Interns/Volunteers in South Africa!

Christina and Emma’s South Africa Adventures! WK6

September 20, 2009 on 10:53 am | In Christina and Emma's South Africa Adventures! | No Comments

In our first class Monday morning, the kids have the opportunity to share their news from the weekend. It broke our hearts to watch as five first graders in a row recounted horrible events—deaths of family or friends, disease, and freak accidents. Every week the news seems to be like this. The teacher asked if anyone had good news and a girl responded by saying, “There is only bad news in this land.” The teacher later informed the class that one student will not be returning for the remainder of the year, because he got third degree burns after a pot of boiling water fell on his head.

A second grade teacher had us teach a reading comprehension lesson using the story “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” We again realized how difficult it is to make sure that 45 kids stay in their seats, listen, and do their work. This was especially difficult, because there seems to be no stigma against tattle-tailing here. Kids are constantly getting out of their seats to tell on each other. This literally happened at least thirty times over the course of an hour and a half. The next day, another second grade teacher, who had heard about our lesson, asked us to teach it to her class. It was cool to see how two different classes responded to the same lesson.

Spring break starts this Thursday and we are terrified for our last class on Wednesday. One teacher asked if kids in New Jersey get crazy the week before Spring Break. It seems that some things are the same everywhere. As many of you may have been talking about this week, Kanye West stole the mic from Taylor Swift at the VMA’s. On Wednesday one kid asked Emma if she saw what Kanye did in the news last night. People here are very interested in American pop culture.

For the first time in the schools history, a group of students checked out books from the library at Zuurbekom. Every kid that was allowed to do so chose to take home a book. As we were leaving school, we saw that many of them were reading their books as they walked home. We hope that very soon all of the kids will be using this opportunity regularly.

Today we went to Mrs. Kinney’s (a college counselor at Pingry) sister’s house. Abby and her husband were nice enough to make us hamburgers, give us Haagen Daz, and brew us Starbucks coffee. It felt just like being back at home. To make it a little more South African, though, we had warthog (that her husband hunted!) sausages.