Khayamnandi: 33. Baa Baa Black Sheep 2.0: Back to Kayamandi

Thursday 9 May

After another prayerful morning meeting at Prochorus, we set out again to the same Simni crèche we had worked at before our trip to Kruger. Some things were kind of similar to our first experience there, but other things I noticed were different.

The kids were all coughing and had mucous all over their faces and in their mouths.

We got to go outside and play since it was dry outside. It was so hot, but since it is fall/winter, they were wearing winter coats and some of them even had hats on. They played on the playground and I caught the kids flying off the end of the slide for about an hour. Whoo! It was a workout!

The teacher again asked me to pray, so I went with a thank you for bringing us together…Our Father… hoping that they might recognize it, or at least the teacher might since they are so into reciting prayers, but nope. Haha!

I know I wrote about the floor last time – and how the holes everywhere were striking. I noticed very soon after arriving in the morning that they had covered the floor with a piece of plastic that looked like fake hard wood. Sheets of it were overlapping and covered all the holes in the floor. It looked quite nice actually. At least it was an improvement. But at one point, the kids were marching around the room chanting a song, and one of the kids’ shoes got caught in the overlap of the two sheets and…uhoh domino effect, 15 kids piled on top of each other on the floor within a few seconds. But still no tears. I was impressed.

The kids remembered Hailey and I, which was kind of nice and made me feel as though our volunteering is going to be a continuation, not just random isolated incidents.

And then…one little kid grabbed my face and pulled it so I was facing him and he had my full attention, and then – to my horror – he started singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep aeeeaeeeeiaeiuoaa – ool” THEY REMEMBERED IT! The teacher didn’t remember it, so she made Hailey and I teach the kids the song again for a good half an hour. What have I done?!

In the afternoon, since it was Ascension Day, the Reading Eggs program in the Kayamandi library was closed since the kids didn’t have school. So Bones, one of the staff members at Prochorus, a really nice guy from Kayamandi who uses his spare time to run a drama program for youth in the community, gave us a walking tour of Kayamandi. Kayamandi is build onto a mountainside, so it was very steep. But he took us all around – Kayamandi is home to ~70,000 people. But it’s really small for that since up to ten or twelve people live in a shack sometimes. Bones took us into the fire zone from the mid-March fire that raged in Kayamandi. We walked around, and the majority of shacks had been rebuilt with a combination of shiny new corrugated tin and old burnt metal. I could still smell the burn smell. There was burned rubbish and ash everyplace. But people were just going about their daily business, working on their new homes, cooking, kids playing in the street. What a fast rebound for this community!