My mentor

First get together with our MENTOR

Gordon White and the other members of the syndicate group he belong to went to town today to meet our mentor for the second time after we were introduced to him on the 25 of February 2009. We were supposed to meet him in town around 1:30pm but we managed to arrive early and I then decided to let Leen Filius (our mentor) know that we were waiting for him in front of McDonalds. Thabo (one of our syndicate group member) was kind enough to send Leen a text message. A half an hour went by and a car parked in front of us in the street and the two guys who were in the car started looking at us as if they knew us. I asked the others if the know them and they said “no”. We then started to think what if this is the business partner Leen was talking about two weeks ago but what we couldn’t figure out was that Leen is a white guy from Amsterdam in Holland and this two guys who parked in front of us was both black foreigners. We then started making jokes about these two guys saying that they are spies for the government and that they are sent here to spy on Ubie (second member of our syndicate group). Five minutes later something happened that shocked Gordon White, a girl between the age of 19 and 20 robbed someone and ran off, Ubie and Thabo then decided that they are going to run after the girl and see what’s going on but eventually they caught the girl because there was a police car in the area when the incident happened and they then chased after her.

Our mentor arrived a few minutes later and took us to a restaurant called Gainsboarg. When we got to the restaurant he told us we could order anything we want. Thabo and I both ordered Italian meatballs and Kim (third member of our syndicate group), Ubie and Leen ordered hamburgers with fries. Leen then started to ask us what the activities is that we want to do as a group. While we were talking someone walked up to us in the restaurant and to our surprise it was Leen business partner Patrick “finally I’m getting to meet Patrick” I thought to myself. Patrick then sat down and ordered something after he introduced himself to us. Leen then asked us about the peer educating we do because I mentioned in the car that we would like him to join us at one of the implementation days of the peer education. The main topic for the day that we discussed was about the impact that HIV & AIDS have on our country and in our communities. When it was time to go home Leen told us that when ever we meet, each one of us will talk about something they read in the newspaper and how that incident affected the life of the person who read the article and also whenever we end the our get together we will end it with a question directed to Leen or Patrick. It’s always hard to say goodbye but at the end of it all we had to say bye to Leen and Patrick. While Leen was driving us to the train station a song of Patrick Schwassie (I had the time of my life) was playing on the radio and for me I would describe my day using those words “I had the time of my life”.