Days 71 & 72: Working for Youthtown

I spent the last couple of days (Tuesday & Wednesday, March 30 & 31st) working for Youthtown at their aquatics center.  It's located on Orakei Basin, which is a saltwater pool where the water is held back by a sluice gate.  Every so often they open the gate, drain the water out with the tide, let the tide flush the basin a few times, and then close the gate again when the tide is high.  I wonder if any fish every get trapped in there?  Anyway, because it is saltwater and not circulating regularly, it often looks pretty murky.  Another thing it has going for it is that there's all kinds of oyster shells at the bottom and those are like razors and will slice your feet right open if you aren't wearing shoes and try to walk around.  (The pool is not very deep, maybe 6 feet at its deepest point in the middle.)  At any rate, Youthtown has the use of the Orakei Sea Scouts building (like Boy / Girl Scouts only with an emphasis on sailing!) and a container out back behind their building that has kayaks, sailboats, windsurfing boards, pfd's, wetsuits, etc., etc.  On Tuesday and Wedenesday we ran some aquatic activities for a decile 1 school.  Apparently in NZ, school are rated between decile 1 and decile 10, depending on the resources their communities have.  Decile 10 is a really rich school, like the kind of place that has its own swimming pool.  Decile 1 is at the very bottom of the heap.  But this school had a corporate sponsor (the name of the school had MainFreight in it - that's their sponsor) so they were better off than some, and the principal and the staff were dedicated to the idea that the students should have all the opportunities that kids from richer schools would get.  They had just done a unit on water safety, so this aquatics day was their chance to put some of those lessons into practice and to just have fun.  I helped to teach a raftbuilding activitiy in the morning on Tuesday, and then did it on my own in the afternoon, and then twice again on Wednesday.  It's pretty fun - you teach the kids a few knots (figure 8, clove hitch, square lashing, etc.) and then they lash bamboo poles together and add plastic barrels for floatation, and then float their raft around in the water.  It's a good time and the kids really got into it.  None of the rafts really lasted for very long once they got into the water (the problem is keeping the barrels on - they tend to pop off, but if you can do that then your raft will float like gangbusters!)  At any rate, I had fun and I hope the kids did too.