Community Stays

Today we went back to Share for the day. We attempted to do home visits. I was with Leyton, and two of the care workers. No one was home at the houses we went to, so we had plenty of time to talk to the care workers. We talked about their families, their likes, interests, and the challenges they face as care workers.

After dinner, we had an evening session at the Waspe's house. We did some basic agility and flexibility testing based on the Dan Waspe method: a cereal box. It was a little awkward, but really, really fun. Once that was over, we started discussing our upcoming community stays. We will leave the Village just before lunch on Friday and return at some point around lunchtime on Monday. We are all staying in Welverdiend, which is in Bushbuckridge. It is still within Mpumalanga, but is at least a two hour drive from the Village. Community stays are dependent on the families we are staying with; sometimes volunteers are housed individually, other times (normally) they are housed in pairs. For our intake, we will be staying in pairs. I am staying with Melissa, Alicia is staying with Mariah, Dave is staying with Russell, and Joe is staying with Leyton. We will find out more about the families we are staying with specifically tomorrow. We will also go shopping for basic supplies: food, soap, wash clothes, etc, and any thing we want to take to pass the time with our families. In the past, people have taken playing cards, paper and crayons or bubbles, if they are staying with young children, and balls are very popular. We have played with some sort of ball at (I believe) every community visit, from tennis balls, to soccer balls, to even a football at Siyathuthuka. Most of the children who attend the feeding points are in neighborhoods with other children who do not attend the feeding points. For this reason, Dan said that if we take balls with us, they will probably be ruined by Monday morning because the children will be so excited to play with them. As for food, we may or may not get live chickens to prepare and eat. This has been done in the past, but it is dependent on the individual community and if there is access to enough live chickens. The September intake did get live chickens because Dan knew exactly where in the community he could find them, and enough of them. Busji and Audrey are working on it; I guess we'll find out tomorrow. The additional items we decide to take help pass the time, but also help bridge the language barrier. In the community of Welverdiend, the locals predominantly speak Tsonga (Xitsonga.) Depending on if there are any adult family members, they may also understand some phrases of Siswati, as this is the predominant language within Mpumalanga. I am more apprehensive about being able to speak the language than anything else to be honest. Luckily, Mel has been to Africa before and has a better grasp of both languages than I do. Occasionally you do hear stories of volunteers on community stays, within South Africa or abroad, who could not speak to their host at all. Sophie had that experience when she was abroad. At least having a list of basic sayings allows us to have a starting point for communication. I typically haven't been sleeping more than 6 hours a night, and I know if I can get 3 I'll be fine, so I am much less concerned about the physical aspect of the stay. And let's be honest - it will be an upgrade from our boxes as homeless people, am I right?

That is the basic gist of our community stays for now. After the community stay, I should be able to take some pictures within the community to show you all. I will try to write one more post tomorrow, but will obviously be offline until Monday afternoon at the earliest.

The morning got off to a rocky start, but it has turned out to be a pretty successful day. Thanks for reading, and thanks for praying for all of us here at the Village.