Sad News from VMS

 

Left to Right: Community Outreach Coordinator Khathu, Nancy,
Teacher Constance (K-1), Jo Ann, VMS Principle Florence 

Sadly, we just received news from Sue-Anne, Director of Vhutshilo Mountain School, informing us that our dear friend and colleague, Constance Muthivhi, has just suffered a serious debilitating stroke. Our latest news was that she has typical left side paralysis, slurred speech and the loss of sight in one eye. VMS is making every effort to continue to keep her on full salary since she is the sole support for her family. In the meantime, Sue-Anne is scrambling to provide adequate instructional supervision for her K-1 students. A huge “Thank you!” to an anonymous donor who has sent a donation specifically for Constance’s multiple needs.

South African Adventures and more

Forgive us for being so tardy in sharing our latest South African adventures. We returned with a full plate of new ideas, new needs, and new projects to complete. We are very excited to say that we will be doing a ‘soft launch’ of a new social networking project that Meryl and Laura from Verndale, a Boston full service digital agency, have been helping us to complete. Very exciting stuff which will be ready to preview in the next couple of months. We’ll keep you posted!

In the meantime, we’d like to share more of the 2011 trip experiences that we weren’t able to communicate from South Africa. Although the main road to the Vhutshilo Mountain School from Thathe Vendo (where we were staying) was washed out, we managed to travel the bumpy, dirt, back roads to school every day. We spent much of our time in teacher Constance’s K-1 and preschool teacher Dorah’s classes modeling lessons and assessing critical teaching needs. Teachers from the Indian Brook School in Plymouth, Massachusetts generously donated many of their personal teaching supplies which we put to immediate use in the classroom. Thanks to our generous Hope for Limpopo donors we were able to purchase additional instructional materials while in a distant South African city enabling us to round out specific lesson objectives. We were fortunate to have American teachers Amy and Tricia join us this trip for they pitched right in organizing lessons, teaching classes and training VMS teachers.  Read about teacher, Amy Baldwin, in VMS K-1 classroom.  It was such fun to see our own school materials on the walls of all three classrooms knowing that we left the VMS teachers comfortable using them in their instruction.