Africa so far

To get into the African groove I decided, before we got into any serious learning per se, to YouTube Africa Dance. This led to a brilliant morning of walking, or shall we say dancing, in somebody else’s bare feet.

The kids found a few videos that took them step by step through a dance set to the hypnotic pulse of an African drum. Eli really just got lost in the music, which I kind of feel is true to the style.

The girls took the steps, or twists, a little more seriously.

Lilly ended up being quite the hip wiggler.

Eli found a video that taught you to play the drum, and, as we didn’t have one handy he improvised with a toy basket.

We also read a beautiful picture book called Natemba which is about a orphaned baby Vervet monkey and her journey through the African wilderness to find her family. I loved it because it introduced the feel of the Country, the look of the animals that roam it, but it also had an important conservation message to tell and one that didn’t paint all humans as evil but as part of a chain of helping hands to save a gorgeous little life.

The Author and Illustrator of Natemba is Annette lodge and is a local, yay whoo! for local talent.

Our kids had a go at water colour illustrations like the ones we found in the book. I asked them to choose one particular animal as the focus, then they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by choice and also we can go to the library and research the one they chose. Lilly chose the zebra.

Lani painted her version of the heart-warming reunion when the little vervet monkey found her family.

Eli painted a giraffe. We then looked up each of their animals on YouTube just so we could see them moving around, hear their sounds and in Eli’s case watch them fight, he now thinks giraffes are really hard core.

They all wrote down observations from the footage as well, only I have misplaced it at the moment, never mind this post is long enough and Eli’s mostly said “….and then the giraffe whipped his neck around and they bashed their heads again….” and so on, you can imagine.

We watched a documentary from the library called Families of Ghana that follows a day in the life of two children, 8 year old Deborah and 10 year old Emmanuel. Deborah lives in a poor rural community in a house full of extended family. Her life, especially the skill and effort required to pull off her daily tasks intrigued the kids. Emmanuel lives in the capital and the fact that he had a bed and running water made him just like them apparently. It’s funny, I don’t really know what they were expecting to see when we first started looking at kids around the world, maybe they thought that some countries were full of kids with magical powers or maybe they thought we would find the land of the giants, but overall their most repeated comment has been “They are just like me”

That is till we watched Deborah, her life looked hard. To be fair all we have looked at so far has been North America and South America and I know there is hardship there too, and they did get to see tribal life in South America but all the documentaries show beaming children splashing in rainforest rivers. Not trekking for hours through the desert just to get water like Deborah.

They had a lot of respect for her water balancing skills and asked to give it a go.

Lani filling up our family’s daily water supply.

Eli pointed out that both kids even the one with taps had to sweep the courtyard before going to school so he took on that job.

Sabi was desperate to do the women’s work too.

She may need a little more practice.

I don’t think we would survive for very long on the little that actually made it back in her bucket.

Lilly was fascinated by the scene when the little girl washed the clothes she’d worn that day, she didn’t even know you could wash clothes by hand, how sad is that? Lilly grabbed shorts from the dirty linen bin, some detergent and a bucket and set to work. After she washed them she rinsed them and hung them our to dry. later when Grandma and Granda were around she came careering into the family room an explosion of excitement crying “I washed my shorts and they really came clean and now they are dry!!!” then very proudly wore them to her drama class.

After thinking about it for a while Eli decided that the girls efforts with the tiny bucket were simply not good enough compared to the kids on the video. He didn’t make it down the stairs….

… I was below, it got very wet very quickly,hmm.

There is a series playing on TV at the moment called Last Man Standing. The show takes western athletes to compete in tribal contests in remote areas of the world, this week was Ethiopia. Now it’s not really a kids show, there is blood, lots of blood actually, a little swearing and superstitious beliefs and practices but that said we don’t want our kids to be unaware of the world around them, we are not afraid of them coming into contact with values that clash with our own. We are educating them in the way we believe God wants them to live their lives, they can see our values by the way we live. They know we find swearing offensive and a corruption of the English language but they also know people do it and they will hear it occasionally. They have to learn how to process that without copying it, same with drinking blood and scarification, like I said not really a kids show but an eye opener for someone who didn’t even know it was possible to hand wash clothes.

They have also started working on an African Lap book but they aren’t really worth showing yet.