This week some important visitors (i.e. donors) are coming to Sparrow, so there was a village-wide cleaning effort to pull the weeds and hide the litter. Every year Caroline organizes the Piki Tup Campaign, named for Joburg's municipal garbage service. Kids collect trash and trade bags in for signatures, which then count towards small money prizes. Understandably, no one gets too excited about the whole thing. But even worse, this year, a few kids somehow broke one of the brick brais, so everyone got in big trouble - no TV for two weeks (though we are told this will likely be reduced to two days, since 250 unoccupied orphans could make much worse of an impression than a little litter).Not only did this punishment dampen everyone's enthusiasm for trash collection, but it affected us too. Kemi and I were ready to start our "Women's Health" discussion series for the teenage girls (boys later), using a movie as an icebreaker and springboard. (We decided on "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," which covers a lot of 16-year-old girl issues, even if it takes place in a different world than our adolescents live in.) But the session, since it included a movie, was deemed to be too fun and was therefore forbidden. Instead, we started on our "Oral Hygiene" didactic series, deemed not fun at all and so permissible. Everyone did seem to enjoy getting the personalized toothbrushes we made though.
Kemi engraving toothbrushes and modeling for our instructional poster.
Cluster 7 gets their toothbrushes.
No comments:
Post a Comment