Thesis accepted!!!

Dear readers,

I finally got some time to write a new blog. Roxane and I did the second and third Health Promotion lesson. The second lesson we gave was about sweets & snacks, because half of the children of our school eat too many of them. At first, we did a recap game to see what the children remembered from our first lesson about the food-based dietary guidelines of South Africa. It was great to see what the children remembered of this lesson. After this, we told them something about sugar and we did a sugar game. We asked them to order sugar-rich drinks from the least amount of sugar to the most. Maybe also interesting for you guys to know: coca cola (200ml) contains 11 teaspoons of sugar, which means that you drink about 5,5 sugar cubes when you drink one glass of coca cola. After the game we gave them some information about salt and we learned them how to read a food label of a product. The third lesson was almost two weeks later and the subject was fruit and vegetables because more than 80 percent of the children don’t meet the guideline for fruit and vegetables. It made me really proud to see that the children remembered the drink with the most sugar, the amount of sugar in that drink, products which contain a lot of salt and the health benefits of eating less salt! After the recap, we gave some information about fruit and vegetables and we did a tasting game with the children. We made egg muffins, banana pancakes and aubergine chocolate cake. The children got a piece of it and had to look, to smell and to taste it and then they had to tell us which fruit or vegetable they thought was in the product. It was great to see how much they enjoyed the lesson! Furthermore, we did a tuck-shop where we sold butternut squash fritters, healthy Oros and carrot muffins. Butternut squash is a pumpkin. Oros is a kind of soda which the children drink a lot and we made a healthy version of it with water, sweetener and mandarins. We made 207 fritters, 5 litres of Oros and 150 muffins. It was all gone in only FIVE minutes!! So you could say that it was quite a success!
Moreover, I’ve to tell you that our thesis is accepted yesterday! This means that Roxane and I are allowed to do our final test in the end of June and if we pass this test we will be graduated!
This week Roxane and I have our second and last tuck-shop and our final presentation at St. Michaels Primary School. We also had our end presentations of the Theewaterskloof project last week. Yesterday, we had our last family dinner with most of the students and today the first students left and went on vacation. It starts to hit me that this is the beginning of the end and I can honestly say that I get quite emotional when I think of this. I have only one week left with ‘my kids’ (as I call them) and only four weeks left in South Africa 

Because of all the deadlines, I didn’t do much fun things in the last couple of weeks. In the weekends, we sometimes went to Longstreet to go out, but most of the time we stayed in Grabouw and chilled at one house with all the students. Maybe that’s the reason that this blog is the shortest one I’ve written so far. In two weeks I’ll write another one in which I’ll tell you about the results of our research (like I promised you), about the fact that I graduated (hopefully) and about our well-deserved vacation. See ya!