2012 Summer Volunteer Projects
Tshulu English Winter School
23rd June – 15th July, 2012
In 2012 Going Brown and Tshulu Trust are collaborating to offer a three week ‘Build & Teach’ summer volunteer project. The two primary activities will be building a pre-school classroom and running a winter school (it is winter in South Africa in June) in HaMakuya, a rural chieftancy in the north-eastern Venda region of South Africa, close to Zimbabwe, Mozambique and the Kruger National Park.
The HaMakuya community has been asking Tshulu Trust for some time to assist with their pre-school initiative, and the collaboration with Going Brown will finally make this possible. Helping to improve English language skills has been identified by HaMakuya community members as one of the most important contributions that visitors could make. It has therefore become a central focus in Tshulu Trust’s development activities.
The Winter School will be more like a non-residential camp than school, and will focus on life skills, leadership, team work and English language skills. In the mornings each Irish volunteer will lead a group of five 15-17 year-olds from HaMakuya through a series of fun but educational activities, and in the afternoons the school children and volunteers will work together on building the pre-school.
The English Winter School will provide an annual intensive boost to Tshulu’s ongoing English education programmes run from the Trust’s Resource Centre. The Winter School will give children ongoing personal attention from first-language English speakers in a fun but focused environment for 3 weeks. Volunteers will work with groups of not more than 6 children, a student to teacher ratio that HaMakuya children have not encountered before. (Many classes have 70 to 80 children each.) We hope that, apart from what the children learn in 3 weeks, that the experience will motivate and inspire them to work on their English throughout the rest of the year, and achieve their dreams for a better life.
Guided by experts in Teaching English as a Foreign Language in terms of content and method, volunteers will provide a full ‘school day’ of English language learning. While all conversation will be in English, topics will be wide-ranging, and activities may include sport and field trips, and will aim to foster life skills such as leadership capacity and team-working.
As teaching activities will not take up the whole day, volunteers will also work on an adjunct project: a smaller initiative that – as far as possible – will match the interests and capacities of volunteers with needs and initiatives in the HaMakuya community.
Please click on the links for more information about the following: cultural exchange and the HaMakuya Home-stay Programme; volunteer programme leaders; living and working in HaMakuya; raising funds; and health and safety.
For further information and an application form, please email allenl@tshulutrust.org
