Week 8: A final week in South Africa

Week 8 marked my last week in South Africa and it sure was busy! I had initially planned to use this time solely to train Zhaun, but we still had a lot to prepare for the exhibition. The time would need to be spent working with the students to finish up their projects. Furthermore, we needed to figure out how to handle the three students who had not participated in the extra week of class. On top of that, I had gotten to meet with Mr. Jurgens on the previous Friday and the logistics of the exhibition were starting to come together. These would need to be finalized. All that to say, working with Zhaun would have to be postponed.

The students came in for the robotics class on both Monday and Tuesday. The first item to be completed was the robot dance. Each of the three teams who had come for the extra week were now finishing up their robot's solo dance portion. Once they all finished, we moved on to choreograph and program the end of the dance. It was coming together! The batteries had also been charged and so the robot motors were slightly more powerful. This meant we needed to go through the dance again, re-tuning the motor powers. At the end of class on Tuesday, we had finished the dance and started discussing how the exhibition would go. Each team also recorded themselves to give voices to their robots!

As for the three students, I sat down with them and we discussed how their absence had affected the rest of the class. I decided, however, to give them another chance and lumped them all into Team Yellow. Zhaun would spend all his time working with them, to improve their chances of finishing.

Running in the Dave Spence Memorial Run

During our trip to Addo Elephant National Park, Emily (United States) had managed to convince me to join her and Ms. Solomon, a teacher at Hyde Park Primary School, in running a 10K. I've never been much of a runner but figured it was worth a shot - if we finished within 1.5 hours we would all get medals. That sounded pretty cool! Also, Ms. Solmon had been working very closely with my housemates who were teaching Physical Training (PT) at Hyde Park and they had told me so many great things about her.

Anyway, on Sunday (July 17, 2011) we got picked up by Ms. Solomon at the crack of dawn, and she drove us down to the run. Along the way, she told us about the area and pointed out some landmarks. It was really interesting to hear about these places from the perspective of someone who grew up there!

Soon we arrived and registered - I was still half asleep. We also got to meet some of Ms. Solomon's friends who are also runners like her. As the sun began to rise, the run started and we set off. Keeping a steady pace, we jogged through and got to see some of the township the path took us through. I had never run in something like this - it was fun to experience something new!

Anyway, after around an hour we had made it and ran through the finish line!

It was a lot of fun...though my feet were a bit sore for the next couple of days! We hung around for a while afterwards and even got to buy some soccer jerseys being sold for 10 Rand (less than $2). Afterwards they dropped me off, and Emily and Ms. Solomon went to go sign up for more races!

Masikhule Educare - A Projects Abroad Dirty Weekend

Title: Masikhule Educare - A Projects Abroad Dirty Weekend

Marieke (The Netherlands), who I had gone with to Addo Elephant National Park, had also been planning a service project at the Masikhule care center where she volunteers. They were going to be doing some renovations and painting. In the lingo of Projects Abroad, this is called a Dirty Weekend.

Week 7: A trip to Addo Elephant National Park

Week 7 was my second week without teaching. Thus, I decided to spend it exploring a bit more of South Africa. I went with Onno (The Netherlands), Marieke (The Netherlands), and Emily (United States) to the east coast of South Africa, to Addo Elephant National Park. There we would be able to drive around the park in a sort of self-guided safari. We rented a Renault Koleos from Drive South Africa and come Monday morning were on our way! I have to admit, however, I don't remember much of the eight hour drive there...I slept for most of it. :p

As we got close to Port Elizabeth and Addo Town (situated right next to Addo Elephant National Park), we needed to figure out where we would stay that night. Emily and I called a few places and found a good price at Avoca River Cabins & Luxury Treehouse. Split between the four of us, it was going to cost around just $10 a night! We had some trouble finding it when it got dark and as we pulled in, we could not see much of the scenery.

The hostess was very kind and gave us some leftovers to eat - we hadn't stopped for dinner. From Avoca's office, we drove down to the huts we would be staying in.

A trip up Lion's Head

On Sunday (July 10, 2011), Bilal and I decided to hike up Lion's Head, another peak by Table Mountain. We met up with a friend of his, Meltem, and began our hike up. As with our first trip up Table Mountain, we could see the city below along the hike.

Week 6: Preparations

The school vacation at Hyde Park Primary School was three weeks long. We were only able to get into the school for the first week of it and so I now had two weeks without teaching. Week 6, was the first of these two weeks.

Week 6 served first to give me a breather to catch up on some items. In fact, it was during the first couple days that I did some blog writing. One day at the internet cafe, I also got to meet a Nigerian mechanical engineer! I was just reading some articles to learn a bit about transmissions, which I was curious about that day, only to have the man sitting next to me tap me on the shoulder. As a mechanical engineer, he was able to explain the concepts quite well and we chatted about engines and transmissions for a few hours! Here he is with a car he designed. :)

A trip to Cape Point

On Sunday (July 3, 2011), a couple of us went on a trip to visit Cape Point, which I believe is part of Table Mountain National Park. After a long drive along the coast, we finally arrived and from the parking lot could see the famous Cape of Good Hope.

Week 5: Phase 2

Week 5 marked the beginning of vacation for the students at Hyde Park Primary School. However, all the students in the robotics class had gotten parental permission to sacrifice their first week of break to continue robotics. Now, they would get to design and build robots of their own.

However, I was still a bit unsure about how to guide them into Phase 2. In particular, we needed to come up with some tasks for each team's robot to do. We needed "cool" problems that they could solve with their robots. Furthermore, the problems could not be so technically challenging that the students would need to learn much more - unfortunately, we did not have enough time for that. All that to say, I was struggling to decide on problems that would be good for them.