A day spent at the St Thomas Home for Children

We arrived excited and ready to go on the morning of the 28th July. We had prepared a 2 hour programme to do with a group of kiddies that we had been given. My group was designated the 7-10 year old boys called "the Dragon Ball Z". Just a name like that got our brains thinking of all sorts of fun, wild activites that could keep these boys entertained for the morning. In my group was

Dayna, Me, Mariam and Haseena pictured in the photo and also Slindelo.

When we got there we found out that our boys had been sent away on an excursion for the morning but luckily the other group was missing a few members so we got given the 6 and 7 year old boys and girls. We also now had a few extra hands to help us run our activities which was nice.

As soon as we opened the door of the kids' room you could hear the excitement, one immediately grabbed my hand and it was like he was my best friend. I was shocked to see how small these kids were for their age, which is due to malnutrition and other factors.

We started off by breaking them into teams of boys and girls who were called "The Hulks" and the "The Barbies" respectively. They were given the task of creating a group banner as their warm-up. They loved all the stickers and we had to limit them or else the would of covered the whole poster. The kids loved just drawing and decorating the poster and eventually we had to pull them away so that we could start the relay races.

Fellow therapist, Princess pictured with the  "Barbie Girls" poster.

The kids were pumped and ready to go. I made them have little war cries with actions that they loved performing. We played games like beanbag throw, dunking' for apples, sack race(done with black bags), dribbling around the bucket etc. All the games went really well and they loved them but we had a problem when it came to the competitive side. These kids come from all different backgrounds and most have been told they are not good enough and are in the bottom of their class at school so their self esteem isn't good. Therefore when they were losing they were nearly in tears because they felt defeated especially when the girls were beating the boys. So after some rigging we made it a victory for the boys in order to boost their morale again and the girls were proud of them. We had made party bags for all of them so that they all received the same prize and therefore tried to instill equality. The other group then took them for a picnic which they had great fun doing. When it was time to say goodbye we all got huge hugs and lots of thank you's.

When all the different groups had finished our lecturer got us all together to reflect on our time at the home.My group reflected on how we didn't realise competition would be such a big deal for them and how sad it was seeing their little faces when they were losing and how hard it was to make them feel better about it. Something we should of done differently was to mix up the boys and girls to make the groups more fairly weighted. The idea of the relays worked so well though and the kids were introduced to games that they had never seen before like the apple dunking game, we had to help them a bit in the beginning because they couldn't pick up the apple our of the bucket of water with their mouths. It was also a bit eye-opening to how the kids craved attention and were very possessive over you if they thought you were their friend and therefore couldn't be someone else's. The other groups made musical instruments, told stories and many other fun things. Children in those groups had problems with understanding morals behind stories that they should be familiar with like "the 3 little pigs" etc. They also didn't know how to colour in a flower. It was discovered though that they all really enjoyed the physical games and activities like spinning around, running around etc. All in all I think the day was a great success because we put a smile on every single one of those kids faces and gave them so much love. Imagine what we could of done with more time...

This home needs so much help and I am very keen to go visit more often in order to make a bigger change because these kids are needing input and love. There are great facilities that can be used and lots of opportunities to help out. The kids range from 3 to 10 years old and they are all very cute and eager to be apart of something fun. Please contact me if you would like to get involved.