If you don't know Graham & Nicola but are interested in the work they are doing in South Africa they would be very pleased to hear from you and let you know more - their email address is thewhites@granicsa.co.uk.
Graham and Nicola’s News Letter March 2008
Hello everyone we hope you are all keeping well.
We have a very busy start to 2008. As you may remember we are now running a bridging programme for brighter school leavers from disadvantaged backgrounds to give them the skills they need to get them on a more equal footing with their peers in South Africa.
In January a team, including Jo, from Mosaic church in Sheffield came for the start of the programme and ran an introductory camp for us. The Sheffield team were fantastic and worked really hard to get alongside our students as well as teaching basketball, art, drama and singing.
Everyone missed the Sheffield team when they left but we managed to buckle down to some serious study and Graham started teaching computing 4 days a week while Nicola has been working with Karl to run the programme. Nicola has been busy organising the life skills training, arranging the trainers and finding material which will meet our needs. She has also had her first taste of teaching – running an English course as a second language lesson and teaching interview and CV skills. We are still waiting to get some dictionaries so she had to explain every word that came up that the students didn’t understand.
Graham is working very hard preparing and teaching computer skills. He is very grateful that it is not so hot this summer as last, as he is squashed into a small room with 10 PCs. The course is going well though Graham has to cope with a wide range of abilities in each group, not only with the aptitude the students have for computing but also with their understanding of English. Progress has not been as good as hoped, so we are planning to stream the groups after Easter.
Our biggest issue so far this year has been power. In January this year South Africa started running out of power and all through January we had load shedding – power cuts when there is not enough electricity to go round. These power cuts are meant to follow a planned schedule but we have not been able to see much similarity between the published schedule and what actually happens. Sometimes Nicola has to start work without a cup of tea when there is no power at breakfast time! As you can imagine teaching computing without electricity does present a few major challenges.
On top of this we have also had many problems with the computers. The computers we are using are refurbished Pentium IIIs and have proved to be unreliable. The engineers have been on site most weeks so it has been very stressful for the computer trainer!
It has not all been bad though. We have a great group of students and are gradually getting to know them better. It has also been great to get to know Karl and Josephine Malotane our new team members, so we are now a team of 8 staff.
On a personal level we have started running a home cell in our church – known as a Life Group here. We have also said goodbye to good friends who are off to Tunisia. We had a great time with Jo while she was here and we managed a lovely weekend break in the Maluti Mountains at a town called Clarens. We are hoping to go to Lesotho over Easter and visit Swaziland as well.
We can’t really believe that our time here is nearly over – we are meant to be coming back to the UK in July. It will be very sad to leave here but financially speaking we just cannot see anyway of staying. In fact we still have more funds to raise for these 2 years.
Please pray for
- That the computers stop breaking down
- That we find good staff to take over from us
- For the students on our course that they find jobs and/or study courses to go to after our Skills for Life course
- For the continued safety of the training centre and everyone in it
We have also updated our website
www.granicsa.co.uk with recent photos in the “Communication and Net2Work” and “Skills for Life camp” photo albums.
Do take a look at these.
With lots of love
Graham and Nicola
