City Mission Educational Services

I started my internship at CMES yesterday and quickly realized it is the perfect place for me. I love the population of students that I am working with (middle schoolers) and I love the hands on work that I am able to do (teaching P.E. and a class on life skills, shadowing in classrooms, and planning different events!). I also quickly realized that it is going to be an incredibly challenging experience for me as well, for some of the same reasons that I love it. For instance, the population at the school is students who do not fit in to the normal school system. Sometimes this means they are “age inappropriate” learners, in other instances it means students who do not come from typical home backgrounds. In the second classroom I visited, I ran into both of these situations. The classroom was “sixth grade” but it actually was comprised of a second grader, three fourth graders, two fifth graders, and six sixth graders. When explaining this to me, the teacher also told me that most of the students lived in a shelter in Khayelitsha, lacking even the most basic home structure. The shelter provides everything they need, but relies on outside donors to finance it all. In order to keep my composure, I had to suppress the thought of these students living such a life and how they could ever care about school when they was just trying to survive. I started working with the second grader, who is both housed in the shelter and an “age inappropriate” learner. He is ten years old, he cannot read, and he couldn’t spell “boy” or “ten.” As a matter of fact, out of the dozen or so learners in the class, at most three could read proficiently. The harsh reality of all of this was hard to swallow and will be the biggest emotional hurdle I will have to overcome here. Being in such a situation, however, provides many instances for extremely rewarding experiences. The second grader went from being incredibly distracted and unwilling to learn to being focused and attempting the work in front of him, leaving me with a great feeling of hope and satisfaction.

After lunch, I went into the 8^th grade classroom to finish the day. Much to my surprise, the teacher gave me only the most basic instructions on what to do with the kids for the next two hours and left me with the warning that they “need to be kept in line.” The first hour I spent overseeing their completion of a worksheet, where aside from a student introducing himself to me as “Tortoise,” they were respectful and orderly. We finished all our work with about forty five minutes to spare, so I took the time to talk with the students. They taught me some words in Xhosa and Afrikaans, two of the local languages, and we talked about life in the States, life in South Africa, and how the two compare and contrast. The day ended with what has easily become the highlight of my trip. After confessing I knew nothing about cricket, the students explained it to me, even going to the extent of drawing the field on the board. The director of the school came in during this with a big smile on his face and couldn’t resist the opportunity to provide his input as well. Oh, and I’ve decided to let “Tortoise” stick, and while I know the student’s real name I am going to continue to use his self imposed nickname.

I came to South Africa to work at my internship. Now that it has started, normal life here has also begun. I am incredibly excited to get to know CMES and its students.