Dear friends,
We had quite a dramatic start with the group that started their training in February. We had eight students when we began. As part of our training, the students get up at six every morning during the week to do general chores like cleaning the house that includes their bedrooms, working in the garden, maintaining the grounds and a few other things. This did not go down well with one of the students who thought the work and being at Ekuthuleni was too hard and he ran away in the middle of the night as others were sleeping. Another one of the students also thought that Ekuthuleni was not the right place for him and left within the first few days. We managed to take on one other young man we had interviewed, but our course is running with seven students. The current group of students is averagely not yet performing at the level at which we expect them to, both in class and in the workshop. However these past few weeks they have begun to slowly improve. l have often discussed with John what the cause may be, and we thought that they had a bad beginning as there was no water due to our borehole being down when they began their training. They spent a good deal of their time trying to help to fix the borehole in the first term and second term, and in the midst of that had to go to the neighbours for water on foot when the car was not available .This was very discouraging to all of us, and for the students it was hard to be motivated and to focus as we spent so little time doing what pertained to carpentry.
Mishack