names and karaoke

We got up early (for us) and were in the office at 9 something or other. Every single time we walk to the office, we walk past children playing with car tyres. No matter what time of the day, morning, midday, afternoon, they're always there. Possibly there are different children who just happen to hang out on the same street playing with tyres, or that's just all these kids do (it is school holidays so it's possible). Some of the kids are basically smaller than the tyres themselves, I don't know how they run along with them so easily. They often say hello to us, they are very cute indeed :) I never seem to manage to get a proper photo of them running with it, but here's one of some of them.

On Wednesdays Martha and Opa fast and pray, so they weren’t at the office. We spent most of the day doing data inputting – they have compiled on scrappy bits of paper lists of the name, age, gender and location of the children they work with (now over 700), and wanted us to put it on the computer (no-one is very computer literate – we are going to give lessons next week). This would be a lot easier and quicker if it weren’t for the fact that firstly, most of these names are ones we’ve never heard of – like Tlotlo Ramosekwe (tl being pronounced as a click, of which there are several in Setswana), and secondly that the handwriting is often indecipherable. I read out the names, often guessing at letters, and Kate typed. The monotony was broken up sometimes by amusing names such as Lala and Girlly, or by simply making up the ends of words that trailed off into squiggles. Some children have names such as Jim or Piet for their surnames, some have no surnames, like five year old ‘Timmy’, which reminded us of the South Park character and sent us into a giggling fit (I guess you have to have fun somehow). Some of the kids don’t have ages written down, I can only assume because they didn’t know how old they were. Anyway, a few hundred names and many hours later, we knocked off and went back home.

Every Wednesday, George’s pub (mentioned earlier in this blog) has a Karaoke night. We were going to go with Wethu but she cancelled on us because she’s been feeling ill and wanted to go to Church (yes, you’ve read that right, she wanted to go to Church at 9pm on a Wednesday instead of going down the pub). Since it’s only a two minute walk away and Wethu said she was happy to pick us up, we went alone anyway. It was really fun, watching people play pool, drinking cider and listening to some terrible, terrible singers, but all in good spirit, there was no booing or anything like that. I ended up singing a song, Kate has promised she’ll sing one by the end of this trip, and I’ve promised to play pool with her at some point despite the fact that I’m shockingly, embarrassingly bad at it. For some reason the videos that went with the song words were all really corny, eighties-inspired things, weird views of sunsets and people in ridiculous eighties jumpers walking through forests and stuff like that. I wonder if they’ve had the same machine since the eighties…