Pendla

I don’t think that I’ve said anything about my volunteering in a while L It’s going great there, really fun and I feel a lot better about my experience since I’m in this new classroom. The third graders are so cute and so fun to work with in the classroom. They like to follow us around at recess too. We’ve been teaching one or two lessons a week and reading to the kids a lot more. We’ve also been meeting with our teacher, Nomatemba during break time to discuss the school’s needs and such. Before we came here, we raised a lot of money from events on campus so we just need to decide what to do with it. First, we are fulfilling the requests of the principal to pay the salary of the gardener and a maintenance worker. They have a vegetable garden that is used to supply lunches to students who don’t bring something from home. Paying these salaries helps the school, but it also helps two families in the community as the two workers have children. To put things into perspective, the yearly salary that we are paying these people for a full time job is R7,200 or $720. Things do cost less here, but $720 is a very meager salary to support a family on. It is what they requested though and we can’t spend all of our money on just those requests. We also are buying copying paper for the school and soap for the bathrooms. Depending on how much we have leftover after that, we will buy chairs for the classroom or more school supplies for the children. We also have money allocated in our program budge to host a family night for the entire school. Last year, the group served dinner to over 1000 people. We plan to do that and we will also supply some sort of gift to every student. It will be as simple as a pencil or a toothbrush, but they’ll have fun. There is a committee that is starting to plan this event and the date is already set for our last day of volunteering and my birthday, May 12th!

I am on a different committee to plan a Hygiene Day that will go along with the purchase of the soap. The kids need to be taught about germs and how to keep themselves clean. So we’ll have a morning devoted to this. The other girl on the trip who is an education major and myself are in charge of planning it. Except for having to add another thing on to my list of assignments, I’m excited to plan it.

I also got some money from a teacher at my mom’s school who donated to buy some school supplies for the children here. After talking to Nomatemba about what the class needs and what the students need, I decided to spend the money on making a reading corner for the kids. I’m really excited about this because Nomatemba does value reading a lot and the kids love it too! (I’ve begun to read to them at recess and always get a crowd around me). I’m going to get a big rug and some big pillows to put in one corner of the room so that they will be able to enjoy reading in their classroom. The school has a nice library that was paid for by a different group of CSB/SJU students about 10 years ago. I might also make some posters on how to take care of books, or how to read with a partner and things like that. I want to give this to them sooner rather than later so that I can help implement its usage in the classroom.

I am already getting sad thinking about having to leave Pendla. I missed them when I was gone for the 3 weeks for spring break! Being with them has been a great experience and one of the best aspects of my time here.