Gap Year Students

Isaac

Sunday was meant to be our first home visit to Benjamin since he went back home. However I was told on the day that Benjamin and his mother would be going to watch the ‘Comrades’ marathon on that day so we postponed the visit until next week.

On Monday I once more had the pleasure of meeting with Rejoice Ngcongo who will start a company to organise retired volunteers to mentor young workers. Alex Wallace has helped her with advice on the company and I am making a website for her. She named her company ‘Dor LeDor’ (Hebrew for ‘from generation to generation’) and I can’t help but feel I will have left a signature through this name!

We produced a small video for the website homepage of her introducing the company and the logo for the company was designed by our very own Lucky Peko. The website should be live next week.

Dor LeDor logo designed by Lucky Peko

Tuesday held another session at St Raphael’s Special School. Next week will be my penultimate one with them as term is drawing to a close here for the winter holidays.

The first half of the day was spent in the ‘Autistic unit’ as usual. As well as being in the classrooms I was asked to be in a meeting with two teachers and a parent who is finding some difficulties with his child (from the unit). He was finding it hard to toilet train his child, which is common here and I believe anywhere, in addition to generally keeping his child “in order” at home. The child will watch television when he wants, eat when he wants, sleep if he wants, hit who he wants and when his parents ask him to do something he is unlikely to ever do it. In general his parents have difficulty in keeping any control of him.

None of this is much surprising for a child with Autism and leaning disabilities whose parents have no knowledge of strategies for such children.

When we asked him a bit more it appeared that the child has little to no routine or order in the day, or night, and his diet consisting significantly of sweets and fizzy drinks was not going to help anything.

We suggested some dietary adjustments for the child and I drew him up a fairly basic and hopefully manageable night/ bedtime routine. There of course is a lot more to address but we agreed we should not overload the parent with too much all at once when he is already feeling overloaded by dealing with his child.

Wednesday was a day of meetings.

The first was with Paul and Larry who have been helping SISCO out as directors of charity Abakrestu. They sponsor the rent for SISCO’s office and came to discuss with Russel, Mjoli and myself the use of the office and centre. They were both very fair but left us with a decision to make: keep the office or keep the centre.

The facts are as follows: all of the work has been moved to the centre over the past few months and the office is rarely being used. We are running a centre with no resources; there are no paid staff, minimal food donations and no sponsor for the gas we use to cook. Mjoli and Russel sell hotdogs every night to raise the money for themselves to live and buy most of the food and gas. We may or may not even find the money to buy the building.

So, although it chocked me at the time, I suppose the decision was not a difficult one. The drop in centre has been a success for the time it has run. We will continue looking for funding for all of these things we are lacking so perhaps one day we will open again, this time with adequate resources.

The rest of Wednesday and Thursday were spent at meetings of organisations and going around the newspapers and television channels to explain our situation and advertise a media briefing at the centre on Monday that will explain what we have done there and the reason it will have to be closed. We do this in hope that the publicity may bring funders and already have two newspapers and potentially one television channel attending.