Saturday morning I discovered the absolute joy that is a handstand pushup. Wow, those are pretty fun until your arms burn like nothing else!
Following that, I headed to Scottsville High school in Brackenfell to assist with a Food Tents build. This consisted of packing a bunch of plastic bags with holes in the bottom full first of wood shavings then of topsoil, and planting spinach and beetroot (three to a bag) into each one. Then we formed a long chain and passed these off into the tent itself, and watered the whole lot using our now emptied water and soda cans. All in all, it took about three hours for three of us from heart, maybe four people from Pick’n’Pay (who were sponsoring this build), and a handful of people from the community. It was so cute to see the kids lining up and passing the bags from person to person!
Afterwards I went to Stellenbosch to pick up a friend. We tried to stop by Tokara but as it was 3:07 they were closed. Ha, well, the wine isn’t so good there anyway in my opinion. So we headed into Cape Town and pretty much immediately to the local pub where we had to sit in the garden as all the inside seats were taken up with some crazy rugby fans. Happily for the general peace and security of everyone involved, the local team (the Stormers) beat the Bulls. Or, apparently so, as I wasn’t exactly watching.
The next morning we went for a nice drive over by Sea Point to Camps Pay, and down to Hout Bay, over to near Chapman’s Peak but not along it as I didn’t want to pay the toll and besides we were due back in Cape Town. But not before stopping to climb on some rocks and look at a statue that is supposed to be a lion but looks more like a leopard to me. This road was pretty familiar as we had been here on our tour last winter.
So one of my coworkers had organized an informal get-together at Mzoli’s place in Guguletu, one of the local townships. Wikipedia describes it well, basically it’s a bunch of tables and chairs underneath an awning. In the street next to it a bunch of Namibians were the DJs for the day, playing some really loud music that after an hour or so and a couple of beers (it’s BYOB but you can also buy from a bunch of places around), most of us were dancing to. The only unfortunate thing about this was that it took so long for the meat to arrive that we were all starving and jumped on the plate of beef like a bunch of carnivores pretty much the second it arrived! The chicken and HUGE pile of sausage lasted a bit longer, at least until after I left. But if I may say so, this was some of the best tasting meat I’d eaten in a long time (secret sauce, apparently), and I don’t think it was just my hunger talking! Also, we got to meet Mr Mzoli, so that was nice as well.
Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera but others took pictures. I was happy that my friend Nomkita came by (she lives somewhat nearby), and it is also nice to be able to walk down the street with an open beer and not be hassled. This is technically illegal here (how uncivilized, really!) but in that environment and that close to Mzoli’s it was fine.
So that was about is for the adventure that was the weekend; I spent the evening resting and preparing myself for the week to come.
The first day back at work was actually quite mentally tiring, to the point where I literally needed to take a break about 4:30pm. After revising some slides on market research and designing some in-class workshops around the four Ps of marketing and company operations, I was analyzing the deliverables required by the incubator and mapping to that the training modules that would be required. For some reason, this was mentally taxing.
Next up tomorrow: looking over various articles on how to write a business plan and reviewing the existing business plan template to determine if it needs to be refined at all, and to start developing training materials for the business plan section from the bottom up. We are starting with what the social enterprises need to do, so that we can be sure that we are covering it from a training perspective.
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