The Choir Series 3: Zulu edition!

Hi friends and family...
Hope you are all well, I miss you all a lot! Had my first pangs of homesick last week when I was feeling fluey...but I honestly feel so settled now.

I have become really good friends [I think, I hope!] with quite a lot of the kids now...especially with the teenagers. That's probably because they are better at speaking English! I have homework sessions with them 4 nights a week, and sometimes they turn up on my doorstep unannounced asking for extra help with assignments. The other night I was just trying to have some dinner when there was a tap on my door and a girl wanting help with her science homework...I really had to rack my brain to remember what 'hypothesis', 'independent variable' and 'dependent variable' meant. In the end my GCSE science seemed to come back...which was a bit of luck when 5 more kids turned up, all doing the same piece of homework. I ended up teaching a chemistry lesson in my cottage!! It's really nice that I can be of help to these kids, the other careworkers don't really have the education to be of any assistance. I have really taken my education for granted until now. I have had so much more than people of my own age here, and especially those in older generations who grew up during apartheid.

The other thing that has really brought me closer to the kids is the fact that I have started up a Gospel Choir!! It has really taken off, the children absolutely love it and are always turning up wanting to practice. I have shown them videos I have downloaded from youtube of my choir at York, Revelation, and of other choirs. Their favourite was the one from The Choir BBC show with the boys' school who sang Stand by me/Beautiful Girl, they have seen it literally hundreds of times. Always it finishes and they say 'repeat again auntie Rebecca'!! They struggle with the words so I have made them copies of the lyrics and they practice all the time, you can hear 'dumdum dada dumdum' and 'staaand by meee' all round the Home, any time of day and wherever I am someone seems to be singing it! They bring their own zulu style to the songs and the most fun one is a version of 'amazing grace' I taught them. The boys' part has a really good rhythm to it and it fits their style of dancing. So they are always dancing along as they sing - a million miles from the struggle I had trying to make the choir in York just step from side to side and click their fingers. Now I only have trouble trying to keep them still!!

My cottage has really come alive in the last 2 weeks. Now that I have welcomed the kids into it for choir practice they have come to treat it like their second home. It is really nice because lots of other places in the Home, like the offices and the Principle's house, are kind of off limits. I have adopted an 'open door' policy. It seems whenever I leave my door open it attracts a visitor. So if I ever feel lonely I only have to leave it open and soon one of the kids will turn up, usually asking me to play 'dumdum dada dumdum' for them on the laptop! Today I was overun with about 20 kids coming in and out the house - that's because it's Saturday and they have quite a lot of free time. I had laundry to do so I just left them in the house watching tv, playing with my camera and laptop. I really like just letting them chill out and enjoy the kinds of luxuries that kids in the UK think of as everyday items and activities. For these children, it really is a different world. And they have so much discipline and routine here that when they come to mine I really try not to tell them what to do but just let them choose for themselves. They are so well behaved though, I don't worry about them taking something or damaging anything, they have a lot of respect for other people's possessions.

This evening I had a little video party at my cottage with the teenage boys. I borrowed a DVD player and bought popcorn and fizzy drinks for them. They all came round and 16 of them perched on my sofas, sitting as good as gold as I handed out drinks and food. It was so sweet, it seemed like a brand new experience for them. And yet for me, sitting down on a Saturday night to watch a family film and eat popcorn, is again, a regular activity for me that I have grown up with. It was so nice to give them that experience, I'm sure we will do it again soon. We watched 'Cool Runnings' - it was such a good choice, they LOVED it! Lots of the jokes transcend language barriers so even if they didn't understand most of the dialogue they laughed a lot and understood the general plot. There are lots of jokes which bascially involve people falling out of things/crashing into things - perfect boy humour!

Today I also went on a trip into the town with my friend Sthabile who works in the office and I took one of the boys, his name's Peter and he's 14. The day before Peter had to go to the hospital. The night before he had asked me to accompany him to hospital. It turns out they wanted him to go alone and to catch the bus home on his own, which he had never done before. He was nervous about going alone, that's why he had asked me. The problem was I didn't know when it was going to be...the next morning I was fast asleep when at 6am there was a taptap on my door. It was persistent so I got up and answered the door in my pyjamas..I still had no idea who or what it was. When Peter was standing there waiting for me I felt so bad!! I had to tell him to go without me... So at 9am when I was down in the office I asked if I could have a lift to meet Peter in the hospital and catch the bus back with him. Luckily when I got there he was already out so he just got a lift back with us, we didn't have to brave public transport!

It turns out the reason Peter is in the Home is poverty. He comes from a village in the Drakensberg Mountains and his family are too poor to care for him and his siblings. They had resorted to stealing in order to get money for food. Peter's older brother is in the same prison as Mark because he was caught for theft. Peter would be there too except he was only 12 when he was taught to steal by older kids. The reason he was sick and had to go to hospital was probably because of the water that he has been drinking in his home village. They do not have proper running water so there are a lot of diseases and ongoing health problems that have come from the bad water, including red eyes. It turns out there is another reason for the red eyes - nothing to do with HIV. In January they are planning to make a trip to Peter's home with all the teenage boys and spend a day digging an alotment and planting food for his family. The Home will pay for all the seeds and everything, and hopefully it could provide a lasting solution for Peter's family.

Because of Peter's family position he therefore has no host or foster family coming to look after him in the holidays or at weekends. In the holidays he still goes home to his village and he is given food parcels and weekly visits from the social worker while he is there, to check he is being fed. Lots of the other children have people who come and take them out for weekends, buy them new clothes and spoil them a bit. But Peter has no one like that, he only has the Home and what they can afford to give him. So when I was with Mlondi I suggested that I could take Peter out shopping at the weekend, and maybe buy him something which he needs, be it trainers or trousers or whatever. He said that would be really nice and that Pete was definitely the one I should take out and treat!

So today, the two of us braved riding the 'taxis' for the first time - a mini bus which picks people up when you stick out your finger. They just look like tins on wheels and the drivers drive like lunatics, speeding and overtaking all the time, then suddenly stopping with no warning to drop someone off or pick them up. They are also exclusively ridden by black people, so they were pretty wide-eyed when I turned up this morning! I'm sure they will be talking about me for years to come, the white lady who rode a taxi...! The first shop we headed to was 'Tekkie Town' tekkie means trainers, and we were there for about an hour choosing trainers for me as well as Pete. Really he wanted soccer boots but I had to persuade him that they wouldn't get used enough and that if he got astroturf trainers he could use them as normal shoes too.

Then I also wanted to buy him some new clothes, but being a teenage boy, he has a big thing for sportswear, which doesn't come cheap - even in Africa! I bought him a teeshirt of his soccer team, the Kaizer Chiefs, who play in Johannesburg and some 3/4 length Nike trousers. This was the very first time in his life that he had been taken out shopping and asked to choose what he would like to buy. I must have been on hundreds of clothes shopping trips for myself...makes me sick how much I must have had spent on me over the years. That's why I ended up going a bit over the top and buying him a whole outfit, but he was so so happy, it was worth every penny...and much more besides.

There really is nothing like the feeling you get when you know you have given a child the feeling that they are special. It may seem unfair that I was treating him when I can't afford to treat them all in the same way but that is what makes all the difference to Pete. All the others have more than him, they may have suffered in other ways, but in terms of material things, he is definietly the least well off. Now he has been allowed to catch up a bit! And the important thing is not what he got materially from it, but that special feeling he got, being singled out by me, being asked to come to town - his first time ever! It has given him a chance to experience something new as an individual, rather than as part of a big group of boys. Too often they must get the feeling of being lost in the crowd when they are living in a big group - 16 boys with just one careworker. This was Pete's chance to be singled out from the crowd and given the full attention of someone who cares for him and wants to see him happy. I know for a fact that he will remember this day for a long time to come. And if when he does he remembers how he was made to feel special and loved, then that is something which I believe you can't put a price on.

It really feels true to me today, that...It is in giving, that we receive x