2fer!

You get 2 posts today, lucky you (the other one was mostly finished so...).

Oh, by the way, if you hadn't figured it out, township = projects. FYI.

I visited the School for the Deaf on Wednesday. Really interesting to see. The Vice-Principal says that since the kids can't hear and therefore can't communicate, a lot of parents just don't pay much attention to them early on. Sad. They teach sign language in the early classes, but it's really hard for the kids to learn english/writing, especially coming from a multi-lingual culture. Imagine that your family speaks Zulu at home, which you can't hear. You start to pick up sign language at school- which is based on English. To learn to read and write, you basically have to memorize it all, because you can't sound it out like hearing people do. Sign language really has no association with the sounds of English. Then for your matriculation exams (for graduation and university admission), you have to read and write in English. Very hard. Only about 2% go on to university. We saw a monkey while we were there, on the bright side! Big and light colored, just hopped down from a tree.

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Yesterday the kids next door (there are a lot of them) were really anxious for me to come out and play, so I went out after dinner (before it got dark) to run around in the streets with all of them hanging off of me. Seriously- they fight over who gets to hold my hand. We went and recruited some other white girls (we are the only whiteys in the neighborhood) to play. We wandered around for a while and they laughed at my poor attempts at Zulu and I tried to figure out who actually lived next door to me. After my friends ended up going elsewhere to do homework, I had the whole flock of kids (probably like 8, all around age 7) to go back down to our street with. We walked back to our street, and past a couple of scraggly dogs. A quick explanation: Dogs here are not pets, people can't afford to look after animals, so dogs are mangy and skinny and mean, and usually act as watchdogs. There really isn't anyone to look after most of them. Anyway, we walk past these dogs and a couple of the kids start barking at them. The dogs barked back and I was kind of like, "Haha, the dog is talking to you!" but then the dogs started chasing us! The kids started running, fast, so I followed suit and booked it. The people at the house above us were cracking up at the white girl running for her life with all these kids, I'm sure it was a hilarious sight. But then one of the smaller girls fell down and started crying. I turned to see her on the ground with a dog over her and I was terrified that the dog had bitten her, but he just sniffed at her and once satisfied we were out of his territory, went on his way. I went over to her, and she was crying, so I brushed her off and checked her over. She had scraped her elbow pretty badly, but was otherwise unharmed. I took her back and got some first aid stuff from my room (thanks grandma!) and cleaned her up and slapped a band-aid on it. I was amazed that she didn't even flinch when I wiped the scrape with an alcohol pad- in fact she was laughing at the toddler walking around beside us. All was well. Actually a funny experience in retrospect.