The Story Continues

So I’ve just about hit the one-month mark in being here, although it doesn’t seem that way. My roommate Kate and I just went on a lovely walk around the industrial District 6 area and then back into an incredible marshy wooded area surrounding the observatory – apparently there is an actual observatory in Obs (with a ‘large telescope’ as it says on the gate), except it isn’t open to the public. In some sense I do wish that I were here for the summer months instead, but then the colours are so beautiful and everything so lush in winter that I really can’t complain.
Just this past week I’ve picked up a second internship at the Cape Town Child Welfare Centre here. My work at Astra continues, however right now I only have one client that I am working with and seem to have a heck of a lot of free time on my hands. And actually it’s sort of great that I ventured to do more because my work at the Welfare Centre is looking to be very promising. The centre is sort of like a huge mediator in child services. They do referrals with everything from adoption to foster care placement to sexual abuse counseling to general therapy to medical treatment. Traditionally they refer children in need of counseling to the Red Cross here. However, there is currently a six month waiting list for this, thus the centre is in dire need of a therapist. They are very excited to have me working with them, as I am as well, only I am a little bit of a nervous wreck too. Here I am, not even have completed my undergrad, never had a professional counseling job, and now I am all of a sudden the primary therapist for this organization!! Don’t tell anyone but I really feel like I have no idea what I am doing!
It’s really different working with kids, especially here. For the most part children don’t know how exactly to express their feelings – either they’ve never been asked to or have been taught not to. So it’s not like I can sit down with them and say tell me all your problems, you really have to be creative and use alternative methods to get them to communicate with you. I am also worried because I will only be able to work them until I leave in August. It takes a while to build a relationship and earn the trust of a client; this is going to be difficult as time is not on my side. Apprehensions aside though, I am very eager to begin at the centre -- hopefully this will happen later in the week, so far I have just been reviewing files and doing prep work for my sessions.
This past Saturday there was a food and wine festival – sort of like a ‘taste of the town’ type deal where all the well-established restaurants/ wineries come together and present their best. There was a R95 door cover (about USD12), which I guess you could say was worth it. Things ended up being much pricier inside than I was anticipating, but oh well, it was neat to experience the supposed finest of Cape Town, and the unlimited wine tasting was awesome.
Another somewhat new development is a community garden project that I am helping to head up. We are called MUHD (Model Urban Harvest Development) and we are “a volunteer project assisting to create sustainable gardens in undeveloped communities” (our new mission statement as of this evening). Basically we have 2 huge plots of land in 2 of the different townships in Cape Town – Nyanga and Langa – and sufficient interest from the communities to get started. We hope to help begin the gardens and work to educate the communities (and ourselves) so that eventually the projects can become completely sustainable and independently run. We also hope to implement gardening programs in some of the surrounding schools so that the kids can then go home and either work on an existing garden or start one of their own. Right now we are fundraising for tools, seedlings, manure, worm bins, and electricity for irrigation systems. I am working on a t-shirt design right now, and hopefully the profit from the shirt sales will give us a little bit of a start.
I haven’t done anything design related since high school and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I went down to the local art supplies shop the other day and picked up a sketchpad and some charcoal pencils. I have a lot of down time in the evenings and find myself longing to create. Also in the evenings I am reading ‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster Wallace. I am only about 50 pages into it but I definitely like it – it’s so bazaar and brilliant. Has anyone read it?
Tomorrow I am going into work around 8 (earlier than the usual 9) to start an English reading group with some of the grade 4 students at Astra. After that I have a therapy session and then come home for lunch. In the late afternoon I am hoping to hit up some of the different merchants in Obs and see if I can rally any support for the gardens, wish me luck =)