Sha-Sha and Charlie

After school today, five of us went back to Kliptown to help kids there with homework. We split off into different buildings, so as to work with as many kids as possible. Since no one was around in my building, I ended up having a fantastic afternoon playing with Sha-Sha and some of the other kids.

Sha-Sha

Sha-Sha is a three year old orphan who lives at SKY, the other kids adore her and love to play with her and carry her around but when we first arrived today, they were fighting over who got to hold her and I could see she was getting quite upset, so I took her and sat with her for a little while. When we went inside to discuss our plan for the day - helping kids with homework as best we could, Sha-Sha came with me and sat on my lap playing with my watch. The house I was supposed to be working with was deserted so I ended up sitting outside with Sha-Sha for about 45 minutes. We had a lovely time playing with my watch and then my camera, taking pictures of the dogs and other things around us, then I was showing her how you can use the zoom, and we'd zoomed in on a group of older kids across the yard and Sha-Sha, who hadn't said a word so far, suddenly started telling me all about who they were and how they were her friends. We'd all assumed she couldn't speak English, if she could speak at all, but actually she was obviously just reserving speaking for when she felt we'd earned it.

Towards the end, we were joined by a whole group of other kids, who came along to see what we were up to and to join in the fun. After watching the second hand on my watch go round and shouting out the numbers in awe along with two five year old boys, I finally had someone come to me for Maths help. Charlie is a 12 year old boy, who loves Maths, and who also has a fantastic singing voice (he sung for us last time we were at SKY) and we had a fun half hour working out 10s, 100s and 1000s using imaginary building blocks, as well as learning tricks for how to do your 9 times table. I also worked with a girl called Nellie (I think, it is probably spelled completely differently) who was a few years older and was trying to write an essay on the consequences of irresponsible sexual behavior. As usual, the SKY kids are absolutely amazing, they seem to be way above the usual level for kids their age and are so full of happiness and positivity that it just radiates out of them.

Charlie

Hopefully we'll be going back tomorrow, in the mean time I'm going to try and get a couple of photos online as my attempt to make my 3Gig of internet last all trip has failed and I am going to have to buy another batch anyway.