That's my project

After two weeks that I’ve spent at Cotlands now I finally feel like I am having an approximate image of all the things that the organisation is involved in. So today I will try to give you a rough review of it and try to show you how I spend my whole blessed day.

In general I am working from Monday to Friday from 8 am to 4 or 5 pm. But as I am also living in my project I often work longer because I see that help is needed somewhere or donations have to be collected at a special time.  For the moment there are three different divisions in that I am working: The Units, the Toy Library and the office.

The Units

Twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, I am working in the Units. The Units include all the projects where I am directly working with children. In the mornings my work begins in the Early Learning Groups that are comparable to preschool. Here I am working together with Stella and two teachers. Every morning at 8 o’clock children from the neighbourhood at the age of three to six are arriving in our Cotlands classroom. Before the class starts they are all getting porridge for breakfast. After that school can begin! We usually start reading out a story to the children, then review it bit by bit and transfer it to their everyday life. That’s how they should learn from a cute animal story for example to be economical with their food. After the reading session we assemble different play and learning stations where the children can do puzzles, paint, play with dough, play cooking and many other things. The focus of these games is often put on colours, basic shapes or names of animals or food for example. Many things like definitions of shapes (“a square has four equal sides and four corners” etc.) are repeated every day but are still difficult to remember for some of the children.  But sometimes that’s also a linguistic problem because English isn’t their first language. One day for example I was sitting at a table and playing with dough with four little boys. I was already thinking that they didn’t like me or that my English was too bad when I realized that the only English words they knew were: “Yes teacher!” So sometimes it can be difficult to communicate with the smaller ones because my Zulu knowledge isn’t good enough for a real conversation. But most of the children are already quite good at speaking English – many are probably much better than me!

If the weather is good we also go out to play. At the Cotlands property there are several small playgrounds where the children love to play. And it’s an important place for them because it’s one of the very few places here where it is save for them to play. At the playgrounds we try to teach them things like rope skipping, to walk on stilts or playing basketball and cricket.

After playing it is always time to sing – not quite my favourite part because after that I can’t get the melodies out of my head for the whole day – and then it’s already lunchtime. After a short prayer the children get their lunch and Stella and I are also taking our lunch break.

After lunch we are helping with the baby massage or the after-school care. To the after-school care school children from the neighbourhood are coming and we assist them with their homework and supervise those that just come for playing. When the students go home at 4 pm, and also if we got some spare time in between, we usually go and help at the Baby Unit. This unit is the only place that is always manned and it gives home to 11 babies and two older children at the moment. The babies are at the age of two to 18 months and need a lot of care. Our job normally is to play with them, but also to feed them – and that can be the very hardest job! – to change their nappies, to dress them, to do baby massages and anything else that accrues. At about five o’clock when the babies go to bed we normally leave and try to get rid of all the children’s songs that are stuck into our heads!

The Toy Library

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we are working in the Toy Library. That’s a library with many many different toys for children categorized into different learning targets or themes. Children can come here and borrow the toys for two weeks and we also use them in the Early Learning Groups or the Baby Unit. Our Toy Library here in Johannesburg isn’t the only one. There are many more spread all over South Africa and Cotlands founded an own Toy Library association that hosts seminars and workshops for future librarians. Next week a new Toy Library in Pretoria will open so that for the moment there are many trainings for the stuff that will be working there. We are also helping to prepare a lot of things for the new library by making lists of the toys, photographing all of the items, numbering and varnishing them and much more. 

On Monday when the new library is opening we also have to help transporting the toys to Pretoria and are already looking forward to see the opening.

The work that we have to do in the library isn’t very difficult or exciting, but sometimes it is a pleasant variation because even if we love playing with the children sometimes it is nice to recover from all the action and the attention that they need.

The Office

On Fridays we are working in the office. Cotlands’ offices are much bigger than we first thought and there are approximately 25 people working in them. So far we spent only one day in the office so that I can’t say that much about it. We had to do the inventory of a room and prepare Christmas cards for sponsors. This also weren’t very challenging duties but nevertheless most of the time we enjoyed it and are curious what other exercises are waiting for us in the next weeks.

I hope that I could already give you a helpful overview of my work. If you want to see a little bit more just watch the Cotlands video below!

PS: I try to illustrate my posts as good as possible and of course they would be much nicer with pictures of the children but understandably I am not allowed to publish any pictures of them and I will have to adhere to that. Yet I will try to take some pictures of my area in the next days but so far this was not that easy because I’m not quite sure if it is intelligent to walk around with a camera. But I will figure that out!