Volunteering in the Elephant & Barrel

We did forget one very important detail...

Paul's place is well-secured (so no worries Mom & Dad!) and has an alarm system. The best part is though, it is basically a car alarm for a house. It has a keypad with a red button, and when the alarm is activated the roof beeps once. Deactivate it beeps twice. Makes us giggle everytime.

SO, on to the last day and a half. Yesterday we shadowed some classes to see where we could be of help. The classes consisted of standard subjects as well as Business Economics & Life Orientation which was interesting. Most of the teachers were wonderful but there was definitely a difference in the teaching style. For the most part the kids were very well-behaved with little oversight but the teachers do not demand much from the students and do not work one-on-one with them much. It is definitely more up to the students to get what they can out of the classes than we are used to. After school yesterday, we went to the local Hospice with some of the kids to work on an art program. A local artist and her assistant work with them once a week but since the new school now has an art room they are phasing out this school to replace it with more needy ones. This school does not have an art teacher yet though, so they asked us to put together a class while we are here. I purchased supplies today and we will be teaching the kids tomorrow! After the art class we headed to Elephant & Barrel, the one pub in town. Nicole decided to make it her personal goal to become known by the town as ''those Americans,'' which should be started by making friends at the Pub. We started off there with our usual card games of War and Spit but once we got sick of those we asked our waiter to teach us another game. He brought another waiter who was off-shift out to teach us Crazy 8's and played with him for awhile. He pointed out the different people from the town who kept wandering into the Pub and let us in on some of the town gossip. Doug from Kusasa eventually joined us and introduced us to most of the people there... we are well on our way to becoming known here! Everyone really does know everyone here, it's crazy. We ended the night by talking to Doug's brother-in-law / the bookshop owner next to the pub who is from Zimbabwe about the troubles there. He was also a fly-fisher in Santiago, Chile for awhile so I'm going to see if Marc knows him? I'll keep you Whittakers posted.

Today was incredible. Before I talk about it, here's a little background. The difference between the culture here is white, coloured and black and it is open what the difference of lifestyle is. Black people are of Xhosa descent and had no rights during Apartheid so they make up most of the townships. Coloured means of mixed race and, according to Doug, are the descendents of Dutch sailors who arrived and said ''where's the nearest woman?'' They are Afrikaaner so they had slightly more rights under apartheid but still live in the townships or a little outside. They have a separate school than Xhosa because they speak Afrikaans rather than Xhosa. White people are the Dutch descendents or mostly English people (or white foreigners from local countries). I apologize if this is very over-simplfied, it's just the way things have been explained to us.

We have been helping at the Xhosa school so we started there this morning and read a book with a class then played Hangman to reinforce their English. During a break some kids asked us to play Netball with them which is a variation of American basketball, then we headed to the Afrikaaner school to help. Doug had been promising them world-renowned soccer coaches so Nicole played with some of the girls and then learned Netball. She said they were playing fiercer than the girls did in college because they were fearless and would charge her fullspeed with no shoes. I read to another class with Doug and they sang the song ''Mighty Jungle'' for me. It was interesting seeing the difference between the 2 schools, the Afrikaaner one is much older and the kids are much more outgoing. The Xhosa culture teaches kids to never look elders in the eye so they are much more shy.

We planned on meeting up with our friends from Elephant & Barrel at 5pm tonight to play Crazy 8's so that's our plan for the evening and we pick Bethy up with Sintu from Kusasa tomorrow morning! We'll write more with her once she arrives.