Our Englisch teachers Ms.Illig and Mr.Kindler organized an exchange program with one of Ms.Illig’s South African university friends, Sean. At the beginning Ms.Illig and Mr.Kindler wanted to make South African history and Apartheid more understandable for us and give us even more insight on the subject. They did that by contacting Sean and his father who has enlightened us plenty about this all to cruel time that he has actually lived in.
It was a very interesting conversation and the sweet man answered all of our questions attentively, no matter the absurdity of them. We also got to meet and talk to Sean for the first time through video call and were instantly elated because of his kind nature and smile. After that video call we were all put into different groups and were able to ask questions to different acquaintances of Sean. One of them was Zoe, a very intelligent young woman who told us a lot about her culture and also the struggles that her family had to go through.
The second and this time real life meeting that we had with Sean was just recently on the 24th June. It was the day of the “Bundesjugendspiele” and our whole school was meeting at the Aumattstadion in Baden-Baden. I don’t think that I just speak for myself when I say that a lot of us were surprised by how tall he was. It was a really fun day.We all introduced ourselves and had casual conversations with him. Last Wednesday on the 6th July we had our official meeting and he showed us a beautifully made video about his home country and his endearing students. They told us about themselves and what they knew about Germany. We got to ask questions again and all of them were carefully and thoroughly answered. We also planned our after school cooking with Sean that would happen the next day at 5:30pm. Because Sean used to be a professional chef and even prepared dishes for high political figures, he showed us how to make two of his favourite South African dishes, Bobotie with Safran rice and for dessert Milk Tart, which were both very delicious!
It were his last few days here in Germany so we thought about making a video so that he would be able to show it to his students back in South Africa. All of us were grouped up and each group needed to film something else, some were responsible for creating our own music, others needed to film the school and Baden-Baden. It was a quite successful project because most of us came back with pretty and funny video clips and the music was also cared for by our school choir, the Päda-Voices, and our music teacher Mr.Serr.
Overall it was a very fun experience and I can speak for us all when I say that we all feel very grateful to our teachers, Sean, his father and the different people that we were able to talk to and laugh with. We hope that Sean had a great time here and that he will come to visit us soon again and thank him dearly for showing us a part of his beautiful and rich culture.
Marie-Alexandra Müller
