Part Seventeen: Back at Otjikondo (14th – 31st January)

I can’t believe that is my second term out of three working at Otjikondo and I’ve already had one out of two holidays – the time seems to be flying past and I’m sure it will only fly faster.

The weekend before the children arrived was spent doing washing, tidying and getting everything sorted for the start of term – this included sweeping the vast amount of bat poo from the Art room. I was also very trusting and let Chelcie cut my hair, luckily she was trustworthy and I have been left with some hair. We gave Luise a tour of the school and bombarded her with information about what she could expect once term started. We have also been joined by another volunteer called Rachel from England, who is English and 59. She has come for a month and has been twice previously. The children all arrived on the Monday and we spent the day going around the hostels, helping get things ready and welcoming the children back. It was so lovely to see them all again, we have both massively missed them, and it was very exciting to meet all the new children. The new G1s are so CUTE and really little. Andrew who was the smallest boy in the school last year has been joined by his younger brother – Solomo, and they are identical although Solomo is slightly taller. The pair of them are so adorable.

School started with an assembly in the Hans Seidal Hall where all the teachers are introduced and then all the new children. All the new children are then given a teddy of some sort to help them settle into boarding life – another special Otjikondo way. For the first week I was teaching Grade 4 as their teacher was still on maternity leave. This was quite challenging as I wasn’t given anything specific to do with them but told to occupy them with something useful! Their class is also massive – 35 due to 3 new children (Izaura who wants to be called Natasha and twins called Marlin and Martin) as well as 6 children who have moved from Wings. It’s quite a jump for them moving from a class of 12 to a class of 35 and it definitely takes a while to get them all to be quiet. I spent the week helping them cover their exercise books, doing mental maths, spelling competitions, English exercises, extra PT classes and teaching them elementary Spanish which they loved. When I came to mark a writing exercise on “My Christmas Holiday” I got a couple of shocks. The majority wrote about their Christmas day, time on a farm, visits to family, travels to other parts of Namibia, what I would have typically expected. However, when marking one boy’s exercise he wrote how he was so cross with the man who had beaten his friend and how he had gone to visit his friend in hospital. More shocking was another boy’s account of how his family had just been about to leave the farm when someone had hung themselves on a tree. I can’t say this is what I expected to read at all but as Gilly says you never know what happens to them in the holidays. The thing that I found most shocking was how they seemed just to slip it into their writing and then just carry on as if it wasn’t something massively scandalous or scary.

The second week of term I became Mr Kalundu as he went to Windhoek for a week. This entailed teaching Maths to Grade 5 and Science, Maths, Life Skills and Agriculture to Grades 5 – 7. Anyone who knows me would think that Otjikondo are crazy to put me in charge of teaching this but I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT. I had one of my most enjoyable and satisfying weeks at Otjikondo so far. I loved teaching academic subjects and I really enjoyed teaching the older grades. I have always thought that I would want to teach lower primary, around Grade 3, but I am now properly considering teaching upper primary and specialising in one or two subjects. The children really wanted to learn and they were old enough to be able to listen and then ask intelligent questions so it wasn’t just me standing talking at the front. I had to learn to write on the chalk board after my white board pen stopped working which was pretty horrendous but didn’t kill me. I have now become Mrs Vermaak as she has gone on a conference so I am teaching Maths to Grades 6 and 7. I am doing Approximation and Estimation with the Grade 6’s and Factors with the Grade 7s. Today the Head Girl, Kenisha, came up to me after the lesson and told me what a good teacher I was – this meant the world to me.

I made my first cake in Africa as it was Rachel’s 59^th birthday so I made bobotie and then a chocolate cake. I was very anxious about how this would turn out as I didn’t have a measuring jug and the scales I borrowed from Gilly were the old fashioned sort and therefore not very accurate. Luckily it turned out well and we had a really lovely birthday supper. We had decorated the kitchen with bunting and made a happy birthday banner.

The Button Box: We have had first round auditions which were incredibly exciting and we are now half way through our second round of auditions. This is something that I have been looking forward to ever since I got my information pack from Project Trust about what my job at Project Trust would entail – putting on my own musical. We have already cast all the main parts and the solo parts and now are only left with choosing our chorus. We have nine solo parts and are looking for a chorus of 20 to support them. We have already narrowed them down and they are returning to sing and dance for us on Friday so I will keep you updated.

Athletics: This is Athletics term and since we’ve returned there has been a competitive air running through the school. Every member of the school is either in the Yellow Team (me and Rachel) or the Green Team (Chelcie and Luise), every year but one the Green team has won at Sports day but I have been saying continuously that the year that I am here will be the year that this changes. We have been training so hard every afternoon. I was put in charge of getting the older children fit and working with the relay teams. This meant that at the beginning of the term I was absolutely crippled. Having done no exercise what so ever for the last six weeks my body went into shock and slight melt down! We also went for cross country runs with the older ones before they had supper. Sports day is incredibly important and the rivalry is massive between teachers and pupils alike. All the pupils were given wool in their team colour so everyone was sporting yellow/green bracelets and necklaces as well as having braids in their hair. I was firmly branded in the yellow team with my yellow watch on my right hand, a yellow friendship bracelet on my left and then a braid in my hair done by Chelcie.

Sports Day: The most incredible day. My alarm went off at 5:40 and after a quick breakfast we headed for the school. I had a yellow star on my face and I have written GREEN on Chelcie’s face (we had missed our anniversary face paint for January so this was our face painting day instead). My first job was to hand out all the name badges to the yellow team and I branded them all with a yellow star on their forehead! We then marched out to the sports field followed by the enemy – the green team. The sports pitch looked incredible – the day before they had painted all the lines on for the races, put up bunting around the edges and erected gazebos and umbrellas for shade. My job for the day was timekeeping and in particular I had to time the person who came 2^nd in each race. This was easy for the long distance races but slightly more pressurized on the 80m sprints as they would come out of nowhere and I would have to spot who was coming second. It was a really good job to get as it meant that I got to watch all the races, coach the children before the long distance races and I had a pretty good view of all the other events. The atmosphere was unbelievable all day – each team had a tent where all the children sat when they weren’t competing and they were joined by their parents dressed in their child’s team colour. All the children were in little blue shorts and either a very vibrant yellow tshirt or a green one. They sang all day team songs and the parents got very competitive in their singing and dancing. It was soon incredibly hot (the previous evening it was 36˚C at 6:30 in the shade) but the children were very good at doing their best – even when the number of laps for the 800m was miscalculated and they all ended up running 1100m! The end of the events came and it was time for the relay races – for the younger ones there were 6 races and yellow won 5 of them. By this time I was sooo over excited that I was jumping up and down laughing uncontrollably which amused the older ones who thought I was going crazy! The relays for the older ones didn’t go quite as well but we still won a couple and that was the end of the events. I knew that we had done well but I wasn’t sure we had done enough – I thought we could have done with winning more of the older relay races. I wandered down the pitch for prize giving where I was spotted by Mr Hawaxb who told me it was my turn to run! The parents have two relay races – one for the mothers and the other for the fathers and they wanted me to run for the mothers! I found this distinctly unamusing as a) I can’t sprint and b) it was 3:15 and scorchingly hot however I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Luckily I won my 100m and we won overall so I didn’t embarrass myself! It was then time for prize giving: first of all certificates were given out for the best girl and boy for each year group. Out of 14 children 11 were yellow children and my hopes rose. They then announced the winning team and...............................WE WON! It was so incredible and all the children were so happy. We were given a massive trophy and we paraded up to the dining room where they were rewarded with chocolate icecream. It was a marvellous day which didn’t actually have much to do with winning but the atmosphere throughout the day. The only bad thing was when the parents left and we had some very unhappy six year olds who wanted to stay with their parents. I had one little boy who I was having to physically restrain with all my strength as he screamed for his Mummy and kicked and fought me to run away. It broke my heart.

Environmental English: Chelcie and I have been doing environmental English supposedly every day with 12 of the Grade Ones. Some of them have very little English and this is to help them with their vocabulary, so every session we do 5 new words. For example: head, nose, mouth, ears and eyes. This was all okay although they confused the sounds for ears and eyes. So I would say point to your eye and they would, then I would say point to your mouth and this was fine and then I would say point to your eye and then they might point to their ear. I have also done a bit of phonics teaching with the Grade Ones and I think I will do a bit more of this when my schedule is back to normal. Chelcie and I get to sponsor a child from Grade One so as awful as it sounds we have been vetting the children to choose which one we want! I feel I should just blindly choose from the list but....I have narrowed it down to a couple of them. Some were taken out straight away as I feel I can’t sponsor an African child called Sam! I think I’ve made my decision but I will let the suspense build and release the name of my child in my next entry! It really made me laugh reading through my little book that  my friends wrote in before I came away – 90% of the messages say don’t come back with a child and I’m going to even if it’s not in the way they meant!

Yesterday I had a moment when I find it really hard to be in Africa rather that in England. We are carrying on with Athletics in the afternoon with about 60 children who are representing Otjikondo at Outjo next Friday where we go for an athletics match to compete against 5 other schools. We were doing high jump and Damian had a crashing fall. He totally over jumped and missed the mats completely landing on his head. At first I thought he had knocked himself out but then he started making this awful animalistic groan, he was writhing about so I knew he hadn’t damaged his spine but I made him stay still on the floor and tears were just pouring from his eyes. I sent one of the older boys to get Mr Hawaxab and he came over but after he saw that Damian wasn’t seriously injured he went back over to his sprints session. After a while I got him to sit up and then slowly I walked him over to the clinic. He was very dizzy and I was properly supporting him. We don’t have an actual trained nurse in residence but we have the school “nurse” who was trained by a visiting nurse a couple of years ago. She got two girls to wash his head where it was cut, put some ointment on the cut, gave him two pills and sent him to the hostel to lie down. I felt so helpless as I didn’t want to leave him alone as I thought he might be concussed as he was still very dizzy. I walked him back to the hostel and then told Stanley that he had to check on him every half an hour to see how he felt, how dizzy he was and if he had double vision or anything. Luckily today he is absolutely fine but I felt very responsible last night and I wasn’t happy with how he was looked after.

I really don’t understand how but...it’s the end of January (I left home 5 months ago today) so record time: I have read 17 books (I would recommend The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins and Afterwards by Rosamund Lipton, both of which absolutely gripped me), I have sent 12 letters and received 11 so another win to me, competed in one relay race, discovered a passion for teaching science and maths (aghhhhhhhhh) and won one incredibly competitive sports day!

MASSIVE CONGRATULATIONS to Emma who has won a history competition and is heading off to Poland at some point as her prize – I am so proud of her as she has been working like an absolute Trojan! This is a dedication to Qwirkle who disappeared off over a month ago and has yet to been seen so if you have my cat please give him back as his brother is missing him and apparently is getting very fat. A big thank you to Godmother Katie to my parcel – the tangfastics disappeared very quickly and Chelcie didn’t get a share! I really hope that everyone who has gone off on their own travels this month is having an amazing time and that you are all sage. Love as usual to absolutely everyone, I’m missing you all although still having the best time ever despite losing the ability to sleep again. Last night I had horrendous nightmares of centipedes coming up the side of my bed and crawling over me and my blanket. I thought that I had actually stabbed a scorpion last night but when I couldn’t find the knife this morning I ascertained that it must have been a dream although in the middle of the night it was very real! Gilly has told me that I should try having a stiff drink before I go to bed?!

Lots and lots of love

Ottilie xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx