050213, Tuesday, Reading Hut sessions

Afekile

Yesterday morning I had to attend a community meeting in the rain and on my way back I went to the Reading Hut to organize some new books.  When I arrived there, Mhleli was standing outside in the rain.  Now Mhleli, about 7 years old is a boy who lives on the hill and one of the Reading Hut's most frequent visitors.  He is also the only one so far who has been giving me some problems.  He'd want to colour in but then really just waste the colouring books a bit, mechanically colouring the whole picture with only one colour, having no regard for the lines, not even looking where he’s colouring and then just work through the pages.  If I ask him to do something like put the books back neatly, he’ll just refuse and swear at the other children. 

So when he was standing there, skipping school because of the rain he says, I decided to let him in and spend some quality one-on-one time.  I gave him some lessons on trying to stay inside the lines and use different colours.  When he finished a picture I told him to write his name, which he didn’t really know how, so I had to write it for him to copy.  He then wanted me to write his surname as well.  When he was finished with that he started practising his name on the mini blackboard I painted on the wall and continued to write the numbers 1 – 10.  He had a lot of them the wrong way around but he kept on until the board was about full. 

Today I walked up there again, and the only person who came for about an hour before anyone else, was Afekile, a 9 year old girl in grade 2 who lives just below the Reading Hut. She was one of the kids who since the beginning, I knew the Reading Hut could have a potentially great impact on, because her 2 older brothers Buyana and Aphiwe used to come and visit me all the time at my tent and their English improved quite a bit, while Afekile always had to stay at home.  Now she comes to visit the Reading Hut every chance she gets because it's so close to her home.  She really doesn’t speak much English at all, only knows some basic nouns and not much else. God was super kind to bless us today with some very valuable time together.

Spending one-on-one time with these kids really helps to see exactly what their levels are and what great needs they have.  Afekile kind of knows the alphabet verbally and knows most of the letters, but still there are many she doesn’t know at all.  I think today was the first time someone showed her that W and X are in fact two different letters.  The 2 together must have sounded to her like ‘double-ex’  and she thought that was the name for W, whereas she didn’t have a clue about what the X was.  LMNO and some other letters, totally confused her as well.

Very thankfully I received an alphabet puzzle-set today, (thanks Joy!!) with the letter and a picture next to it. This was a great help to use with Afekile and I think she now knows a whole lot more about the alphabet. 

Of course I realized then that she actually couldn’t read at all, which previously I had assumed that she could at least read basic words.  First I showed her exactly which books she should look at (There are some graded Xhosa books from 1 – 4, Thanks Oxford publishers!!!) and that they differ in difficulty.  (I also wanted her to see that there are different numbers, so in future she would aid me in keeping them a bit organized, because kids just come, grab a bunch of books and shove them in anywhere else.  

I then  went back to even more basic books, there are a few very basic Xhosa alphabet books teaching colours, numbers, alphabet etc.  So we looked at the colour book and I showed her basically how to read a word by breaking the word into parts.  I think there is more we could do in this line, with more pictures and labelling familiar objects.  Anyway, I could see that Afekile was able to learn and that her lack of knowledge only stemmed from not being taught properly. 

A little later some older girls arrived.  Some of them could actually read a bit of English and they hung around till I closed the place at 5:30.  I was also impressed that somehow things were running even more like a real library, people putting books back neatly where they found them and speaking in low voices.  When the little kids are there I constantly have to remind them to whisper cause the get quite loud.  It looks like I can teach a few individuals the basic etiquette and when other kids come they tend to spread the way of doing things.  Everything is actually going much better than I anticipated and I feel God’s blessing on this whole project!  Thank You Father!  May Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven!