Hi everybody, we are Ellen and Tina, the current volunteers on the Bonnie People project. Ellen is 22, comes from Holland and is a 5th year medical student. She is volunteering at the project for 2 months and arrived 18th August. Tina is from Germany, is volunteering for 4 weeks and arrived 11th September. We support the teachers at the project and we also organize some special things. Last Wednesday we took the older children (4-6 years) to the birds paradise in Robertson with the money we got from family and friends in Holland and Germany. Ellen also got support from the fund WWvK (www.wereldwijdvoorkinderen.nl). We rent a bus, went there for a morning with 10 kids and 5 teachers, including us. After the tour at the birds farm, we had lunch at the playground.
We are also working with a 14-years old boy called Jason who has dyslexia. We are playing games with him like four-in-a-row and are trying to teach him letters and numbers. On Friday, 16th September, we went shopping for new clothes with him, see here the result.
Especially he was very happy with his new white shoes and the sun glasses. As he felt unobserved he was dancing in the fitting room. It gave us a very special feeling to be able to do this for him.
Currently we are painting the classrooms in yellow and green. The classrooms were really dark before we started and Lee came with the idea to change the colours, so that the kids can feel more comfortable. It's a lot of work because the walls need to be cleaned, sand papered and cleaned again with a special chemical stuff. Before we can paint with the colours we have to paint the walls white for one or more times to hide the dark colours. The children are having their lessons outside at the moment. We'll show you the results as soon as possible!
