it has this past week. Oh, and we’re now also paying Nelsiwe, as the parents agreed to pay an extra E20 a month to go towards her. She does too much for the school to not get paid at least a little for her efforts.
Apart from the struggles at Injabulo (which was definitely some 1st class life experience) everything else has been going really well. While teaching the younger age group has taken some getting used to, I’m really enjoying it! The Leopards class at Moriah Centre are an absolute delight to teach, although there are a couple who just don’t have the attention span to sit and listen, so everything has to be very pro-active! At Soup Kitchen everything is going very well. We handed out our first clothes and shoes donations as we were given last year’s lost property from Sisekelo. We are yet to have a shortage of food to give them, as there seems to be lots of left over’s from hostel recently and lots and lots of bread! Aunti Winnie and Mama Rose have been fantastic at helping us out with preparing the food as we’ve been very busy lately. Tuesday’s had become a very busy day, with us working at all 3 projects in the one day. We had started going to Injabulo on the afternoons that we taught at Moriah Centre, but because of the hot weather and the masses amount of preparation that now has to go into Injabulo, we’ve stopped and use those afternoons to prepare. When the weather cools down and we’re more settled at our, now, very different pre-school we’ll start going again.
We’re now on a big search for some sort of funding towards Injabulo, as now with a school 58 children, resources are going to run out very quickly. Letters have been made and are ready to send out to charities and local businesses, to see if we can get some help from somewhere. The other day we had our first encounter with Trusty, the local MP for the Ndobadoba area, which is where InJabulo is situated. Admittedly, it was because she just happened to drive by when we were doing the morning pick-up, but she did say she would try and visit the school and arrange some funding to get us more tables and chairs. We’ll see what happens with that one!
Recently, Big Bend has been hit by many storms and lots of rain. It meant that for around 2 weeks we had to go the long way to Injabulo because the bridge was constantly flooded! And the river got frighteningly close the Sisekelo! It then all died down again but just in the past day or so there have been some crazy storms! On Friday I got trapped in the staff room as a storm suddenly appeared and if I went outside it was very likely I would get blown away or drowned by all the rain! And then yesterday as we returned from the Swimming Gala, we went through an extremely violent storm, that had streams running down roads, tress falling over and signs blown over! So the whole of yesterday evening was spent in the dark with no electricity! It was probably the worst thunder and lightning storm I’ve ever witnessed!
And speaking of Swimming Gala’s, swimming is now the way to go! With the climate being far too hot and humid to do anything like running etc swimming is now the only way to do some exercise. Big Bend has a swimming club called ‘Splash’ that I now go to and yesterday we all went to a Swimming Gala. I wasn’t swimming, instead I ended up time keeping, but Xoli has told me that next week I’m definitely swimming. We’ll just have to see how that one goes. A couple of weekends ago I did swim the Swazi Mile though. This took place at a dam just north of Mbabane, where you swim a mile in a dam. It was good fun, although pretty tiring and my first experience of swimming in open water! Next month we’re going to be heading to Limpopo in SA with some of the children to swim the Ebenezer Mile, which is again swimming a mile in a dam.
And that’s pretty much it for the past month. Everything (fingers crossed) has now settled down and we can focus on teaching rather than the whole issue of deciding who gets to come and who doesn’t. We’ve got lots planned for the next month or so, so things will be busy, busy (but what’s new there!).
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