Hostel Report

Universally 2020 was a challenging year, but at Waterloo House it was also those challenges that inspired a lot of creativity and closeness.

Being a hostel family and living together during a pandemic brought additional health and safety challenges. There were a lot of adjustments to be made to our hostel way of life, particularly in terms of physical closeness. This was especially hard on Waterloo House residents, since hostel is also home away from home.

Our leaders, Cassidy, Mihle, Sinazo and Stacey-Lee had to learn how to be leaders while at hostel and at home, keeping the younger grades together and making them feel like they were still part of hostel during lockdown.

Covid meant the boarders were restricted to the hostel, so some fun weekend outings were absolutely necessary to avoid the Termlies going crazy! Special thanks to Dr Wallace for recognising this and finding the all-important budget to make it happen! A huge thanks also goes to our staff, who rose to the challenge and came up with creative Covid-adjusted activities and outings to make sure we still had a great year.

Some highlights included sunset at the beach, dinner at a secret burger joint and a memorable trip to the golden canola fields for a private photoshoot, run by one of our favourite boarder mistresses and in-house photographer, Valentina. Being able to get out and do “normal” activities really lifted everyone’s spirits.

In some ways, Covid pushed us to be more creative and come up with our own activities that didn’t involve public spaces, like a Murder Mystery evening, expressive art and Self-Love Saturdays. These were wonderfully socially distanced, yet extremely connected events that allowed our boarders space to breathe, to speak about dealing with a pandemic and being in high school. They documented their experiences through the many videos we created, which are available on the school website.

For Mandela Day, we held a bake-off and cake-box decorating evening, baking cupcakes for the nurses at Victoria, who were working so hard during Covid.

Sadly we weren’t able to have our usual end of year celebration for our hostel matrics with the whole hostel and guests. The matrics did have a special dinner out though and the requisite 500 photos were taken!

In spite of everything, 2020 was a good year at Waterloo House. We kept our spirits up and had a lot of fun together. Ms Florence Cull

MATRICLOCKDOWN

Photographer: Drew Dickson-Hall

Photographer: Mikaela Meyer

Photographer: Anna Lee Photographer: Mmiki Serifi

During the national Lockdown we held a series of online photography competitions where learners were invited to submit their photographs.