Justin Bieber: South Africa Loves Him Too

Sunday, May 23rd:
This day was relatively uneventful – your typical “lazy Sunday.” This was fine for me, because I needed a little break and was still catching up on sleep a little bit. Around 2 PM, Philly (my host mom) made an awesome brunch for the family and me: curry chicken and potatoes, beef, and vegetables. It was DELICIOUS and spicy, but nothing I couldn’t handle. The cuisine reminded me a lot of Indian food I had eaten before (probably because of the curry). I got to chat with my parents in the early afternoon which was great; Skype voicechat doesn’t take up too much bandwidth, so I think I can afford to do that on my internet card. The only other things of remote substance I did that day were watch two movies: Grease (I forgot that I love this movie SO much. SO much.) and The Wedding Singer (which, coincidentally, is now an awesome musical that Hoof ‘n’ Horn really needs to do). And… that was Sunday.

Monday, May 24th:
Today was my first official day at work! Hooray! So, I got picked up at around 8:30 AM (I am beginning to learn the meaning of ‘Africa time’ – when someone says they’ll pick you up at 8 or 8:15, go ahead and assume they meant at least 15 minutes later). After helping my coworker Petra get set up for her morning computer class with the women of Philisa Abafazi (I’m working on a different teaching schedule than her, so I teach at different times), I set out to assess the computer situation of what the organization had. I tested all of the assets and found that we had 1 working desktop out of 5 desktop computers. So, I then channeled my 9th grade computer repair skills to see if I could fix any of the remaining ones. Unfortunately, it looks like they all have broken power supplies (more expensive to replace than simply buying a new computer) or have strange BIOS/motherboard problems that I can’t seem to fix. Bottom line: we need more computers. Luckily, for our main classes with the women, we have the one working computer and 3 laptops for them to use. So, allowing them to take turns, we’re able to cover a good amount of ground between them. Still, having more computers would be extremely nice. I’m beginning to look into various nonprofits that might be able to donate some to us, such as the OLPC (one laptop per child) initiative. We’ll see what happens there.

I took a short lunch break and then had some time to sit in on and help out a bit with the classes Petra was teaching. We were working on basic skills such as typing, using the mouse, and word processing. The women were extremely enthusiastic about learning, even if the learning was coming rather slowly; many of them had trouble grasping the concept of using two hands at the keyboard for more efficient typing, and the mouse was awkward to hold for some of them. With time, I’m sure this will improve. Still, just in this very first lesson, I could already tell that we were going to cover a lot of ground.

In the late afternoon, I got to work with another group of people Philisa Abafazi is affiliated with, the informal housing settlement. Headed up by a woman named Aysha, this living community provides a place for hundreds of families to live because getting an actual house from the government is a lengthy, unjust process that can take more than 30 years to complete (!). So, today, I worked with some of the youth of the settlement, getting them comfortable with typing and some of the same skills that Petra was working on. I encountered some of the same difficulties Petra was facing, with the children awkwardly pecking out each individual key on the keyboard with one finger of one hand. I recalled that it took an entire semester in 7th grade for me to learn to type properly, and conjectured that I wasn’t going to be able to ingrain exactly proper typing into the minds of my pupils – so I instead settled on the idea of keeping the hands on the home row; this would improve typing efficiency a considerable bit anyway.

The children weren’t as enthusiastic as the adults about the typing drills I had them do; typing names, addresses, and sentences is admittedly a boring task. But some of them really needed to get comfortable with this before we could move on. One of my students walked out after about 10 minutes of teaching – I either was really boring or he was really uninterested. Another was gaining accuracy and speed with the typing slowly, but it took a little while. The last student, a girl named Lauren, was my star student. She was a quick learner, and did what I asked of her without any hesitation. After mastering the basics of typing, I decided to give her a quick foray into Excel. So I taught her how to enter numbers and add them up. Then I showed her how to use the first basic formula function of Excel, the average function. I felt it was appropriate to first explain what exactly an average was – harder than you think, by the way – but had a lot of trouble describing what it was without a mathematical formula or using the word average. I eventually interpreted it in terms of test scores and that seemed to click pretty well. By the end of the session, Lauren was typing, summing, averaging, and inserting clip art like a pro. I was impressed. Before I left, some of the local residents of the came by the makeshift computer lab and chatted for a bit. One of them was crazy about Justin Bieber and played his "Baby" over and over on the computer near me. She knew all of the words; even the Ludacris rap. I was impressed.

The rest of the day was fairly relaxed, and I got picked up from work around 4 PM. We have a new volunteer from the USA today, which is really exciting – California! She isn’t working at Philisa Abafazi very much though. Oh well, it was still nice to talk to someone without a British accent. No offense to those of you who have them, of course.
More excitement tomorrow!

PS: I'll slowly be adding a few photos here and there. Not too much, gotta make that internet last until I can get out to buy another card. Check previous posts every now and then, I might get some new stuff up. Also, click the photos for larger versions.