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By iobrien1093

I’ve been working at New Chapter Foundation for the last three weeks, splitting my time between the organization’s new office building and the community center in Phumlani Village. Initially, I thought I would spend my time in the village’s community center tutoring children or assisting with the after-school homework club, but I quickly realized on my first day of volunteering that international students are essential in the development of most of New Chapter’s programs, as it is such a young organization lacking the means to hire many employees.

At the moment, I’m working with two other volunteers from CIEE on about three different programs that are all in their initial stages of development. The first is a Youth Advice Center, which aims to provide the youth of Phumlani, as well as drop-outs and students from local high schools, with the resources, computer skills training, and scholarship information to enable them to achieve their educational and career aspirations. The problem is that New Chapter is presently without Internet connection or a phone line, so we can’t even begin recruiting youth to the office without first fundraising at least $1,000 dollars for Telekom Service. Once we have the money, trained volunteers will deliver workshops to the participants. We’ve spent the last week creating and sharing an Indiegogo fundraising webpage for New Chapter that will hopefully draw in the funds to kickoff the advice center by the end of March.

Our second project is an art program that will target the mothers of Phumlani Village, many of whom are unemployed and spend their days at home with the children. The project is meant to provide these mothers with their own income by asking them to create art and jewelry from buttons that will be donated from local retail stores. We have already received about 8 boxes of buttons and elastic from a single retailer. Last week, we spoke to one of the head “Mamas” of the village, asking her to spread the word to other Mamas who might be interested in participating. Although she was interested in working with New Chapter, Mama was extremely skeptical as to whether the designs would actually sell and whether New Chapter would be as invested in marketing the project as the Mamas would be in creating the pieces. From our conversation it was clear that these women have been promised things before that they have never actually received. It’s difficult to reassure these women without having experience with this type of project. At this point there’s no concrete way to convince them that it will be successful.

The third project will be the After School Club at the Phumlani Community Center. I had thought when I started working at New Chapter that the After School Club was an organized, year round, five days a week program, but I discovered last week that it actually occurs once a week and only when international volunteers are available to run it. I was frustrated by this fact, since the After School Club was a major part of the reason why I chose to work at New Chapter in the first place. I had planned for the program to be the foundation of my capstone/independent research project.  It felt like there were too many projects depending on volunteers and that I was being assigned my capstone project even if I had no experience or understanding of how to go about developing it. It was a very overwhelming week, but when we opened the after school club for the afternoon last Friday it was actually very successful. We haven’t yet set up a homework club, as of now it’s just drawing and soccer games, but the kids are so excited to have somewhere to go and something to do after school other than walk the streets.

After leaving Phumlani that day, I met with my Service Learning advisor to sort out my mess of thoughts into a set of organized goals. She helped me realize that I’m not alone in this service project and that I’m not expected to know how to set up these programs by myself. She directed me find a project in New Chapter that I would really enjoy working on for the next three months even if wasn't something that the director of New Chapter had initially planned for me. It was a relief to have someone know my worries and to have her provide me with resources and connections.  I decided that I would like to create a Reading Partners program for my cap stone project where I will match high school students from one of the high schools affiliated with CIEE with a Xhosa or Afrikaans speaking child from Phumlani.

It’s been a busy few weeks, with some bumps in the road, but I finally feel like I’m able to visualize what the next three months will look like.

Isabel