The Internship

While completing our final semester in the Masters program at the UT School of Social Work, our roles at Botshabelo will be as Clinical Social Worker interns. There we will participate in therapeutic processes with children of all ages, as well as adults and families in the village that surrounds the orphanage. Though we are not quite sure what our days will look like...we are certain that our time in South Africa will be an incredible journey filled with joy, challenge, uncertainty, connection, learning, peace, laughter, sadness, and most importantly, growth.


About Botshabelo

The Cloete family started Botshabelo 20 years ago--out of the darkness of apartheid--where Con and Marian (the couple) spent their entire life's savings to care for the children of South Africa. Con and Marian, along with their three adult daughters, their partners, and their children, established Botshabelo as a place where about 150 children without families could have a place to belong. Ilene and Ayla will also call Botshabelo home for the next four months, living and working alongside these amazing individuals.
Since 1990, Botshabelo has worked to become a self-sustaining community and, more importantly, a place of safety and family to South Africa's AIDS orphans and economic orphans. The community includes an orphanage, school, village, medical clinic and organic farm.

To learn more about our new home, visit: www.botshabelo.org

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Short and Not So Sweet

Hi Everyone,
So its 7:35am and today is gonna be a good day. The homeopathic doctor is coming and going to run some tests on us and give us some very nasty tasting medicine (we will write more when we more), and Ilene's friends from Austin are coming today! This next week is gonna be jam packed with touristy outtings for Ilene's friends, and we are throwing a Saint Patrick's Day Bash for the kids! We are supposed to do an educational piece about St Patrick's Day... I dunno if you have ever looked into it, but there's not that much educational value in this day, its just sort of drunken debauchery and parading.
Anyway, what I really wanted to blog about is karate. For years now there has been a Sensai (master karate teacher) coming to Botshabelo and teaching the kids karate twice a week. A couple times in the year the kids can go to Johanesburg and test for a new belt color. A few of the older boys are already black belts! Yesterday 3 more boys went to test for blackbelt... they were the only 3 black boys at the testing... can you guess where this is going.... and all 3 of them were denied black belt status even tho their Sensai and the boys that were already black belts said that they did more than enough to pass. Needless to say, everyone was in a pretty crappy mood when they returned from Jo-burg. There is not really much else to tell about this besides how surprised and deeply disturbed and saddened we were by the news. In my best Jewish grandmother voice: they're such good boys! They will try again for black belt during the next round of testing in August. Send them some love!
Ayla
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