Global Solidarity Project 2024 - 1 week in Rustenburg
Arrival, preparation, cooking and the first of Three youth camps successfully completed…
After a long flight and journey to Rustenburg we arrived at Tsholofelo Community and met the Youth Leaders we would be working alongside over the course of the next month.
A brief tour of the community later, equipped with our Global Youth Work Toolkit, the newly forged team made up of volunteers from Tsholofelo, The Western Cape and ourselves from Friends of Africa set about planning for the weeks ahead.
We exchanged ideas for icebreakers, team building activities and the personal development workshops which we would be delivering in mixed groups during the forthcoming Youth Camps.
Together, we developed our schedule and, most importantly, the menu for the meals which we would be working together to provide during the Camps.
Before the Camps began, we visited the informal settlements where the young people who would be attending the Camps over the next three weeks live.
First to the projects where several of our local volunteers work in Freedom Park, then to Mphokonou; before finishing up with a visit to the projects in Siza. The volunteers from the Tsholofelo Community work in these projects throughout the year delivering youth development programmes and skills training for young adults.
We are fortunate to have such experienced leaders who work at the heart of these communities, as the rapport which they already have with so many of the young people coming to the Youth Camps will be invaluable in ensuring that each young person has a positive experience at the Camp.
The first day of Camp arrived and Tsholofelo was soon buzzing with excitement as our 23 young people arrived for registration, were assigned their teams and shown to their rooms. And just like that, week one of Camp had begun!
The leadership dream team was up to the task with decades of youth work experience between us. Across the week, we worked collaboratively to deliver workshops on pertinent topics such as sanitation, healthy relationships, self-awareness and sexual health; outdoor sessions of games, obstacle courses and team building activities; all between mealtimes of hearty homecooked meals to fuel both the teens and the leaders for the days chock-full of activities.
The members of the leadership team with meal prep responsibilities got a crash course in the realities of cooking for upwards of 40 people on a jam-packed schedule.
Almost as quickly as it had begun, week one of Camp was unfortunately coming to a close. As the Camp prizegiving ceremony was getting underway, a traditional South African Braai (BBQ) was lit in preparation for what would be our final meal with the teens.
As the young people got their pap, braai’d boerewors sausage and gravy, there were tears, smiles and laughter all-round as the buses arrived for the journey home.
The excitement of earlier in the week was replaced with sadness we waved goodbye to our new friends from the Freedom Park cohort and began the preparation for the arrival of the young people from Mphokonou next week in what’s sure to be another week of smiles, laughter and cooking on a commercial scale.
- Seán Óg McAnespy
