Cultural Group finished their official practice.
In the picture you can see two young girls dancing
in the middle of a circle of dancers.
At the beginning of the practice it was only the members
of the group whom are training for their trip to the
regional dance competition sometime in September.
During the time of practice the drums basically advertise
and many people come by to watch. In some cases they
also want to dance, kind of a dancing jam session. The girls
dancing fall into that category. It may be of about zero interest
to know that the girl on the right is wearing a wrap around
cloth with Bob Marley's name plastered all over it.
As a spectator it is just great to see and hopefully the group
will be capable of performing well enough to advance to
the nationals in the capital ... Windhoek.
It is another Saturday evening, the time that I use to reflect
back on the week. It has been another fair week. We've
made progress on the new soccer field and have one more
tree to clear before it is almost ready to go.
We painted some at the school with paint that the visitors
from Scotland left behind. The section of the building that
we are painting isn't finished but that should take at least
a few days total. But there was some progress.
Made a move to a new permanent location and that is
working out good. Just need to get accustomed to the
new environment.
The Support Group vegetable garden is very close to
expansion as any day soon the chicken wire we need
should be arriving. Also there is building interest in
joining and that is a good sign. No secret that if there
was no interest then something was going wrong.
The girls continue to play netball and the guys are slacking
on the volleyball games.
We finally have devised a system to keep control of the
soccer, netball and volleyballs and we don't have to chase
people throughout the village to get them back.
The high point of this week was the beginning of a
cross cultural blog ... thepandoproject.blogspot.com ...
which was an idea that me and a fellow volunteer John came
up with when we were still in Romania last year. It is a
blog that will attempt to bring together several students
and classrooms together from various regions of the world.
Due to timing of school vacations and arriving anew into .
our new posts, it has taken a little time to get it started.
I was fortunate to be able to get a blog entry initiated from
this end in Namibia.
The best part for me was watching the joy and excitement
from the girl (Martha) whom we chose to post the first
entry. She wrote the words and I typed and posted it.
She was just giddy to see herself on the internet and we
also let her post a message on the message board. It
was the first time she ever touched a computer and it
took her 15 very intense minutes to type the few lines.
It is just the beginning of trying to get computer literacy
introduced in the school (of course first we need some computers)
but soon we hope that the school will receive a few.
As a volunteer it is really just a great feeling to see a young person
hugging the keyboard as they search for the letters for their
first time and know that you can be a part of helping
their development. And if you weren't there she never would
have ever touched a computer.
It's a good feeling and that's the reward.
Well, that's about it for another week from somewhere in the
Bwabwata game reserve.
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