Tough Week Actually Doing Homework.

It is now Thursday and I want to apologize for not writing as often as I should. I have been mentioning how much reading I have been doing, and the paper I had to write was due today. So now that it is off my shoulders I can resume my normal postings and keep you all updated on my crazy life! I’ll start with Monday although my week has been a little on the boring side since I have actually been doing school work. I basically woke up and went straight to class on my bike. After class I came straight home to work on my paper while taking some breaks to lay by the pool and sunbathe. I found out that day though a little about the weather in South Africa. Around mid April the weather will change and become a lot cooler with more wind and rain because it is their winter here and it will remain like that until I leave. See ya later sun-kissed skin! I was basically confined to my room the rest of the night and got so much accomplished on my paper and called it a night. Tuesday was about the same kind of day. I woke up semi early and ran with Becca through the fog, which was really dense that morning and you could hear the fog horn in the distance. Once back, I planned to get ready and head to class. I laid down to close my eyes for a few when I hear a knock at my door. It is our landlord and he tells me to empty my fridge because we are getting a new one. So since he sounded like it was urgent, I hurried to get everything out figuring that someone would come right away and replace it. But let’s be real. This is South Africa. The new fridge came, and it was placed in my room, right in the middle. At this point I was already not going to be able to make it to class and I couldn’t leave all our food out to spoil while I was gone, so I stayed back and slid the fridge out of the kitchen and placed the new one in its place, all with the help of Chelsea of course. The new fridge is huge and we have so much room, almost enough to satisfy my usual milk intake (which is usually about 5 liters a week). I stayed in again that night and put the finishing touches on my paper so that it would be ready to print the next morning. It was then Wednesday and I had volunteering at 215, so I hurried down to the PicknPay to print my paper because it costs less there than it does on campus (2 rand a page). It was a very simple process, but I did write 14 pages so my total was 28 rand, which is about 4 dollars. The only bad part about this is that if I made a mistake, which I later did find in my paper, there was no way to fix it unless I took it back and reprinted it for another 28 rand. Instead, I just crossed out my mistake with a sharpie so that I could save myself some money and time. Not to mention with the wind yesterday it took Becca and I about 4 or 5 minutes to get to the store on our bikes, but about 20 minutes to get home. It is basically impossible to ride your bike here when the winds are that bad. I have never felt such a burn in my legs from biking before and was literally exhausted when we got back. We ate lunch upon our return and then it was time to head to service learning. We drove a slightly different way to Masifunde, I am assuming so that we would miss some of the traffic from the main road, and we passed by a townships with houses that looked as if they were able to fall over. There was garbage everywhere, but I can’t recall actually seeing anyone so I wasn’t sure if the area was deserted, but everyone was probably inside because it was so windy. Once we got to homework club we started right away as usual. Today I had Seme (she has a longer name, but I can’t spell it) to work with and working with her is a challenge for me. She is in grade 3 and I am not sure how old, but she always asks questions and expects me to just tell her the answer. If I don’t tell her she will just reply “I don’t know” or “I can’t do it”. I see it as my job to help her realize that she can and give her a lot of praise when she spells a word right or has the right answer. I tried to relate to her by saying, you try to spell the word garbage as best you can, and I’ll try to spell the same word in Xhosa (because I don’t know a single Xhosa word) so we both tried and helped each other get the right answer. We also went through the numbers, which she was very good at and I even challenged her with some larger numbers like in the hundred thousands and millions! She did great and was so happy when she said the number right! I love to see her happy because she has the prettiest smile. I didn’t have Jessica today because I got done with Seme too late. I had Phumlelade (which is probably not how you spell his name) and he was very slow to start his work. He had to gather a ruler, glue, a blue pen because he had forgotten his stationary. Once we got to work he was very productive and really enjoyed telling me the right answers to his homework. I would like to continue to work with him because he has a lot of talent, but I don’t think he is very motivated because he answered almost all his homework questions correctly, it just took awhile for us to get started because of other distractions. I learned today that even though it might not seem like a big deal, using words like “good job” or “that’s great” are really uplifting to kids who don’t really understand their homework. I can’t wait to go back next week! It is such a nice outlet from my own studies to see these kids succeed. I was so tired once we got home that I relaxed for awhile, cooked a nice dinner of chicken and rice and made rice krispies with the girls, which were pink because some of the marshmallows were pink for Valentines Day when I got them. They were gone within minutes, but soooo delicious! I was up early this morning, 545am, to go running with Becca and Coleen joined us today. We were back by 7 so that I could make it to my 8am class which I could not miss because I had to turn my paper in. My Xhosa class which is directly after my first class was very interesting today. We were learning about religion in the Xhosa culture and our teacher was saying the most extreme things like “everyone here has practice witchcraft, am I right” and the class basically exploded into a long discussion about everything from why people put flowers on graves to when you wish someone ill that is considered witchcraft. This teacher wouldn’t listen to what anyone had to say so it was complete chaos. We ended by going over somethings for our test next week, which hopefully will be relatively easy because I feel as if we haven’t learned a single thing in that class yet. Now I am sitting in the library and am awaiting Chelsea to get done with class so that we can head to Greenacres, which is like a mall downtown, because we want to look for some stuff that you can’t buy at the local PicknPay or Spar (both like grocery stores). Tonight is also Ladies Night so we will be going out dancing as usual, but also celebrating Helmut’s birthday (from Austria) with a braai and then going out. It is a little rainy and gloomy today, but usually it is like that in the morning and clears up as the day goes on. I always find that I am freezing on the way to class so that I dress warm, but once I am out of my first class it is scalding hot and I am sweating. Atleast it isn’t as windy! Until tomorrow!