Just Don't Feed The Baboons: Week 7 weekend

Wednesday morning my class was doing English reading in pairs. We were going around the class as each pair read a paragraph or two. About halfway through the class, I signaled to three 13 year old boys to start where the last group stopped. After about 5 seconds of excruciating silence, Mr. Gobozi said to move on to the next group. We finished the activity with no other glitches and the day ended with these three kids still being illiterate.

The next day Mr. Gobozi and I decided it would be a good idea to take the three kids and work with them individually. I took them to the library and I tried to gauge where they were. I found out quite quickly that I had to start from scratch. We started with the alphabet. After about two hours they had memorized the alphabet successfully about 30% of the time. The next day, word was out. Another grade 5 teacher approached me and asked if she could give me some kids that were also struggling with reading. That afternoon there were 7 of us. But the library was being used by the missionaries so we resorted to the storage closet- no joke, we had to move all the old books and bring in the table and chairs because there was literally nowhere else to go.

I now have a real concrete task- teach these kids how to read- instead of being in the classroom aimlessly with nothing to do half of the time.

By Friday afternoon we had the alphabet down and we were moving on to their sounds and two letter words. I tried three letter words but I think I was moving too fast.

Friday evening, Will joined us for an after-dinner drink and later dropped us off at another club with live music. The band was really good but we called it an early night at around 11 o'clock.

The next morning the wind was unbelievable. There were 5-foot swells in the water and there was no way that we could do any of the things that we wanted- Table Mountain, seal swimming, or Robben Island. After scrambling through all the travel books to figure out stuff we could do inside we found some great options. We decided to go first to the Castle of Good Hope. Caine and Sammy had some business in Muizenberg in te morning so Will drove Rosie and I to the castle. The castle turned out to be a military museum and explained the Deutch and British colonizations along with the Boer War. We then met up with Sammy and Caine and went to the planetarium. We saw the 2:30 showing of, "The Pyramids and The Stars." It was pretty cool but the planetariums in the US are more technologically advanced. At times, it felt a little like a power point presentation.

I then wanted to go the the Jewish Museum of South Africa and I asked the guy at the front desk when it closed. The guy at the desk, how was Xhosa, told me it was the sabbath and that they were closed for the day.

We went to the Natural History Museum instead. We looked at all kinds of marine and land and prehistoric life that came from South Africa. The museum closed at 5 but we had to catch the train by 6 anyway because we can't take it after nightfall.

The next day, the weather was awesome. Caine and Sammy went back to their flat in Simon's Town so Rosie and I had our choice of things to do. Will suggested that we go surfing but we decided to do Robben Island. Will dropped us off at the Waterfront at around 11:00 to catch the fairy to the island. After about an hour of searching for it we found out that it was completely sold out for the entire day. I was pretty frustrated and thought the day would go to waste. We couldn't go back and do surfing and Rosie was wearing flip flops so Table Mountain was out. We decided to chill at the Waterfront for a few hours and then we went back to where the museums were. It was annoying that we spent the day inside but the museums proved to good the second day too.We went to the Jewish Museum and had planned to go to the National Gallery but ran out of time. The Jewish museum was good but Rosie wanted to see the holocaust exhibit so we left feeling depressed.

All in all it was a solid weekend but I'd like to get some of the stuff still on my list checked off as my time here is up in the air at the moment and I don't know how many weekends I'll have left here.