Saturday?
Trip Start
Feb 05, 2007
1
10
25
Trip End
Apr 28, 2007
Barberton,
South Africa
Saturday, February 24, 2007
I don't think that I will need to open things up for donating to the after school activities after all because I am planning on just fund raising locally and setting up pay pal sounds like a lot of work on these slow computers. But I am excited to do some other volunteer work and continue to meet different people in the location.
I have begun to really enjoy working in the Disabled Center. I go there for two hours everyday once the kids are out playing I leave and walk myself the four or five blocks to the Disabled Center. The first time I walked myself there alone I felt as though I had conquered the world, but now it's just the daily routine. I have started to stop walking as quickly as we do at home, the walking pace here is so much slower and in this heat I suppose it makes sense. So I get to the Disabled Center, and everyone sort of wakes up, some people continue to work on the sewing projects they have going. The sewing projects aren't isn't just for entertainment for them, some of them produce rather complicated pieces. everyone get out there notebooks and I make my rounds around the table giving people questions to answer in English and math problems. They like to teach them days of the week, months of the year, names of their body parts and so on. I think all the people there know these things in their own language, it's more of the fact most of them weren't allowed in the regular schools because there isn't the resources to deal with their slower learning ability. So, it's a matter of teaching them a little English.
I know my mom will laugh thinking about me helping other people learn English with severe learning disabilities, since I was such a slow learner and I know my mind still doesn't read or write phonetically. So here I am sitting in South Africa with Gloria trying to sound out the word "chin" with her, she wrote "chen", and I'm like- close enoguh, i know what you mean, or the work "cheek" and I am trying to figure out if you spell it cheek or cheak. I also have little confidence with the word wednesday, i had to look in some other people's notebooks to verify the spelling, because i wrote it wenesday. So, while I might be spelling the words wrong for them, and I have no clue how to explain why we spell the way we do, I feel that I am qualified only in that I have some patience to understand a little bit why it can be a struggle to learn to read and write. It makes perfect sense to me that writing English is confusing and unpredictable.
I have also been able to teach Bonginkosi, the def man, how to to count past ten. I think he almost has the whole pattern up to 100 now. It only took a couple says, and it's clear to me that he is a capable man of understanding what he is taught. I was asking why it was that he couldn't count or understand sign language like the other def person at the center. I have been told that it wasn't until recently that he has been able to leave his home, I guess his family kept him always inside. He is fun to work with because he learns so quickly, and I am trying to move him from counting circles on paper to understanding the symbols and just doing math.
I am fairly certain that the skills these people are learning at the center will not get them a job anywhere, since there is already high unemployment with people who have finished more school than them. So while I am not transforming their lives with these skills I know that they gain a lot of satisfaction when they learn something new. It seems that there just isn't the resources here to be spent on people who think differently or learn slower. There were several moments this week when Binginkosi was able to count past ten and get all the answers right, where I could tell he was so happy and proud that he was able to figure out what I was trying to teach him.
I might be eating chicken feet today with Binki if her friend is around because she wanted to meet me, and then on Sunday I will be going to church again. And my time is again out.
