The Cross-Cultural Solutions home base (top picture) in the Rosebank section of Cape Town was built in the late 1800s (as a farmhouse) and is large and airy with high ceilings! I am really psyched this time because, somehow, I have a room all to myself! We get our meals here and they serve a variety of cuisines, some heavily spiced and others stewed and potted. Beef, lamb, chicken, etc., always a fresh salad, good vegetables, no desserts. And they cater to special requests such as vegetarian or low salt.
Breakfast is at 7 A.M. and we are in the vans by 7:45. Even though my trip to the township of Athlone should only take about 15 minutes, I am in the van for an hour each morning because we must first head into the downtown area (before the traffic builds up) to drop off volunteers who work at refugee centers and job training centers. Next we drop off a volunteer at Groote Schuur Hospital (where the world's first heart transplant was done in the 1960s - remember? - I'm the only one in this group who does!). Then we head out to the township areas to drop off the orphanage and day-care folks. Finally, Peter and I are delivered to Blossom Street Primary School. Oh, for those days in Tanzania when I could walk the pot-holed, red dirt roads to Mwereni Primary. and back.
Blossom Street is a well-run school carefully overseen by Mr. Davids who has been principal there (first a teacher) for many years, and his mostly-experienced staff. I am working with a Mrs. Joan Abrahams, who is about my age, rather a strict disciplinarian with a very warm heart. She has almost 35 students - not that large a class by African standards - and teaches the reading and social studies for her class and the other fifth grade class. Since it is still the beginning of the school year here, I spent the first few days assessing the reading abilities of all the fifth graders and am now happily taking them in small groups to another room for instruction every day. They are delightful, well-behaved children and I am enjoying every moment. Mrs. Abrahams and I are getting along very well. Her daughter (along with her grandsons) have been living in New York for the past several years, working on a doctorate at Columbia and one of the first stories she told me was how she (Joan) was subjected to racial profiling in a shop on a visit to her daighter in New York and how totally unexpected and disappointing that was for her. She didn't expect that to happen in the USA after she had suffered so much discrimination in SA over the years. Made me feel awful!
Blossom Street Primary is organized around an interior open courtyard, typical of many African schools, and is much better supplied than Mwereni in Tanzania. There are books, maps, chalk, erasers, posters on the walls, staplers, scissors, a copy machine in the office and all kinds of other things I never saw in Tanzania. Yet the desks are the same double wooden benches and the children labor in the same kind of large, thin, narrowly-ruled composition books you just don't find in the U.S. Blossom has the feel of a 1950s NYC public school; Mwereni felt more turn of the (20th) Century.
More next time...
From the pics...doesn't look all that different from USA schools.....nice and clean.
ReplyDeleteHappy you have your own room......that is special!