May the Fourth Be With You: Volunteering with Freewalker

This week has been quite an adventure! Beginning on Monday the roommates (Amaris and Britt) and I teamed up with a local non-profit organization, Freewalker: Volunteer & Adventures for Charity, in their pursuit to improve and develop Kwa-Ford Primary School in New Brighton.

The organization is really cool. It is run by a couple that my roommates (former and current) met through a teacher at Pearson High School-- where several of the roommates have taught. The couple, Jordi and Murray, live in this house in the middle of PE. They have volunteers from all over the world come to their house and stay with them for weeks and months at a time. While the volunteers are with Freewalker they help out with various service projects around the PE area. On the weekends they have the opportunity to participate in discounted adventures with the proceeds going directly back to the non-profit work that Freewalker does with the township schools and other places around PE. They have people coming and going all of the time. People from all over the world are able to serve the schools and other groups in PE through the connections that Freewalker makes. It is a very cool thing that they are doing. Through Jordi and Murray we have met some really cool people from all over the place. It seems like everyone is coming to PE, ZA for something...

So we connected with Freewalker this week to help out at Kwa-Ford Primary. We were able to finish some of the painting that we started several weeks ago as well as paint the walls of Miss Dlanga's classroom. We met Miss Dlanga on our first visit to Kwa-Ford. She is a teacher at the school-- an extremely kind lady who loves kids and seems to really enjoy life. Each time I have seen her she has been quick to let me know she is 60 years old, all while jumping around and running in place-- a very spunky 60! Miss D wanted her classroom bright red with sky blue trim... her wish was Freewalker's command!

All week we worked on her classroom and various other projects around the school including weeding the school garden and getting it ready for Miss D to plant winter crops (Remember: winter here is not very cold). A handful of boys from around the neighborhood came each day to help out. And with each passing day their numbers seemed to grow.

Yesterday, at the end of our work day we were standing around with the boys (about 10 of them) and a soccer match sprang up. Freewalker volunteers vs. Kwa-Ford boys. It was such a blast! Some of those boys are amazing soccer players... their foot work is brilliant. The boys won with 10 seconds on the "clock" making their victory over the adult volunteers all the more sweet. Along with ref-ing the game, Murray took quite a few photos of the event. If I get access to them I will be sure to post for you to see!

One more interesting thing: on Tuesday and Wednesday Murray built a campfire and made everyone roostili, "roosties"-- a sandwich baked over an open fired. He baked bread dough over the fire and we used the biscuit-like bread to make sandwiches. The popular roostie fillings over here are butter, cheese and jam. It sounds like a seriously wrong combo but I tell you, it is seriously delicious.

I have posted photos from the week. Some of the photos were taken by Freewalker. They are captioned. Enjoy!