Time flies

Woopsie, I haven't written for a while! I feel like time is going very quickly. I can't believe that in a week or so I'll have been here for 2 months. Over the past week and a half I've been carrying on with my day to day duties- planning activities, working on a development chart for the children, spending time with the children and the house mums, picking up the children from school, helping plan Rainbow Smiles, and assisting running the Friday afternoon session. We had another birthday in the unit last week, as one of the little girls celebrated her fifth birthday, so I was also busy planning some party games for that :-) She ended up receiving two cakes, and two dolls! The German team bought her a cake as well as the one we had got for her, and they also sang her Happy Birthday- the german version. She stood there with big eyes and her mouth wide open.

Over the past couple of weeks some new volunteers have arrived- , Niall, a retired GP from England, and Lance, Travis and Andy from Canada. Andy is Tim's cousin and was only here for a week, but Travis and Andy are staying for a month. At the weekend me, Grace, Niall, Lance and Travis went to Cape Town and climbed Table Mountain. It felt like a giant had built the steps up to the top, they were so big and steep. Unfortunately for the guys we had to go 'Jesspace' as I wasn't feeling too good. But the view from the top was amazing. We also went to the beach and made sandcastles.

One memory that has come to my mind is when Grace and I stopped at a large cafe before we picked up the kids from school. We were hungry and we had food in the fridge at the unit, but we ended up guiltily sharing a cake outside in the patio area overlooking a lawn. Ten minutes later we drove into the township to pick up the kids. The contrast couldn't have been greater; the cafe was full of primarily white people enjoying lunch with glass of wine, whilst the township was hot and dusty and we were noticeably the only white people in sight. I don't want to oversimplify the situation: it's not that white, coloured and black people never mix or that there's absolutely no overlap between their worlds. But the wounds of the apartheid are still very raw, and it's evident that different worlds are still co-existing together with little interaction between the two. It's a bizarre feeling to move between them.