Sleepover and Project Day

     This weekend was super busy.  We went to class as usual Friday morning.  It was a pretty good class.  Grant is starting to prepare us for leaving.  It's weird to think that school ends in a month and we leave in two months.  I don't feel like we have been here that long, but we obviously have.  After class on Friday Tyler's grade 6 and also grade 7 prepared for their sleepover.  I stayed to help out...they definitely needed it.  There were so many kids!!!  Two other girls also stayed to help, but even still there didn't seem to be enough of the international students.  This is what Tyler says about it...any thing in parenthesis is stuff I add.

     "We were at class all day Friday then we had a sleepover with the
kids in my grade and the kids in the grade below us. In total there were 27 wild kids. We spent the night at the school. At the beginning they were mostly outside playing soccer and then we made hot dogs on the grill. During dinner it got a little hectic. A girl decided to stab another kid with a fork. (Another kid had been stabbed earlier while Tyler was cooking the food.) Kids are pretty violent here and its from what they learn at home. Parents hit their kids as a form of punishment. The kids were crazy at first like during dinner then in calmed down some. After dinner we made smores (Where like two kids walked across the fire...it was crazy) and watched Harry Potter. (Harry Potter was a half and half success.  Half the kids stayed and watched the movie, but the other half tried to go outside and play spin the bottle in the hallway unsupervised which is obviously not a good idea.  We had to keep the doors open and watch the kids as they left to make sure the boys didn't go to the girls room and the girls didn't go into the boys room.).  They finally ended up falling asleep about 2 AM and woke up at about 7. Saturday we sanded the desks in the classroom which went okay and then it was over by noon. The kids weren't being very respectful but I do think they enjoyed spending time together and enjoyed it."

The kids here love taking pictures of people...I thought this was kinda cute lol.

Smores!!!

     I slept with all the girls and for the most part all of them were really well behaved and ready for bed.  When I say for the most part I mean all of them except 5 of them.  Three of them just wanted to talk super loud all night long.  We told them they could whisper, but we ended up just waiting for them to finish talking before we were able to fall asleep.  Another girl was waaaay hyper and chanted , "We are hyper" a few times before calming down.  But, the big trouble maker was this one girl who decided that whenever the lights went out she would throw things.  Shoes were her weapon of choice.  She actually ended up giving a girl a bloody nose because she stood up over her and chucked the shoe at her face.  She ended up  hitting one of the international students too.  When we took the shoes and moved them away from her and she found books (hard cover).  We ended up having to move her to a separate room with a teacher in order to prevent her from doing it anymore.

     After seeing what went down at the sleepover I got extremely nervous about my grade 8 project day which was this Saturday.  Surprisingly, it went perfectly.  I was really nervous because last time we were with the kids they behaved extremely poorly, but they were extremely respectful and well-behaved.  We started the day off with some watermelon for the kids around 9am.  We then went outside and explained to the kids the schedule for the day which started with taking all the desks out of the classroom.  Only 13 kids showed up from our class which was more than we had brushes for, but we needed to clean the classroom as well.  We had 9 kids painting desks and the remaining 4 cleaning up the classroom.  Luckily there were four boys who didn't want to paint (they didn't want to get their clothes dirty) so nobody was unhappy with their job.  We painted the desks a dark purple and yellow.  The colors actually turned out looking like the vikings colors.

Edwina and Abigail.

Maureen and the boys cleaning

     When all the painting was done we went outside to play some games with the kids.  The games were going really well.  Maureen stayed out with the kids while Vanessa and I went inside and got the lunch ready.  Vanessa had made the lunch last night and all we had to do was reheat it which was nice.  I was worried that they would be impatient, but I only had to ask them maybe twice to not get so close to the food table.  As a reward for the kids working so hard on their classroom we decided to take them to a movie in Stellenbosch.  We partnered with the movie theater in the Neelsie (Student center) and the owner ended up giving the kids a free showing of the movie Honey and also threw in a soda and popcorn for free.  

Kusanda, Luciano, and Adrian at Stellenbosch University, outside of the Neelsie

     The international office here supplied us with a van to transport the kids (also for free) to Stellenbosch.  We had to make two trips, but it wasn't bad considering we didn't have to pay for it.  The kids really loved the movie and they were so polite to the owner when they met him.

     When we got back to the school the bus driver volunteered to drive all the kids to their various farms/townships which was way out of his way and extremely kind of him.  I went with the kids to be dropped off because he offered to drop me off instead of taking the train or asking Tyler to come get me.  On the way to drop off one group of kids, Jermaine (one of our girls) tapped my shoulder and said something to the extent of, "We want to thank you for the movie and the food and everything you prepared for us.  We also want to thank the driver."  It wasn't a whole lot, but it made me so happy because we (Maureen, Vanessa, and I) really did put a lot of effort into this day. 

The darker ones are purple...I swear.  It's just poor lighting.

Some of our kids =]

      Needless to say when I got home I was flat out exhausted, but it was only 5pm, so I didn't want to fall asleep because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to sleep that night.  As it turns out neither Tyler or I could stay up very long and ended up falling asleep for like 3 hours.  Needless to say we didn't fall asleep till very late, but it was ok because it's General Conference Sunday over here and we have already watched it.

     I am really excited about tomorrow's lesson with the kids because I think it's going to be really cool.  The girls lesson is on public speaking, so that may not be as much fun but the boys and girls lesson should be.  We are doing a lesson on personal motto's and such.  I have had a few people from back home send in videos of their motto's to show the kids which I know they are going to like.  The only thing I have left to say is congrats to Andrew and his Blue team for winning the Spring Game!!  Tyler and I really wish we could have been there.  Hamba Kakuhle.