Volunteering Week 9

This week at Sinethemba Homework/Children's Home was especially difficult for me for several reasons.  For the past couple weeks, there have been some issues with discipline and organization at Sinethemba, and so this week, more volunteers were brought in to have a better volunteer to child ratio.  The new volunteers however, were Xhosa speaking, which may have been a great thing in the kids eyes, because it was someone they could relate to and speak their native language with.  However, from an educational standpoint, it was not beneficial.  We were told that while at Sinethemba, the kids were only supposed to speak English to improve their English skills.  The entire reason NMMU has us students volunteer at Sinethemba is because we can bring a culturally diverse experience to the kids and also offer them specific help with English speaking and spelling.  Since the kids could easily relate and talk to the new volunteers they flocked to them, and the rest of us were kind of just left sitting there.  When I finally did help one boy with his English spelling and attempted to explain things to him when he didnt understand, I noticed the Xhosa volunteers laughing at me.  This just made me feel like a fool.
Another thing that is very frustrating for me is trying my best to help the kids at Sinethemba, but knowing what their education system is like, where they will return to school the next day and how they will continue to be educated.  The education systems in the townships are very, very poor, receiving less than $400 U.S dollars per child A YEAR- and there are usually nearly a thousand children in a township school.  With numbers like that and such little money the education system is very poor.  Most of the teachers do not even posses a college degree because it is not a requirement at the township schools since they cannot afford to pay teachers who hold degrees.  Its overwhelming to me when I want to help so badly, but at the end of the day I am only one person, helping one child for an hour and a half with their spelling.
This week however, a few of the girls were going through my purse and found my camera- so I have a few pictures to show this week!