9D in all their glory

Hi All

I thought it would be nice to put up a picture of our 9D participants. I first met them in May when they were 8Ds and we were at the start of the project.

It was these students who helped to design the site and came up with the name. NISA Connect. (Northern Ireland South Africa Connect). I think I have already said on the BBC site that this was to echo the name of the town here, Knysna.

You can also see Mr Scott in the back row. He has been a real moving force in the project. He shows constant enthusiasm and puts up with all my emails requesting this, that and the other.

9D have put together some Power Point presentations so I am hoping to showcase some of their material on the Blog as well as on the BBC website.

At the moment the Year 8 classes, and the rest of the school, are all doing their end of year exams. Usually the exams begin at around 9am and continue for 2 to 3 hours. The silence that reigns over the school when they are in their exams is quite eerie as usually there is a very healthy buzz about the place. When break time comes the noise level increases dramatically!

On Monday I invigolated an exam with fellow traveller Donna. All went smoothly although some of the students did leave about one hour before the official end of the exam. I do worry that they will not have done well in that exam.

That's it for now. Claire

Another Cockroach Story

My housemates from Travellers Worldwide believed that this would make a good Blog entry.

The other night we were watching TV.

People out there, don’t be down on British TV – you are so lucky. Not wanting to be rude or disrespectful but I find the content on the main channels lacking. There are an inordinate amount of Soaps. Some South African, some American imports. We have The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless, Backstage, Days of Our Lives and so on. These, I think, are an acquired taste and with the American ones we play spot the Botox. Really, there is a woman on that can’t move her face at all. She has to show emotion with her eyes. Unfortunately this usually means that she just widens her eyes which, sadly for her, results in a permanent ‘rabbit caught in the headlights’ look.

ANYWAY, the point is that it was getting late and it was time to turn in – so I got up from the sofa and went into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and saw something on my shoulder, sort of emerging over my shoulder actually. I turned slightly to get a better look, at this point unconcerned, and lo and behold, it was an inch and a half long … wait for it … cockroach. Red and shiny and full of life, waving its antennae.

Well, I screamed and tried to flick it off. But it clung on.

Well that was it, I went into stratospheric panic mode and really let rip in the scream department. I knocked the thing off and tried to unlock the bathroom door and get out into the hall whereupon I was met outside the bathroom by concerned house mates wanting to know what an earth had happened.

Orla and Paul tried to get some sense out of me while I just repeated “I looked in the mirror”. I mean I can have my rough days but even so, they didn’t think my looking in the mirror should have caused such an extreme reaction.

When the word cockroach became clear Donna, (new-ish housemate from London not accustomed to my extreme cockroach reactions), dived into the kitchen, collected the Doom and sprayed (or rather drowned) the critter to death.

I still get the creeps just thinking about it. I know, I know. I am much bigger than it is etc etc. But why does it always have to me who has close encounters of the cockroach kind? It’s just not fair.

A Personal Account

Hello all

Today I am going to share a story with you. This is written by a student from 11B and is part of a community project initiated by Mrs W Wardale, teacher of English at Percy Mdala High School.

The picture above shows the community that Percy Mdala School sits in.

A part history of my area: Concordia by Lunga Skei

My parents arrived here in Knysna in 1979 and I was not yet on this earth. They lived in Oupad when their shack burnt down. In 1999 I was ten years old when we moved from Nekkies and found our own good house in Concordia. Fortunately my parents bought their own house and it was good to move from Nekkies because the crime rate was very high there at the time. I was attending Thembelitsha Primary School and my parents thought it would be a good idea to be near the school. In that area there were only coloured people living there and the land was owned by the old mother of the big family living there. There was peace because that old mother had eight children and they were also mothers and fathers of their own children.

In the year 2000 that old woman died and my mother was the only black woman involved there. After a while problems arose, and they started to discriminate by telling us we were blacks and we did not belong there on their mother’s land. My mother reported this to Sharon Witbooi who was responsible for that area. Then there was peace again. Eventually more and more black people came to live in that area. Then the last and worst problem was that we were told that the place where our house stood was the same place where a road was to be built. So we had to move, but the municipality offered us no compensation.

There were fights between us and the coloured people because they wanted to own everything, like the taps and the roads. Now our community is fun to live in because there is everything: electricity, houses, roads, taps, and democracy. Now we are all equal and we all love and support each other.

We have many more personal accounts and interviews that the learners have done within their own community. We are going to make them into a booklet, with photographs, for the students but, unfortunately, they will have to pay for the photocoping costs if they want to own their own personal copy as the school does not have the resources to provide them for free.

I hope that you have found this interesting and will post some comments or questions.

Claire