Unexpected Visitor

Every February St. Brendan’s High School holds an awards day – called Prize Giving Day – for the purpose of honoring students who have done exceptionally well the previous school year. A guest speaker is invited to inspire students to strive for a good education and a bright future. Often the speaker is a former St. Brendan’s student who has done well in the years since graduating from school. This year, we were delighted to see that the guest speaker was a young woman named Fhulufhelo, who was one of our students when we taught at St. Brendan’s sixteen years ago. See her here (red jacket)posing with Don and Ann Stone when they came to visit us in 2002.

Fhulufhelo was an excellent student then as well as being a wonderful and happy girl. In the time since she left St. Brendan’s she has completed medical school at the University of Cape Town and is now completing a residency in a nearby city. We got together with her after the awards event and she spent some time with us and the Bakhita girls. As a student, she would come and help play with the girls and do a little tutoring. Now as an adult she enjoyed being with them and believes that she will specialize in pediatrics.

While we were teaching, it was difficult to know whether we were making any impact on anyone – after all we were dealing with teenagers! But Fhulufhelo told us that we helped her immensely to learn about a world bigger than the one she knew, to see an example of a loving couple who can work together and do good and she says that we taught her how much a sincere and warm hug can turn a bleak day sunny. So there you go. Her unexpected visit certainly sunnied up our day!