Day 3 and day 4 April 25/26

To start off I didn't write anything yesterday just because of the simple reason that I didn't feel like it. So I will also tell you about everything that happend yesterday. Because I will hate myself when I am older and I want to read about this trip and I realize that i was lazy. So yesterday we were picked up by Tia weasels the woman who is in charge of thamsanqa. She said she'd come at 8:00 but it turned out that she came 8:15 because she had a hard time in traffic. When we were in the car we drove to Motherwell. It is around 17 km away from Peter and dafne's house.We heard from a woman on the plane who lived in PE that we shouldn't visit it because it was super unsafe. But she never visited it herself. Yes it not Beverly Hills and the people are a bit frightened by white people. But they are all so open and nice. I didn't feel not safe for a moment. So we first visited a project by Tia that is called under the tree. It is at the place where they initially wanted to put the tinkertots crèche but couldn't because you are not allowed to build permanent homes. Only sheds. But because tia didn't want to leave these children they build a temporary crèche. We visited that and it was impressive these teachers teach the children without anything. And still all those kids keep smiling. We helped the women to make breakfast for the kids. The breakfast is corn starch(maizena) with strawberry flavour mixed with water and milk. Roeli and I made that for all the children and washed the dishes. It is really bad there, they don't have running water or soap so cleaning the dishes with just water was not easy. After that we left again. We are going to spend our next Tuesday there we are going to teach the children. After visiting under the tree we went into a house( well house a shed) Tia wanted to drop by there because the day before she took a child away there because the mother was drunk and they didn't have any food in. But Tia wanted to get also another kid from the same home. That kid hadn't eaten and had AIDS. Apparently if you have aids you have to take your medicine at constant times. The mother should have reported her at the clinic at the 7 of March but she hadn't visited yet. So the kid is really sick. Unfortunately the mother nor the kid were home at that time. I saw how poor they were they had basically nothing. It was really sad. Putting that all behind we had lunch at Tia's office. We met Louise( Tia's daughter) and the people who worked at the office. After lunch with everyone we went with Louise and we visited all of the thamsanqa houses. These are the homes for kids that cannot live with their father and Mother. They have five houses And we visited four of them. The fifth one is transistion home for the children who are 18 years old to live on their own. We visited all of the houses and they all live so beautifully. All of the mothers that take care of the children are so caring. We went to the houses for Peter to ask if there was anything he could fix like doors and stuff like that. We also visited the tinkertots crèche for the first time. It is a beautiful crèche with 3 classrooms and 5 women who work there. 3 teachers and 1 cook. and Larissa( Louise's daughter) she does the administration and teaches a class if another teacher cannot teach for a day. One of the teachers who works there also lives there with her husband and son. They live in a small room up the front off the buiding. We played a little bit with the kids and we returned home. Back home Peter and Dafne were already for dinner. Tia and Louise joined us. We ate frikandel(smashed meatball) with mashed potatoes and vegetables. Louise stayed over a little longer to talk us through what we will be doing for the coming days. After that I was so tired that we both went to bed to go to sleep

So on to today. We woke up at 7:30 and Larissa picked us up at 8:30 we went straight to the tinkertots crèche and on the way we picked up many people from the houses we were in a 5 persons car with 9. But we all made it. I helped lulama today. she taught the lion class. The children start to count in English and the months of the year. Lulama is also a mama at one of the houses. I am really impressed by the teachers how they teach the children. The children of course got bible lessons. It was amazing how lulama told the story about Noah and the ark. After that the children had a little snack time. The snack they all brought was a little danoontje. After that the children leart how to count to three with apples. They had to draw the apples. I taught them hoofd shouders knie en teen. In English it was really fun. After that the children had lunch the cook made some sort of chicken soup with bread and I helped them. It smelled really nice. roeli and I brought our own bread so we didn't need anything. After that the children were picked up by their parents or stayed at the crèche until 5 o clock. They can do that but they have to pay for that. So we returned home with Larissa and some of the kids at 13:30. The car drive was a lot of fun. Xthani a boy that stays at Louise's house because there was no room for him in the boys house, is such a sweetie and very smart. We returned home in about 14:30 and we relaxed a bit with a cup of tea. Tonight at 18:00 we are going to Louise's home for dinner and tomorrow there is a public holiday so there is no crèche. We will be going to kwantu(I might have spelled that wrong)a wild park to hopefully spot the big five but we will have to leave very early. But we are willing go do that