Yesterday was an amazing start to our working programme, and today continued this good start.
We were told we had to meet Joe at a place called Vasco at 8am, and after looking up how to get there, alarms were set and we were up and about at 6am, leaving our apartment at 6:30.
We weren't too sure how long it would take to walk down to the station to catch a train to Vasco, so we decided to jog the first half of it, but were exhausted after about 10 minutes because we stupidly put our coats on, after looking at the cloudy skies, forgetting how warm and humid it would be.
We eventually made it to the station at around 7am, and got our tickets, which were 10.50Rand each, which comes to just over £1 together. We had no idea what train we had to get, but luckily we saw a receptionist from our retirement complex, who helped us in the right direction. The train system itself was confusing, as almost everything was delayed, and there were no maps saying where each train was stopping, so we had to almost guess what train to get on.
After being picked up by Joe at Vasco, we stopped off at the Communicare Learning Centre, where we signed a couple of documents that allowed us to take the car, spoke to Joe and Lourens about a product they want help with called the 'Ponjoe', before heading off to Goodwood crèche to start coaching.
Goodwood crèche is essentially a nursery/kindergarten, where kids from all over Cape Town come to learn basic skills needed for school. It's also run by Lourens' wife.
Our first class were a group of around 20 5/6 year olds. It was the Afrikaans speaking half of the year group, so Joe gave us a big hand in translating what we were saying to the kids.
We started off with a game of pairs tag, where the kids are in pairs, 1 persons the tagger, 1 the runner. As soon as the tagger catches the runner, they swap roles. That seemed to go down well with the kids, which was nice to see.
We then moved on to a simpler version of what Arsenal call the "Highbury Game", where you have a square, and each side represents a stadium. The players run round in the middle of the square, and when a stadium was called, they run to that side. For the kids at Goodwood, we only used 2 sides, and named them 'Arsenal' and 'Cape Town'. This seemed to work pretty well, but I'm not sure whether the kids actually understood what was going on, but simply enjoyed running around.
We then tried a game called "Domes and Dishes", where the players are split into 4 teams, and 1 at a time in their teams, have to dribble out with a ball, flip over a cone and go back. This turned out to be way too complex for the kids, so we simplified it majorly for the other 3 groups.
The next group were mainly English speaking, but to be honest, the difference between the groups was marginal. We didn't have as much time with this group so we played the Highbury game, along with the simplified Domes and Dishes, where they simply have to run to the middle and back.
For the 4th and 5th groups, we had 4/5 year olds. Half spoke English, half Afrikaans. We did pretty much the same thing as we did with the older group, the only difference was that we had to explain it to pretty much every kid to see if they understood. It's safe to say this morning was a tough rewelcoming to community coaching, after a month of lazing about.
After having lunch at the crèche we went back to the Learning Centre, where we had a few hours to kick back and relax, before going down to the "Ruyterwacht Circle" to start our Ruyterwacht Action Soccer Club coaching.
The Ruyterwacht Circle, is officially called something else in Afrikaans but I forget the name. But it used to be a massive drug ring, where drug dealers made their various trades and whatnot. But around July last year, Joe, along with many other volunteers, cleaned it all up, laid fresh concrete and bricks down, and made a small football pitch there for the kids to play on.
We expected around 4 or 5 to turn up, but ended up with around 14 kids, which was a nice surprise. So after a few passing exercises we went straight into matches, which all the kids seemed to have a lot of fun playing in. Even Martin managed to show off his skills (or lack of! ;)).
After that the car was officially handed over to us, so Martin drove home while I gave him completely useless directional advice, but after going a bit stray, we managed to get ourselves home in reasonable time.
At around 6:45ish, while sitting downstairs, George, one of the residents who took care of Luke and Jeff last year, came and offered to take us round to see the sights of Cape Town at night, which Martin and I were both excited to do. So an hour later, we all got in George's car, and he took us to around half way up Table Mountain, and round different hidden sights to be seen in Cape Town, which was really cool to see.
Tomorrow we're at the Communicare Learning Centre all day, so hopefully I won't have as much to write in my blog, as each day seems to end up in my writing longer and longer posts! We'll find out tomorrow.
Harry
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