Pride, Rain, and Chaos

Bonus Post Picture: Our Ziplining Crew from the Garden Route!

After the incredible weekend that I just have, I think I almost forgot that I even had things like responsibilities and a job. Nonetheless, it was nice to get back into the swing of teaching and see all of my work buddies. I’ve grown quite close to my morning class (the ‘advanced’ ones). They’ve come so far – they’re typing with correct hand position (most of the time, hehe), using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, navigating Windows, and formatting essays. It’s really impressive that they’ve done all of this in two weeks time. I want to make them some really nice certificates to give them for completing the course. I think Wednesday will be my last day with them.
Thursday and Friday I will work on some new things for the website; Lucinda has had the cool idea of selling the women’s arts and crafts online through an e-store (awesome!), and of course, I have been enlisted to help out. So, we’re gonna set that up. And then, Petra leaves on Sunday… Oh no!

So the following week, I’ll be taking care of all of her classes (she has like four of them!) and also helping cover for our new volunteer Alexander’s classes. Alexander will take over my teaching at Aysha’s informal settlement.

So enough of the future, and more with the present. Today’s teaching focused on last minute details that I hadn’t included yet: windows stuff, files, folders, formatting essays, the number keys… things like that. And I also devised a “final project” for the kids: they will become travel agents and plan a trip to a place they want to go to, using the skills they have learned. Today, they wrote proposals for trips to places like Germany, Spain, and even Sweden. They never cease to impress me.

Back at Philisa Abafazi, I discovered that Lucinda is out of Lavender Hill all of this week doing meetings and seminars in Cape Town. As you might expect, the entire business of Philisa Abafazi completely went haywire without her calm, ridiculously organized persona around. Kids were screaming and playing musical instruments, papers were strewn about, the internet wasn’t working (I couldn’t fix it either. Tech support was also utterly useless. Let’s hope it works tomorrow.), and general tension was all around. Also, it was rainy and cold, so the kids that came for the afterschool program couldn’t go outside. Nonetheless, we got through it; Lucinda’s presence is definitely missed though.

Back home, I discovered a new afterschool snack thanks to Philly: instant soup. Seriously. If you haven’t had it before, do so. It’s fast, filling, and delicious. That is all.

Meanwhile, South Africa eagerly prepares for the opening of the World Cup on Friday. Every media outlet’s content is completely dominated by World Cup coverage, and there’s just this air of excitement around the whole event. However, security regarding crowd control has been brought up as a recent issue. We’ll have to see how well Cape Town can deal with it when Friday rolls around. I should be in the Fan Park watching the game on a big screen; think of it like watching a Duke away game in Cameron – it’s the next best thing to being there.

This evening, we watched Men of Honor which was excellent. And.. that’s about it. I don’t have too much more interesting things to report. I wanted to go to the internet café to post my pictures, but it’s a 20-minute walk, and the weather was horrible. So.. we’ll see.
More excitement tomorrow, I’m sure. Thanks to everyone who’s left comments on the blog posts – I really, really like reading comments. So keep leaving them!

Poster’s Note: I realize that the general grammar of most of my posts is terrible. I really do realize this. So I’d like to apologize for that. I would edit them, but I just don’t have the willpower. Hope Mrs. Gordon (my high school English teacher, for those of you who don’t know her) isn’t reading this…