Netball

I have been quite busy lately and haven't had a chance to write a post about my attempt to introduce more extracurricular activities into my school through netball. I've been outside with the girls at lunch time playing netball everyday for the last week and a bit, with some mixed results.

Namedi actually has a girls netball time, although I haven't seen the girls playing without me. On our first day, we set up a half court game and established that the girls were a good bit better at netball than I am, although they were rather sweetly trying to teach me how to shoot. Unsurprisingly, I'm still a hopeless case.

Since then, I've always had a couple of girls wanting to play at lunch time, but attendance has been fairly low. I attempted to introduce mixed netball, but the boys got so rough, that after a girl was pushed face first into the concrete floor, the boys were banned from netball for good.

We have also had issues with the fact that Zanele, who is captain of netball gives the Grade 8 girls a terrible time for taking breaks for lunch and has banned two of them for good. I tried to see both sides of their argument and draw them to a compromise, but I don't really think it worked. Since we're now in our last week, there was not much I could do, since anything I say now will be ignored when I leave on Friday, and if anything it will be worse for the girls if I do fight Zanele over it. It was rather pitiful though, particularly when they told me that, "We don't want Zanele anyway, we want you miss."

My Grade 8 friend - Namedi's only camera shy student!

I had a rather sweeter moment today when the kids from the primary school next door were watching me playing netball with Lebo and one of the Grade 8 girls, eventually some of my older kids on our side of the fence called me over to say hi to them, and tell me how they were really excited because there was a white woman playing with the children.

To sum up, my netball experience hasn't been a huge success. However, it has been quite touching how the kids have worked hard to integrate me into their games, and the chance to get to talk to some of the younger girls has been really nice.