Children, Elders & Slightly bonkers!

One of the duties of the volunteers on the photography project is to prepare and deliver two lessons for the students at a local school.  As I have arrived in week three of four, my group was already well underway with planning their lesson for this week.  I have five photographers, a German girl, an Italian girl, an American lady, and a married couple from Israel. One of the things I love about volunteering is the huge variety of people I meet – they come from all over the world and are all different ages. My group this week are aged from 19 – 66 🙂
We drove for 30 minutes to the school, and as soon as we entered the classroom the students got busy arranging themselves into groups so that they could all view the laptops that we had brought.  The children speak basic English but we had an interpreter with us and I was really impressed at their politeness and how well behaved they were.  When they want to answer a question they put their hands up as you would expect, but then stand to answer it if they are chosen.  The lesson that we had to deliver was about different habitats; desert, rainforest, grasslands and ocean, and the volunteers did an amazing job.

We also paid a visit to chat with ‘the elders’ in a community up in the hills.  This gentleman allows African Impact volunteers to come into his home with an interpreter (for a small donation of £2.23) and ask him questions about anything we like.  Topics ranged from what he does for a living (growing maize to sell), how old he is (71), how things have changed since he was a boy (not much!) how many children he has (6, but they had 10 and 4 died)  His wife joined us for a while, so did two of his grandchildren and his daughter in law, who has to cook for the whole family.

On the way back down the hill, we passed a rather bonkers man who appeared to be doing a rain dance!  He was tending to the plants he is growing to sell, and certainly made an impression on us 🙂

Any journey into the community has numerous stops, for the driver to chat to people or to give others a lift if there is room.  Ziggy stopped next to some schoolgirls who were carrying a young boy – this is Ziggy’s son, and the girl carrying him is a friend of Ziggy’s girlfriend.  Ziggy can’t afford to marry her yet as he doesn’t have enough cows!

Yet further down the hillside, we picked up some teenage schoolchildren who were walking home.  We drove for ages before dropping them off one by one.  I asked the last boy how long it takes him to walk to school – the answer was one and a half hours 🙁