The Information Team

The information team consists of 15 youth, from 17 to 25 years, who have all dropped out of school early due to early pregnancy, some have no money for school fees, some live to far away from the school and have no means of transportation, others had to stay at home to make money for their family... The list of reasons is long, and they all have a story to tell. Luckily, they are now members of BUIYSAP, and about half of these will get to go back to school in the start of next year with their school fees paid for by the organisation. The others get training in youth leadership, in life planning skills and most importantly they get to play roles in their local community through the work BUIYSAP does there. We got to know these 15 youth last week when they stayed at the centre with us where we did a workshop together with them. It was a great experience to facilitate a workshop, something neither Malaika or I had tried before, and truth be told we only realised last minute that we were the ones to actually lead the whole workshop, so we had to use the great method of improvisation. It worked out quite well, although the biggest challenge was the fact that most of the youth were too shy to speak up in English. You could hear them discussing amongst each other in Ndebele, and the minute we started asking them questions in English, they would go quiet. We tried to remind them that English is not our mother tounge either, but we are not quite sure they believed us. During the evaluation I was told it was hard to understand my “tone”, and that I was speaking too quickly. Wise words, some might say.

It was a rather intense week having 15 youth staying with us, although a lot of fun. They would, by their own choice, get up at about 4:30 am to make a fire and start boiling water for the “showers” and by 07 am the bread was baked in a pot over the fire and 15 plates was dished up with the exact same size of bread in each plate. 6.30 is the absolute earliest I can allow myself to wake up, so I did my best to be ready on time.
One of the first things the youth did when they arrived, was to wash their clothes. Talita, our supervisor, explained to us that a lot of the them probably don’t have soap at home, so BUIYSAP always has detergent, soap and body lotion at disposal when they have workshops, in this way at least they are all able to look decent while they are there. It made me think about my own clothes, most of them have a spot here and there but I have been thinking that as I’m out in the middle of the bush, it surely cannot matter that much. It probably does to some of them.
It also made me realise how many things you just would not think about if you were to start your own project or organisation without the involvement of locals (probably not very likely, but still), how many small things that can make a difference if you know and are aware of the cultural attributes in a new country.

Talita had told us that a lot of the youth were not very experienced with using a computer, so we thought we would do some training with them one of the nights. Before starting, we asked how many had tried to use a computer before. 3 out of 15 raised their hand. So, we started from scratch, showing them what button to press to start up the computer, how you open a program, and how to write in Word. The excitement some of them were showing when they had written their own name in Word! We were only able to use four of the computers as the generator wasn’t working too well, so they were four on each computer, helping each other finding the letters, and slowly starting to understand how to make a capital letter, a comma etc… During our evaluation on the last day, every single one of them mentioned how great it was that they now knew how to start and operate a computer. It was quite touching to hear them say this!