Too Little, Too Late.

Yesterday, we received an email from the Warwick in Africa team about behavior management within the classroom, it contained two power point presentations about effective classroom control, positive reinforcement and how to be an assertive teacher.

I have to be honest - too little, too late.

As tomorrow is Women's Day schools will be closed for the day, and of course we couldn't possibly go to school on Friday after having Thursday off. As a result, we're effectively half way through our time in Africa now. Taking into consideration that the majority of us are not trained teachers, and have had very little teaching experience, waiting until half way through the programme to give us any advice on this front is slightly ridiculous. Particularly since the moment for establishing ground rules has been and gone.

In a lot of ways I feel our preparation was inadequate for the experience of traveling to Africa. We weren't given preparation for how to deal with so many of the issues that are key out here. Dealing with naughty children being a classic example. Teaching is hard work, you don't just waltz into a classroom and rattle off a lesson. If that were the case, South Africa wouldn't need us in its schools.

Then there are all the social issues, essentially we were warned not to delve too deeply and be aware that there may be major issues going on with the kids at home. No one told Steph how to respond to the essay from one of her Year 10's about how she was raped by a teacher. We had no advice on how to respond to the fact that half our kids are on drugs, or in gangs. What to say when the kids lashed out at one of us for being white.

Apartheid has left huge scars on South Africa. I was reading an article earlier about a group of black men who murdered the family they were working for, including the eight year old child who witnessed his parents murder. One of the comments was that they could not blame Apartheid for the crimes since the men were only babies when Apartheid ended. How ridiculous. We can't just wipe out the country's history and pretend it's all fine.

The statistics on rape out here have truly horrified me, in Soweto girls are more likely to be raped than to finish school. Every 17 seconds a girl in South Africa is raped. A third of men admit to having been involved in gang rape. Corrective rapes to "cure" lesbianism are popular. And as if all of that wasn't bad enough, there's a common belief that the cure for AIDs is to rape a virgin - and how will you make sure that the girl is a virgin? Choose one that is only a few months old.

I had heard of the issue of child rape as a perceived cure for HIV and AIDs before coming to Africa, but there hasn't been much evidence of it in the western media for the last decade. Naively, I assumed that this might mean that the issue was being resolved. Actually, all this means is that in our usual fickle way, we got bored and moved on to the next celebrity scandal. The issue is as prevalent as it always has been.

Honestly, I am feeling extremely resentful of how little support or preparation we were given for the actual problems we would be facing on a daily basis.

The Most Lovely Woman Ever

I am dedicating this post to the lady who cleans the building in the guest house that I am staying in. Very sadly, I don't actually know her name. Regardless, she is amazing. Not only does she put up with my constant mess and make my bed for me on a daily basis, as well as having given me double rations of milk for tea - no, she went way above and beyond the call of duty and, having noticed the pile of laundry I've been collecting at the bottom of my wardrobe, she waited until the boss wasn't looking and snuck it downstairs to wash it for me, since she knows that the prices the guesthouse charges are ridiculous and we have to take most of our laundry to a laundromat in town.

I am actually beyond touched by this, aside from the fact that I desperately needed to laundry, it was such an unexpected gesture of kindness and she is my absolutely favorite person ever.

Soweto in the Snow

Yesterday our teachers were complaining that since we got to Africa the weather has been getting colder. Today has been icily cold, I'm been rushing my kids into classrooms and yelling for the doors to be closed quickly all day. When you have no insulation and no central heating, you really can't afford to have cold winds blowing in. At lunch time, it started to snow, the kids were suitably distracted all afternoon. After much begging, I agreed to postpone the test my Grade 11s were supposed to be sitting, on the grounds of, "It's too cold to write without shaking".

Spent the afternoon doing very ad-hock lessons, trying to tie up loose ends and doing consolidation work, as well as discussing why we can't get any colder than 0 kelvin, how there's not much snow in England, my awful pronunciation of the African language and the fact that, no, I don't have any children.

I'm am a bit worried about my kids as about 90% of them don't have coats, and I'm fairly certain almost none of them have warm homes to go back to tonight...

Cape Town

Way back in our first week, Max, Vijay, Sarah, Mathilde and I decided that since this weekend we had no plans we would take a spontaneous trip to Cape Town. Despite my moment of "This was a completely mad idea, what were we thinking?" it was a completely fantastic trip.

We got up at 5am on Saturday morning to take a 7am flight to Cape Town. Once out there we picked up our rental car, ready for Sarah to spend all weekend driving us all over the place. As we landed it was miserable and grey, with the odd bit of rain. Imagine British summer and you've just about got it. By some amazing stroke of luck as we set off to drive down the peninsula, the weather started to clear. We made a handful of stops at seaside towns on our way down.

The first big stop was at Boulder's Coastal Park, the nature reserve for African Penguins. Despite Vijay's complaints that they are really quite boring, they are quite cute. And walking along the paths spotting their nests in the undergrowth is quite cool. That said - baby penguins are exceedingly ugly.

We went on to drive down to Cape Point, before riding up on the funicular to get to the light house - interestingly this is completely useless as it fails to actually light up the sea if the weather is anything less than clear. Still pretty beautiful up there though, with a view of white beaches, deep blue water and the beautiful nature reserve on the headland. On our way back up the peninsula, we drove through a group of baboons hanging around by the road, including some babies. They're really quite cute from inside a car, but apparently they're extremely vicious and have been known to literally tear apart cars.

After a quick stop at the ostrich farm, we made our way up the west side of the peninsula, including an amazing twisty cliffside road with absolutely fantastic views from which we watched the sunset (admittedly it was a bit cloudy at that point, still quite beautiful though).

We then headed back to Kommetjie, the seaside town where my old boarding house parents Patrick and Terri Minny live. The Minnys made us an absolutely amazing dinner including a grilled snook, boerwurst, roast chicken a cake for dessert and a lot of delicious South African wine. It was really lovely to catch up, as I probably haven't seen either of them in at least three years. We could not have had a nicer end to our evening than amazing company and dinner on a veranda which was literally on the beach.

After an overnight stay in a dorm in a backpacker's in Cape Town (including Max and Vijay's fear of falling off the top bunk being so bad that Sarah and I had to swap beds with them, as well as a lot of music and general noise from upstairs) we headed out into Cape Town for the morning. Cape Town couldn't be more different from Johannesburg, it is full of colonial architecture, tourists and, frankly, white people. Many Africans complain that Cape Town isn't actually an African city, and I can see this argument. It reminded me of many of the European cities I've been to, particularly in Italy, more than it made me feel like I was in Africa. Despite this, it is a very beautiful city and the waterfront is lovely. Not to mention all the smaller towns surrounding it. After searching in vain for a flea market near the football stadium, and wondering about the precise meaning of the sign which pointed left, right and straight ahead for the stadium, we made our way to Green Market Square, where Mathilde finally bought her coveted crocodile skin handbag.

As it had been a rather cloudy morning and the mountains were shrouded in mist we were having doubts about the feasibility of climbing Lion's Head Mountain. Table Top Mountain is the highest peak in Cape Town, but the cable car to the top was closed, and besides the clouds up there never cleared. We drove up Signal Hill, another sub peak of Table Top, which was totally misty. Before parking at the bottom of Lion's Head and starting our walk up. In terms of the weather - again we couldn't have been luckier; as we went up, the sun came out and by the time we reached the peak it was glorious. The clouds which began to gather on our descent, and the rain in the evening only served to remind us how lucky we'd been.

I'm going to be honest - I am genuinely so proud of myself for getting to the top of that mountain. It's a "moderately hard" walk, so you spend a good bit of it walking along ledges with steep drops to your side and scrambling up rocks. I did chicken out of climbing up the steep rock face using a chain at one point and went the long way round on the recommended route. I had massive vertigo, not to mention exhaustion by the time I got to the top, but the views were completely fantastic. Expect some extremely sexy photos of me bright red and sweaty on the top!

We finished our trip with dinner on the seafront at Camps Bay, watching the sunset and drinking cocktails to kill time before our flight back.

All in all, it was a fantastic trip with some really lovely people.

Hitler's Granddaughter

Today was not a good day.

I don't know what happened, my lesson with 11F wasn't great but we plodded through the material, but at the end, something just went horribly wrong and the kids decided that, due to the fact I can speak German, I must be related to Hitler. Followed by the suggestion that I should learn Afrikaans, "because that's what all the whites speak to us". Not to mention a barrage of malicious jokes in various African language aimed in my direction.

I tried to keep my act together, and not make a big scene about it but it really hurt. Personally, I have never experienced the hilarious remarks about my Austrian background implying I'm a Nazi, but I know my sister has had this while living in Italy and it's painful at the best of times. Aside from the personal insult and injury through hearing this. I feel like I've lost something major. Before this point I had complaints about the school, the teachers, the slowness with which the kids work - but I didn't have a bad word to say about the children themselves. I've lost that. And it hurts.