Gap Year Students

Isaac

On Saturday night I introduced my Dad to ‘bunny chow’. For all those who don’t know, bunny chow is a loaf of bread torn open and stuffed with curry; a classic South African dish in all senses.

The arrival of Sunday signaled that it was back to work. We went to meet at SISCO in the morning. The original plan was to first meet with Mjoli, SISCO director, and then to go with Abdul for a home visit to Benjamin. When we arrived, they said they were just popping out for twenty minutes. As an afterthought they asked if we would like to come with them.

The ‘popping out’ turned out to be a long and important meeting with the pastor and stakeholders of a local church situated just off Point Road. They have been having difficulty with street children and adults coming onto the property since they had been forced to take the barbed wire down. The situation had worsened recently when the church was actually broken into and vandalised in part. They have been trying to deal with the issue themselves as a church but they now are in touch with SISCO who will work with the church and the youth for a positive solution.

The rest of Sunday and Monday was spent between Durban and Umlazi filming and editing the first of the Jabulani Stories, a series of video autobiographies of our South African friends. The first is Siza’s story, and this can be viewed on the website homepage: www.jabulaniproject.co.uk

Tuesday was my first day working at St Raphael’s Special School. The first half of the day would be working in the classes themselves and the second half would be leading a workshop for parents of children with Autism.

It is a school for children with cerebral palsy and it has an ‘Autistic unit’; I was working in the Autistic unit. This was the first of seven Tuesday sessions and so it was spent doing a bit in each of the three classes and getting an idea of the unit. There were a fair few similarities between St Raphael’s and the school I had worked in as a learning assistant back in Scotland. However as expected one of the main differences was the staff:pupil ratios – in Scotland we aim to get a 4:6 ratio whereas here they are lucky if they can afford 1:5. I met with the teachers at the end of the day and we discussed what we could practically achieve in the coming six sessions. We settled on mostly drawing up ‘challenging behaviour plans’ for specific pupils whilst helping introduce, on a very small scale, an element of ‘total communication’ in the classrooms.

The parent workshop was also a fair success. The topic was sleep; the first of two workshops we will run on the topic. It was a decent turnout and it seemed like a good response. I’m very happy with how it went as it was my first endeavour of the kind.

Wednesday and Thursday were taken up by various meetings as well as visiting Lucky in Burlington to investigate his Jabulani Story.

Today, though, was very interesting. We happened to see in a newspaper that F W de Klerk, former president, Apartheid dismantler and, with Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize winner, was in town and speaking so we went to see him. It was an incredible opportunity and a great address from a remarkable man.

Lastly I met with a number of the staff members at the Jewish School about the girl I came in to observe a week or two back. People back home gave me a lot of help on how to conduct assessments on children in the classroom and the teachers I met with were very happy with the feedback on the girl and we went away having established there was a lot we can take forward.