This past week has been absolutely
packed. I worked my first three days at Christel House, listened to a live jazz
jam, went surfing at Muizenberg Beach, visited Two Oceans Aquarium, hiked
Lion’s Head, and had a lovely birthday dinner for one of our housemates at the
Waterfront. For this week’s blog post, I want to focus on my experience thus
far at Christel House.
Christel House is a global charity
that works to break the cycle of poverty by providing quality education to
impoverished kids across the globe. Chirstel House South Africa is home to
about 700 kids ranging from kindergarten to grade 12. Last year, they had a
100% matriculation pass rate, which is absolutely incredible compared to the
pass rate of other schools in similar areas which tend to be underfunded have
high drop-out rates.
Christel House students go through
an intense application process in order to be granted admission to the school
which includes an interview and a home check. Christel House does this to
ensure that students will be able to adjust to life at school, have a support
system back at home, and are deserving of the scholarship, which is either
partial or full dependent on need.
The students I have had the pleasure
of getting to know are bright, energetic, and optimistic kids excited about
their futures. The younger children are some of the cutest, happiest, most
enthusiastic kids I have ever met. Walking around outside and through the
hallway, I am swarmed with hugs and smiles and greetings of “Miss! Miss! Hello,
Miss!” I can’t help but smile and laugh at how happy the little kids are to see
me, even if I have to peel them off me.
The first two days at my internship
I was able to work in the library with Ms. Celeste. I met a wide range of
students in my first two days because every grade goes to the library at some
point during the week. I sang songs with first graders, read a story to third
graders, and chatted with a wonderful eleventh grader named Lauren. She told me
her plans for her future – she can’t decide between a career as a song engineer
or a more stable job in journalism – and about her favorite classes at school.
She loves history, and she told me she was learning about South African
history, the Haitian Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the French
Revolution, which she finds especially inspiring.
On Tuesday in the library I was
given the responsibility of running the chess club during lunch break. I
expected it to be pretty simple, just teach some quiet kids the rules of chess
and watch students play each other. However, Ms. Celeste’s prediction that
chess was going to be crazy that day turned out to be spot on. About 20 kids
rushed into the library all at once. Half needed to be taught how to play, and
the other half demanded that I play a game with them. I managed to juggle these
two tasks relatively well, and had a really great time. I wound up teaching
several students the specific movements of pieces while playing a heated match
that was me versus three students. Even though it was tough, it is so rewarding
to see how happy you can make a child just by listening to them, chatting with
them, and joking around with them. Hopefully I will be able to run chess club
every Tuesday.
On Wednesday I was placed in Ms
Lauren’s kindergarten class. Here, kindergarten is called grade R. The students
are 5 or 6 years old, and in addition to going to school for the first time and
being in a brand new environment, they are learning the English language for
the first time. Classrooms have a teacher and a translator to help with this
process, and students learn the language at very different rates. We sang songs
about the days of the week, and learned about feelings, which was very cute. We
were also joined that day by a fifth grade student named Samkelo who was
forbidden from joining his classmates on a school field trip that day because
of bad behavior. He said it was because he was “back-chatting” which means he
was talking back to his teacher. He was so incredibly upset in the morning that
he had to be dragged into our classroom. He wouldn’t look at Ms Lauren,
especially when she threatened him with a book report. When I took him to the
library to find a book, he was pleased to discover it was locked, and our walk
back to the classroom was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Samkelo was
hilarious, and I can definitely see how backchatting resulted in him losing his
field trip privileges. He helped me label and sort supplies for the grade R
children, and we talked about what books he likes to read, his teachers at
school, and played with classroom toys while the grade Rs took a nap. In the
end I was very happy that we got to enjoy Samkelo’s company for the day, and I
hope I run into him during my next couple months at Christel House.
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