We first took a quick tour of the medical center where Thandeka, Leah's college buddy, works, and then she came with us to meet her mother, one of the teachers at Nhlangano central. We were greeted warmly there by several teachers who were very happy to meet us and ushered us into the principal's office, where it was insisted that everyone have a chair despite space restrictions. The principal took the time to graciously thank us for visiting, to talk to us about what we wanted to do and how we imagined it running, and told us with pride about his schools's motto to 'make a grade,' or, as he translated, 'to excel in all ways possible.' We then took a tour of the school with the head of the science faculty, Leah's contact at Nhlangano, who was very excited to show us classrooms and the wood workshop where frames were being made for the solar cell workshop. We saw the science labs where we would be working, and then were shown to a room with a nice long table and a tablecloth and lovely finger sandwiches on large plates and tea. We had a lovely lunch with the principal and some of the teachers, and discussed our plans further as well as explained the IGERT program. We were a bit like celebrities walking through the campus. The students were very excited when we waved, and waved enthusiastically back, and often ran away giggling. Others rained 'hellos' and 'how-are-yous' as we passed by.
Nhlangano has 700+ students. The science club students were going to be joining us for the solar cell workshop. The teachers and principal originally thought there was a limit of 20 students. We said we had been planning on 40 and could fit more if possible. We ended up having an audience of nearly 60 students by 1 PM, scrunched into one of the two lab classrooms. We had until 3:20 pm, and after introducing ourselves, Rochester, and the IGERT program (Margaret), moved into talking about PV cells (Maria). We went into the basics of batteries and storage as well, and Erik moved us into the territory of reviewing the solar workshop steps we would be starting tomorrow (the wood shop needed some time to finish the frames). It took some time for the students to warm up, but we had them asking informed questions and giving answers to ours by the end of the day.
We realized that rather than do the science demos for only the science club students, we could hop around science classes during the day, doing demos across the grades. Mr. S'bane and Mr. Dlamini stayed after school with us, laying out the schedules of every group in the school to coordinate us being able to do science demos for all. With some manipulation and promising an English lesson as well to an English teacher who's class we would be asking to take over, we were able to arrange each 'form' (grade) into one period for the next two days in the mornings:
We then joined Sifiso again who drove us to Mahamba Lodge, a few stone cabins by the Gorge in the mountains run by the church and community. The rooms were nice and we were given a traditional Swazi dinner at 6 and asked to have breakfast at 6:30 in order to join the school in their morning assembly prayers at 7:20 (we'd been invited to do so and wanted to oblige). The night sky was alive with the Milky way, and even in the sunset we could see Mars, Jupiter and the Moon over our stone cabins.
After dinner, we re-organized and coordinated all of our demo plans into a program that made sense for each grade level of students. Tomorrow will be a big day!
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