Let's see, I'll start with last Sunday, the 13th October, when we had our Canadian Thanksgiving dinner and ate a ridiculous amount of chicken, stuffing, Yorkshire puddings...and um...tiramisu (not very Canadian I know, but it was delicious!) All the food was cooked by our volunteer coordinator Irine (her cooking is out of this world!) and Alanna (who is slightly less amazing in the kitchen but tells the BEST stories about her experiences in Africa!). Not only did the Thanksgiving dinner taste amazing but it also helped to raise lots of money for The Happy Africa Foundation THAF.
Later on in the week we also took advantage of our new volunteer Sam, a hairdresser from the UK, and persuaded him to give some of us a trim for charity. We ended up going all out and attempted some avocado and oatmeal face masks. I say 'attempted' because they started slipping off our faces so we had to lie on the ground as the others spooned the mixture on to our faces so it didn't fall off - I don't remember the last time I laughed so much! All the money we raised that evening also went to THAF so we had a great fundraising week overall :)
Every morning at 6 am we've also started jogging or doing circuit training at the local park. Originally it started with just 3 of us (everyone else thought we were crazy for getting up so early) but we've managed to persuade some other volunteers to join us and it has turned in to a bit of a boot camp! It was great training for the Colour Run at Sea Point on Saturday where we ran 5km and then threw lots of coloured paint over each other! IT WAS AMAZINGGGG!
I'm not really going in a chronological order here but on Thursday I went on project in the morning and volunteered with our over 30's volunteer Ervina at the Children of Hope Preschool. Before I went everyone laughed at me because I said I was scared of children (Seriously. Kids are terrifying.) but as soon as the kids saw me they all grabbed a different limb and dragged me in to the preschool. So it wasn't nearly as terrifying as I thought it would be, well it was, but I think I handled it quite well...I only made 3 kids cry because I made them share their toys...but I soon made up for it when I had a kid sitting on each shoulder trying to do the monkey bars. I have to admit that the conditions of the township which the preschool was in came as quite a surprise. I guess Cape Town hides the poverty of the area very well and, as a tourist, it would be easy to ignore the signs of poverty so prevalent in other parts of the city. It was great to get involved in one of the volunteer projects though because I hear so much about them from the other volunteers when they come home. The next project I really want to go to is GAPA (Grandmothers Against Poverty and Aids) because the grandmothers just seems like the most amazing people who are making such a big difference to their communities.
So I think that's all of the events from this week, I just have the weekend to catch you up on now. As you can probably guess, I tried to go sky diving again, for the 4th week running! I had a really good feeling that this would be the week that I finally get to sky dive because the weather was so lovely...but as soon as Sunday came around the wind picked up and sky diving was cancelled again. Needless to say that I have signed up for it again this coming weekend so fingers crossed! Even although I didn't get a chance to go sky diving I still had a great weekend. We went to the colour run early on Saturday morning before going to the Biscuit Mill in the afternoon for some lunch and then to the rugby to see Western Province beat the Lions for the second week in a row. On Sunday we then went to a lovely food and craft market at Hout Bay and I bought some soup. Those of you who know me well will know how much I love soup, so this was quite an important moment (as well as finding porridge in the local supermarket)!
Well that's another week down and 8 more to go!
Sarah x
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