School Visit, Day four

"IBM Corporate Service Corps visited South Africa and the Edwaleni School to bring gifts and share cultures creating a relationship that will last long into the future.

*Scott, Shutaro, Craig, Chris, Rebecca, Zach, Carolina, Veronica, Mirko, Joann, Mary, Sertorio"

-Message written in the Edwaleni Primary School visitor book.

...

That's about what sums up today, speechlessness. It was a day that literally brought tears to my teammate's eyes, and I'll admit, I was close myself.

We spent the day at the school as planned, the Edwaleni Primary School, about forty minutes (or one hour driving 30kph below the speed limit...just kidding Joann). I'll not go into the details of the school, that can be read on the other school visit, but instead I'll go through the program.

We started off gathering about a third of the kids in the school and sitting them in front of the stage where we were located. We started off introducing ourselves and the countries where we are from, with large applause from the kids when they recognized the country...which was every country but Uruguay.

And then the good stuff started, out came a group of talented art students dressed in traditional garb to perform a dance for us. We have amazing videos of this, and I don't think my adjectives are going to describe this adequately, so I'm going to hold off on this until the videos come. It was kind of like a tribal faux fighting or something, with girls rushing and feigning at each other kicking high up into the air.

They went through a couple of dance numbers and then the choir came out. It was at this point that it all kind of hit home. One of the most moving things I've ever seen, such beautiful singing and energy. Again, I am not with the right words to describe it, but don't worry, the videos will be coming.

Finally we had some more dancing and then went and saw the artwork that the kids had done in Room 13. Enough with the words, here are the photos, and I'm not going to caption them intentionally. Take a look and try and see them as we saw them today and understand what it all means.

And please visit Craig's facebook album and blog for the real photos, we're so lucky to have him on our team taking these photos. They're the closest thing to capturing the moment that we have.