Gap Year Students

Isaac

First thing this morning I had a meeting with Larry of the AbaKrestu Foundation. His foundation is a Christian charity that has a number of projects of its own but they too see something special in SISCO, the street kids organisation. They have given SISCO a lot of support in recent months, for example, finding sponsors for their ID campaigns and helping them find their building along with the food and resources after the storms here. They have a lot of expertise and support to offer as a well established charity to SISCO as an organisation really still in its infancy. They offer this very well.

I came away with a large list of things to do in order to help SISCO, mostly in the areas of producing accounts and other documents for them as well as training the workers themselves to do these jobs once I’m gone. The majority of the funding and support is coming to an end for SISCO as the donors of the food and the building only agreed to help with the crisis after the storms. They now need these documents if they hope to get any more funding. They will almost definitely not be able to keep the centre.

I have no skills in producing such documents or in the filing that they need to do but I agreed to do my best.

We parted on a positive note. All of the work we do is chipping slowly away at South Africa’s Berlin Wall. This is especially true of the work of Larry, Russel and all the other great people we stand with here in the Rainbow Nation.

In the afternoon I went with Nombulelo, head of special education for the district, to St Raphael Special School in Montclair. The school is predominantly for learners with Cerebral Palsy although they have a very good ‘Autistic unit’ consisting of fifty-six learners.

My mother, Jane, gave two training sessions here last week when she was over: one was for professionals on the topic of Autism and the other was a workshop for parents of children with Autism. The attendees of both of the sessions were predominantly from St Raphael. We can see that they will be a great school to work with.

The meeting was with the principal, depute principal and educators from the Autistic unit. They are very keen to have me in their class(es) once a week until the end of term in June, which is very flattering as well as exciting. I will also continue the parent workshops there once a week.

The education system in South Africa needs a lot of revamp on the whole and Nombulelo will be a great agent for the change it needs.