It's March already???

Lately here in Durban the heat and humidity has been a little overwhelming, as I find myself sweating almost every moment of everyday. No, the crèche I work does not have air conditioning. I find myself taking very long visits to the grocery store and kind of walking near the frozen food section for much longer than necessary.

Despite the heat though, life has sort of settled into a really nice routine as the weeks absolutely fly by! My days are filling up with music lessons, activities with the crèche, visits with new friends that I seem to just meet everywhere I go, hanging out with old friends, and of course spending time with my host siblings.

Last Thursday I cooked this fantastic pasta with white cheese sauce, garlic bread, salad and chicken and we had a lovely sit down meal with the whole family. This rarely happens because the parents usually never have time to sit and eat together with the kids, so this in itself was a rare treat. Later, when the parents had left, and I was washing dishes, my host brother comes up to me and says, “Felicia, can we have a show-and-tell?” Of course I said yes (I found out show-and-tell for them really meant a talent show, still sweet though). So we used the curtain to my room as a stage where the performer burst out from, we lit candles to set the mood, and each practiced our talents for a good 10mins until we perfected our craft. Sandrine, the oldest daughter, was the host while Rosine performed a hip-hop dance, Tosi did some energetic stylings to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean and I rounded out the evening with a song I wrote pretty much right then on guitar. Needless to say the talent wasn’t exactly out of this world, but we made sure the audience really got in to it, you know? Either way there was lots of laughter and the evening ended with me singing lullabies to them while they fell asleep, so all in all in was an eventful and very pleasant Thursday night.

At the crèche the South African teacher and I organized a workshop for the staff on Discipline and Team Building that took place several weekends ago. All of the staff turned out and most were very interested and engaged. It was meant to offer another way of disciplining children without using corporal punishment – the method normally used in the crèche. The weeks following I have seen some small changes, but they often revert back to their old ways. For this I do not blame them whatsoever. We now have 50 children aged three to five years old in a small room and the third floor of an apartment building, and the children definitely get very unruly. Their whole lives, corporal punishment has been the only method these teachers have known; of course one afternoons worth of explanation is not going to have many immediately profound effects. We are having follow up meetings at lunch times several times a month, so we can debrief, voice challenges, ask questions and share how we feel we are coping.