CCF

Back in August (yeah, yeah), my coworker, Esther, invited me to attend a two day workshop she was co facilitating that covered all the ins and outs of CCF or Child Care Forum. Not connected to one specific organization, and hopefully funded by the Department of Social Development at some point in the near future, CCF focuses on training carers, teachers, creche/daycare workers, and people from churches to become advocates for the children they're working with on an everyday basis. Over the last year I've been to my fair share of "events", "forums", and "workshops" and this one was, by far, one of the best. Esther was AMAZING! Due to lack of funding for my office the last 8 months, she hasn't really been able to get out of the office much... and I know being out in the community is where she shines. At the workshop, every time a question was posed to the group at large and the facilitator was met with silence, Esther would get up from her chair and in rapid Sotho explain things, give examples, and have people's full understanding within a couple of minutes. We played ice breaker games, had group discussions, had to act out scenarios, and the time went pretty fast.


These are the ladies and gentlemen I got to spend a couple of days with.

Pastor Mgiba and his work crew. They were putting cement all along the bottom of the church that we were using for the workshop. During teatime I would go out and help them, learned to slap the cement on the wall and then smooth it out, learned the proportions of water to cement in the mixing process...it's funny all the things that can happen in a day.

When Esther and I were walking from the village of Bellville (where the workshop was held) to the tar road to catch taxis home, we came across people waiting at the water taps to fill their plastic jugs. Most of the time, communal taps are turned on a couple times a week on specific days... and if you don't know those days, you'll quickly find out when you see people lining up for their share of water. As we got closer to everyone, we passed a little girl squatting in a big mud puddle, filling a little plastic cup with water, and drinking it. It didn't take long for Esther to start going around telling people where she had just come from and how important it was for the community to start taking care of its children. Where was the child's mother? The water the girl was drinking wasn't safe... who knows what kind of bacteria was in it, did people want her to get sick? She made her way through the crowd and the closer she got towards the end of all the people, the closer she got to the girl's mother, who was young, pregnant again, and looked to either not care much about anything or be really embarrassed. I backed away and leaned up against a fence post, wanting to capture whatever I could in pictures. And these are what I got. Sorry they're kind of blurry... when I was trying to be sneaky at one point, I smudged my lens.


And then! I'm telling you, there are weeks where everything moves so slowly and nothing really happens... and then days where there's enough activity to fill a week. After work I was walking through my gate when I heard my name being called from a car parked in front of the house. Beshu, Collen, and Tanya were wanting to know if I wanted to go ride around with them... it was, afterall, Tanya's last week in Metz Village. Uh, yeah I did! When asked where we wanted to go... I mean we were in a car... Tanya said that she really wanted to go down the tar road in Lorraine and see what was at the end. Ah, gotta love village life. We ended up at a missionary's house, sitting in the unfinished living room area, having cold drink, and going through a pile of clothes (a lot of GAP Red shirts she was selling to make some money for her missions). Halfway through our 1.5 Liter of Coke, we heard the bells and whistles of a kid driving his donkey cart home. Tanya: "I've always wanted to ride in a donkey cart!" SO Beshu rushed outside with us to see if he could make such a wish come true. We walked across the road... talked to the gogo, introduced ourselves to the kid/driver, and found out that it probably wasn't the best idea because the donkeys seemed to be a little all over the place. BUT! In true Africa fashion... there's no giving up. So Tanya couldn't ride in the donkey cart... thanks to Beshu she did get to sit on a donkey for a few seconds!

For you, Tanya/Mpho. You made an impact here.. oh yes you did... and I know here made an impact on you as well.