Day 39

Day 39.

Really nice relaxed day!

We woke up around 10:00 so we could head down to the support office in town to have our meeting with Wasima,Joel,Joe and Laurence. The meeting was informal and just a nice chat of how we're getting on and our plans for the future in our programme.. like our soccer clinic coming up at Italian Club! I really enjoyed getting my thoughts across and explaining what I had seen so far in crèches, schools and in the complexes. For example in the lower privileged crèches we could see that some kids were really shy and unwilling to take part. Jeff and I both put our point across that this was down to kids being abused and not being play with by their parents. We had been informed by teachers that this was the case, we didn't just assume! Furthermore, due to the crèches not doing any kind of physical activity involving team work.. Children would often not know how to work as a team and would single out anyone who was a weakness because they didn't understand or were overweight! Again this lead to a couple of children not wanting to play because of intimidation of others. I believe if teachers were trained and encouraged by external parties to do some simple activities.. Boys and girls would learn such important life skills such as teamwork! Consequently this would eradicate the problem of bullying and working as a singular figure rather than a team. Another point we explained was that teachers didn't necessarily know how to control such activities. One example we could think of was when a teacher was yelling at a boy to 'stand' on his knees for one of our drills and the boy didn't quite comprehend what she meant. She started to lose her patience and force-folded his knees under his legs. This hit home that teachers have not been educated in "coaching" kids. When some children were still not understanding, Joe did one simple demonstration of what to do and them everyone got it. It's as simple as that. Demonstrations are the best way to explain something. A picture paints a thousand words. Lastly, we explained how communicare could get external parties to appreciate such projects that they do and how this could influence the government or sponsors to gradually pump money in to schools just to put a patch of grass in for example!

Those last few points I explained are they key points of what Jeff and I had to say in the meeting! Once that was over we headed to Burger King with Joe,Lourens and Wasima! Delicious.

We usually dedicate our Mondays to Camps Bay beach. So that's exactly what we did! Jeff and I got the 106 bus to Camps Bay which took about half an hour. We had never done that route before! We usually get taxi but we wanted to change it up! It's quite a dangerous route which goes spiralling around the mountains. We saw the result of quite a bad accident aswell where two cars had collided. Bonnets crumpled and tyres pointing inwards. Nasty stuff! We topped our tans and took in the beautiful scenery. We decided to not get an umbrella but slap on plenty of sun cream.

A really nice day!

We have a new crèche tomorrow and a new high school! Really happy about that!

All the best.

Luke