Wow I haven't written a blog in a while! I thought I would give an update on what I've been up to lately. On Friday night, I went to some bar to listen to the program director's wife's brother play jazz. I ended up playing a couple games of pool with some locals, which I was nervous about at first since I'm terrible at pool, but I really enjoyed myself. I talked to some guy that looked exactly like Spencer Pratt from the Hills and another who said he was in some special forces section of the South African Navy (or so he claimed haha). My friend and I beat the navy guy and some 15-year old kid, then lost to Spencer and his father. Starting that night, I spent the whole weekend with four or five volunteers who are staying in their own house in Kommetjie (which is pronounced Kommie-kee by the way, apparently the tj makes a k sound- go figure! haha). The house is like a palace. Plus, it was nice to hang out for a few days with the other volunteers that I don't see as much. On Saturday morning, we hiked up to the top of Slangkop Mountain and stayed up there for a little while just enjoying the view and a rare few minutes of sunshine that came along as sat and rested after our hike. We just walked, but it was so steep that it didn't take long for me to break a sweat. I picked the wild flower in the picture on the walk back. Oh and on Sunday, I went out on a sailboat! So awesome. Other than that, our first day of work was today! We are working in the Masiphumelele Library with this program called Ikumva Youth. It is so much like the Upward Bound program. Basically, each of the volunteers is running one or two workshops over the next two weeks on all kinds of topics. Today, I helped run a study skills workshop. (Next week, I'm doing a workshop on blogging.) The study skills one went really well. The other volunteers that worked on it with me were really on top of their game, so it went pretty smoothly. One piece of feedback that we received though was to speak louder, more slowly and more clearly. There were 60 students in the workshop in a large room and I now know that I need to work on projecting my voice because wow, is it hard to get the attention of 60 people when you take a break or do an activity and then go to start talking again. Also, English is these students' second language and I'm still getting used to really enunciating and slowing down. In our downtime, I made some smalltalk with a few of the students and once and for all asked them how to pronounce the name of their language (Xhosa). I made them laugh with my first few tries, but I finally asked them to demonstrate in such a way that it clicked (no pun intended) and I finally got it right haha. Anyway, something else that happened today was that I met my mentee (yay!). Each Worldteach volunteers gets paired with a Grade 12 student to guide them through applying for university, studying for classes, figuring out what they want for a career, working on resumes, etc. or just to talk about life. I'm excited. :)
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