Summer Fellows relax with an overview of Cape Town

After our week at camp and weekend wine tasting and hiking around Cape Point, we were anxiously looking forward to the resumption of school at LEAP. The week took different directions for team members and, therefore, my report will be quite general in regards to the activities of the group and more specific in regards to mine. I assume you are getting individual reports from team members. Monday morning began with a meeting at LEAP with the TWA team, John Gilmour, Fozia, and Bonisile.

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I survived my first overnight camp experience in 45 years! It was great fun, intense and very social. The LEAP students were from the 12th grade class. Only a few didn’t or couldn’t come.
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Every morning a team meeting was held to discuss any logistical issues and go over the schedule for the day, as well as begin with any thoughts about what we expected we might encounter that day. At the end of each day, we had group reflection time to talk about our observations, feelings and responses to the day’s experience.

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I will end with the quote with which I began the first team meeting on the July 1, the first day of orientation. It is on the wall in John’s office, and it captured me completely the moment I walked in. I hold it up as the banner cry for this first project, and indeed for my own participation in this journey:
“If you’ve come here to help me, then you are wasting your time.
But if your liberation is bound up with my liberation, then let’s begin.”
We have begun.

One of the critical outcomes of this pilot project that CAN be prescribed is the need to document the project and its processes and systems that develop over the next two months. Each team member will be reporting back to his or her faculty sponsor, which will be shared with TWA. Additionally, each week Jim or Jack will send a coordinator’s report. A weekly update from each team area (education, Green MBA and psych) will be sent to Amy regarding the projects for that week, including descriptions of the project(s) as well as observations and reflections.

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TWA and the LEAP School are seriously committed to supporting our fellows while they are in-country and afterward, and we have a multi-tiered framework in place to give them as much support as possible. Amy Schoew, TWA Executive Director, was on-site for the launch of the program (for 3 days prior to the program start through the end of the first week). Darcy Campbell, a professor of education at SFSU and a teacher trainer and mentor, accompanied Amy and was instrumental in assisting with the facilitation of group reflection and discussion.

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At the end of every day at camp next week, John, Bonisile and Fozia Safodien, the Director of Life Orientation at LEAP, will have a group session with TWA fellows to reflect and process with the team as part of their orientation into the LEAP School program. They will be learning about the LEAP School program in an extremely hands-on experience.

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We had as much interaction with LEAP School students as could be arranged given the holiday schedule, but next week’s four-day camp with the Grade 12 students will be a wonderful and thoughtful introduction to more of the learners. On July 14, the week after TWA fellows return from camp, the LEAP School will resume and students will be back in classes. During this time the TWA fellows will also visit and participate in the local primary schools from which most of the LEAP students come so that the fellows can see how incredibly difficult the learning environment is for these students and what academic preparation (or lack thereof) they arrive with at the LEAP School as 9th graders.

With the majority of our team arrived by June 30, the Teach with Africa July/August 2008 Program in Cape Town began with a trip up famed Table Mountain, for our first team meeting with John Gilmour, founder of The LEAP School, and Bonisile Ntlemeza, assistant director of life orientation. John specifically chose to start the entire program overlooking on the city centre and outlying suburbs, to give the students a geographical context for the economic, historical and social issues they will encounter. The spectacular beauty of Cape Town, the bays, the mountain ranges, and the landscapes was the beginning of this unique experience that is uniquely Africa, which John describes as “having the beauty and the pain of Africa always in your face.”

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Accommodations at Howard’s End Manor are working well so far, although the food budget will need to be adjusted (increased) and we are working on projecting realistic food costs. Also, SIM cards from the mobile stores in South Africa do not work in most (nearly all) US cellular phone models, and since we required that the team members have cellular phone for safety reasons, the team members had to purchase cell phones for their two-month stay.

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