Mural Day

Today was the ever-anticipated mural day, where we all worked on a collective mural with six members from each school, on a cape-town landscape themed mural at an orphanage (Nomzamo) in the township of Langa. Emily and I went to Mary Harding early to pick up our six troopers for the day - we weren't totally sure who we would have with us, because there have been a series of absentses lately. We ended up with a group of four boys and two girls. When we arrived at Nomzamo, it was pretty chaotic. I was immediately stressed, but we managed to move through the lines and get outside to where we were to paint. I expected that simple instructions to paint the outlined water, sky, and whale would be enough, but the students needed much more direction.

I had a lot of concerns and worries going into this day - not concerning the abilities of the children, but whether or not they would get along with others from other schools, since they have had a history of being teased because of where they go. By the end of the day, it was evident that nobody had been made fun of, and in fact, one of our boys got the number of a girl from another school (!) The first thing I noticed when I brought our group in was that they immediately found the room where the orphaned babies were and were fascinated. They seemed to have a natural instinct for taking care of something else.

Back to the mural - some of the kids needed constant redirection as to where to paint and how to paint. It was frustrating at times, and I found myself doing some things for them in attempts to model and still getting frustrated. I think that after they saw what the other kids were doing, they started picking up on it and got into the swing of things. Delegating jobs constantly to all members was also difficult - mainly because we had to judge skill level, height, and what would be the most gratifying for him/her. The part we had been assigned to do was part of an ocean scene, depicting the body of a whale. We decided to paint the whale bright orange and the group would be allowed to add different water-themed creatures after that. These kids love to paint. It seems evident to me that they never had enough time to fully explore all of their painting potentials, so when met with the option of a large canvas, they just wanted to paint whatever - we had kids starting to paint flowers above the ocean, hearts, and a HUGE flock of birds in one corner. I found myself asking the kids several times, "now, do you find flowers above the ocean?" I felt bad not letting them paint whatever they wanted, but maybe it was good to impose restrictions on them?

Either way, all of the kids seemed to be having an amazing time, although one of our girls went somewhere and started sleeping half-way through the day (questionable). By the end of the day, after we had seen a song and dance performance, been DJ'ed out, covered an extra wall with spontaneous joy, and eaten hamburgers, the kids were thoroughly satisfied. One boy couldn't stop saying thank-you :)

Tomorrow is our last day at placement. Tonight we had a dinner with everybody as a farewell sort of deal - it was preeettty good. Not going to lie, very tired. Missing everyone back home

goodnight, <3>

anwar