Week 3

After Holiday Club I realized that a lot of the LSE don’t have a lot of first aid training. On Monday I talked to Mike Talley and offered to do a workshop for the LSE on basic first aid. This has turned into 3 one-hour sessions on Fridays for both the LSE and the support workers who do home-based care. I am really excited about the training and am currently looking at first aid organizations here to determine how easy (or not) it is for my to be a certified instructor instead of running a more informal course.
I also offered to teach part of the lessons for Julie and Timmy at Mountainview. They asked me if I would teach on Health and Hygiene. In my preparation for that I have made a few colouring pages for the little kids and thought of a few games for the older ones. Then I remembered an activity that I did during my first year at SFU. It involved streaking a few petri plates with swabs of different surfaces (toilets, floors, hands, etc) and waiting to see what grew. I decided to randomly email a few professors at the University of Cape Town to see if they would lend me a few plates. A few people emailed me back all pointing in the same direction, to a Dr. Andrew Whitlock. He emailed me back Tuesday saying that he would love to lend me a few plates for my demonstration. I am really excited about this and hope the kids will like it. I know a few of them are pretty interested in science, and one actually really wants to be a doctor so anything I can do to help give them a leg up and stay interested enough to finish school is the least I can do. On Thursday Mandy took me up to the University to meet Andrew and get the plates. The meeting went really well! He seemed really interested in what we were doing and instead of giving me regular agar plates he gave me blood agar (which is a very rich media excellent for the experiments I want to do). Now I am ready to do my presentation in Mountain view next week.
The HCC was a bit of a challenge for me this week. Monday I met an older lady from Fish Hoek (where I am staying) who had literally been thrown onto the street by her family (I am not sure why but I assume it was due to an illness of some sort). She had nowhere to go and was somehow brought to Living Hope who took her in. She was absolutely sad and broken. I ended up just sitting with her holding her hand while she cried. I asked her if I could pray for her and she said no, that the Church was the one who had landed her here in the first place. I asked her if she wanted to talk about it and she said no. I asked if she wanted to talk at all and she said no, that she just wanted to cry so I sat with her while she cried. Then some family friends came and took her to a more permanent care facility. Then I moved onto some of the other patients. One of the guys said he liked my jacket and asked if he could have it. I said thank-you but I would need it when it started raining again. Apparently he is one of the more pushy ones and will ask a few more times for things but as long as I always politely but firmly say no that he will eventually stop. I am still finding it fairly challenging to start conversations with most of the patients but am assured that as long as I press on it will get easier.
After Holiday Club last week I was invited to a brie (bbq) for the OV LSE and volunteers on Thursday. It was nice to be able to see them all again. I was also asked if I wanted to join Meagan, Melissa, Al, Chris, and Nathan’s Youth group retreat this weekend. I got approval from Mike Talley and so now am really looking forward to getting to go away with them, as well as getting to know more of the Youth. I already know quite a few of them since most are volunteers for the Kids Club or come to participate in all the activities. Apparently there is a small pool as well so I will see if any of them are interested in swimming lessons since I know most of them can’t swim. After the brie I went to the Youth group and got to meet everyone who was coming to the Camp this weekend. I can tell this weekend is going to be a lot of fun…and I probably won’t be getting much sleep!