If today's Wednesday, it must be time for a visit from 75 students from Laerskool Gericke. The primary school is in Ceres.
Not Ceres the dwarf planet, although it is true that later this week NASA is scheduled to launch the Dawn Mission space probe to explore Ceres the dwarf planet. Our Ceres is situated 150 km north east of Cape Town, snugly wedged at the foot of the Skurweberg Mountains at the entrance to the Karoo.
But naturally, we had other visitors as well. Like 55 students from Atlantis High. Not the Atlantis High teen comedy TV show from New Zealand, where surfers turn out to be double-agents, aliens and blue-haired, pointy-eared superheroes.
Our Atlantis is 40 kilometres up the West Coast from the village of Kommetjie and is one of those lasting bequests of apartheid: 100,000 people removed from Cape Town and put in a sand dune in the middle of nowhere. Result: gang wars, poverty, unemployment, drinking, drugs, despair. No, not despair. The teachers at Atlantis High are striking back, making sure their students have a future. We help.
More grade five students (46 in total) also arrived today from Fish Hoek Primary, as well as 46 grade R pupils from Kenwyn Pre-Primary, with another group from the same pre-primary school on Thursday. Teacher Yumna Allie warned that, ''by their reactions, the younger ones were a bit lost and confused, although they enjoyed the experience in terms of being out and there were a few hands-on things that were appropriate for their age. The older ones enjoyed it but we need to work with them in smaller groups to get particular value out of it.''
And we had more visitors from further afield - another batch of 47 students from Middelburg and twenty from Waterstone College on the banks of the Klip River in Johannesburg.
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