Our First Full Day at The Restart Centre

Today was our first full day at the restart centre, we arrived at Sanchat around 9am, after a lovely breakfast and a good nights sleep.

 
The children were divided up into three groups of school ages, the youngest nursery children, the middle age group and the biggest children. We ran three, hour long sessions and the children rotated round them throughout the morning. There was a maths class run by Hannah and Zelma, a craft session run by Lizzie and Megan where the children made pom-poms, and a games session run by Ellie and Linz. Sarah floated round the groups and helped the nursery children as they required the most attention. The morning worked really well, we were very pleased with how it went and hope to run similar sessions for the rest of our time at the centre. 

After a bit of free time playing with the children it was lunch time. We were served up a massive portion of ugali- a very common starchy dish - and some cabbage type stew. 

After lunch we had some time to read with the children. Again, they were divided up into smaller groups, each of us had a table and a few books each. The children seemed to love it, listening intently and enjoying having our full attention (though some of the littlest ones fell asleep!)

The rest of afternoon was filled with more playing and hair salon run by the restart girls; they loved to plait all our hair into tiny braids. We also played a massive game of rounders with all the children that are at the centre. This went down very well until it started to rain. Luckily we had some colouring sheets as a back-up! The oldest boys stayed out in the pouring rain playing a very competitive game of football, competing in their very own tournament for the Sanata Cup. 

Very soon it was 5pm and time for us to leave the restart, it did not seem that it was nearly eight hours ago that we had got there, it had gone so quickly.  Overall it had been a very enjoyable day, but quite a lot of hard work. All the children definitely appeared to like what we had organised for them.