March 17th, 2009

What’s been going on?

It has been way too long since the last post, so here is an overview of what has been going on.

First a little update about the projects I am currently working on:

The Valombola Kindergarden

With the kindergarden things are going much better than last year. We have started teaching phonetics & the children are really starting to get how reading works. They can already read simple words like “cat”, something that I think has never been achieved on the kindergarden before.
Besides the phounetics we have a much stricter time table now and make sure that the children play more as well. We do both educational (puzzles, connect 4, etc) and entertaining (building blocks, stuffed animals) with them and Anna has been doing a fare amount of art with them as well.

Brightstart Montessori
At the Brightstart Montessori I am doing technical drawing with the grade 8 children. This is going great! My small class picks up on the geometry fast and I have even been learning them basic Pythagoras. Even though I might not be very necessary at Brightstart I still really enjoy this project.

Windhoek EXPO
I am helping out a bit with the organization of the Lüderitz stand in the EXPO held in Windhoek in May. I am assisting in reprinting a book about Lüderitz and helping out where ever I can.

Buchter News
The Buchter News is improving with every month. In fool colour now, with a nice design the people of Lüderitz seem to be enthusiastic about the changes we have made. The website is getting there now as well, although it has proven to be quite a lot of work to get it exactly how I want and to make sure that the new volunteers can easily maintain it. I am hoping to launch it this month, even if it might not be completely finished. At least we can already put the news on it.

That’s it for the projects, so here is a little about what has been going on lately:

Our desk officer came to visit us a couple of weeks ago, and I think he left with a positive impression about the project. This is especially important since a lot of things might be changing next year: NamDeb might stop sponsoring, the Buchter News computer is to old to run the software etc. I think that without the full support of Project Trust it might be hard to run this project.
Anyway, we had a nice time with John the desk officer, although a bit short - one day basically. He took us out to dinner which is always a treat.

And it was my birthday on the 10th of march which was celebrated in the kindergarden with the children singing happy birthday, and that night in the pub with Anna, Paddy & Jacob. For my birthday they got me a pipe and the necessary tobacco so I can complete my pirate image =)

Last weekend we celebrated my birthday with the same crew but now reinforced by the two neighbours Justine & Goisha. We did this by camping at Diaz Point. Even though I was sick most of the first night we had a great time with lots of sunburn, braais & swimming. We ended the weekend with a two hours hunt after a manta ray (with self made spears), but unfortunately we never caught it although we spotted it plenty of times.

That’s it for now, I’ll try to keep up the writing for now on & I can’t believe how fast the time is going!

Cheers Hidde

Tags: Birthday, Büchter News, Desk Officer, EXPO, Project Trust, Projects, Valombola

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