So Wave Your Flag

Summer seems to finally be on the way out which though I'm not excited for winter weather, we're loving for the moment. There are actually clouds in the sky, today they are big fluffy cumulus ones which means that sunsets are beautiful again and sometimes the sun goes behind a cloud. At night, I start to freeze and need the mink (heavy blanket, not actually made of mink) around 2 a.m. But during the day it still gets hot, and the walk home from school is pretty sweaty. In between weather really is the best.

We've had to travel a lot recently, well mostly James went to Pretoria 3 times in the last week for the diversity committee meeting, medical stuff, and taking part in the fishbowl (a part of the training for new volunteers where volunteers talk about their experiences...he represented married volunteers). I'm off to Pretoria Thursday for a meeting of the volunteer advisory committee. After that, things will calm down a bit for a while, but it will only be 3 weeks until our next Peace Corps training.

It's interesting comparing experiences with other volunteers which James had a chance to do a lot of on his trips to Pretoria. I feel like our experience is pretty unique, and we are very lucky in a number of ways. One of which is that I don't get harassed. Most of the other female volunteers deal a lot with harassment, and I'm not quite sure why I don't get harassed. I think it's because I'm ugly. I've actually wondered if I do get harassed and just don't call it that because it is less extreme than harassment I experienced in Chad. I'm constantly wowed by the respect that people show us, and the lack of the mocking that I experienced constantly in Chad. But I think a lot of it is in your mind. Today I was walking home and some children called me Mme Mmabatho (the name of an old volunteer) and I said 'Mme whooooo, it's Lebogang' and then listened to them repeating the conversation (especially the word 'whoooo') like 50 times. So I guess I could get annoyed by that, but when it's not malicious I think it's rather cute.

I think it's interesting the things we watch on TV here. A lot of cartoons, Oprah, and things like Make Me a Supermodel. And it's not like we are watching these with our host family so we have no excuse for the quality of tv we are watching. I also really really like South African coke commercials and feel kind of guilty for that since I'm pretty anti-Coca Cola in general. They are just so catchy. I wish we had a way to exercise more than sitting around and watching TV in the afternoon. It's hard because I have no desire to start running and with no bike or swimming pool, I don't know of another way to get cardiovascular exercise.

Work is just fine. It's pretty busy in general with teaching computers to teachers and school governing body members, working in the library, 2 after-school clubs, maybe starting to teach natural science, making the area office newsletter, starting an old age home, and more that I can't think of. I think the business that we experience during the day definitely contributes to our laziness in the evenings.

Also, I should mention that we are participating the Longtom Marathon (walking a half marathon) to raise money for the KLM Foundation which some of our friends started a few years ago when they were volunteers here. If you want to learn more about it or donate, you can visit their website www.klm-foundation.org and be sure to put one of our names in the Longtom Marathon Field if you are donating.

And that's the end of my long rambly entry.

fruit philosophy

I've decided recently that there are a number of ways to see fruit in life. One is that you can and do buy it when you want it at wherever you choose to buy fruit...whether it's organic or just regular...a subset of this is whether you wait for it to be in season or not, but there is a tendency to buy whatever fruit you happen to like regardless of the season. Then there's the only buy in season, maybe at farmers' markets. Then there's us...when we first got to our village, oranges were still in season and we have 4 or 5 orange trees in our yard so we only ate oranges. When the oranges ended, our fruit consumption dwindled and we may have bought an apple or banana or two. When there were peaches, we ate those. Figs. Grapes. Etc. But now we don't have any fresh fruit in our yard, and it's been a while since we have so the question arises, do we buy fruit? To most people it would be an obvious yes, yet we continue not to buy fruit. Somehow it keeps coming though. People keep giving us mangoes, watermelon, bananas, pomegranates from their yards or even that they bought. And it's not like we are out there asking or begging for fruit, it's just luck. And we appreciate it so much more now. But I don't think our fruit philosophy is for everyone as we might not always get our two servings a day. In fact, we can go days with no fruit at all. But our fruit philosophy seems to line up at least with our ma's as I've never seen her purchase a piece of fruit.

Eat some pap

I hit a kid with a discus at a track meet.

I bruised my ribs playing capture the flag.

South Africa has an under 10 javelin throw.

I watched twilight and new moon and thought they were spinoffs of Charmed because the plot and technical effects screamed TNT quality.

Got my tickets to the gun show and the US vs UK world cup this week.

The maple will now make a run for the Stanley cup because giguere and Phaneuf are worth at least 20 points in the rankings right.

I really hope that the Steelers resign Casey Hampton and that they draft Spiller in the first round.

New Haven Connecticut looks like a strong candidate for being our new home despite the lack of a curling rink.

Found a thrift store in Brits but I dont want to dress like a 50 year old Afrikaaner woman so the point is moot.

Is fairly sure that Omo could take the paint off a car.

I think that people who make viruses should be ashamed of themselves because they are just hampering people in rural Africa.

what would you do for e-lec-tricity?

We got home from our IST (training) on Wednesday night to find out the power had been out since Tuesday when there was a big storm. We called Eskom about 50 times and they finally fixed it on Friday around 3. It stayed on until about 7 and then went out for the rest of the night. We called them again today and it came back around 12. Who knows how long it will stay on this time. It wouldn't be such a big deal if we hadn't gone straight from eating 5 meals a day at training to surviving mostly on bread and peanut butter since we've been home. And we came home with the computer battery basically dead so we could not take advantage of our normal cheating by actually having entertainment when the power is out. Yeah I think we're pretty spoiled.

But the highlight of this instance of power outages (which does not top our 6 days of no power record) is that the old man next door had no power for two weeks so ma told Eskom that one of the many times we called. So they came to fix his power yesterday. He does not own the house, he watches it for a woman who we have met a couple of times and she seems very nice. Anyway apparently she is a sangoma (according to wikipedia "a practitioner of herbal medicine, divination and counselling") and the Eskom man said that he will never go into that house again because he was so freaked out by the stuff inside. I asked if it was bones and such (if you want a pretty horrific "comedic" rendering of sangomas, watch of Leon Schuster's awful Mr. Bones movies) and ma said no, but didn't tell us exactly what was so scary in the house and we were napping at the time so we didn't get to peek inside ourselves. So now we are aching to figure out the mystery of the sangoma.

We had a great time with our fellow PCVs at IST. It was a little surreal to see everyone for the first time since September since we've mostly just seen Kristen and Gabi, but once we got over the initial shock we had a lot of fun. We planned some great evening activities...a PCV costume party (I was a pussy cat vixem and James was a punk cop voortrekker), talent show, capture the flag game, and of course Peace Corps Prom. There were some genuinely really fun moments including an amazing Bohemian Rhapsody sing a long and Autumn, Kristen and I singing and dancing at the talent show (which for at least 2 out of the 3 of us are not talents). We also got to go back to our training site for an afternoon and visit our host family from training who were very happy to see us and meet their new baby.

Anyway it looks like the family has shown up from Rustenburg so I'm off to say hello and inshallah we'll actually be able to cook dinner tonight.

Boring Work Update

Since we last updated, the school year has gotten off to a fast start. We've both been pretty busy and happy to be so though what we've been doing isn't always the most exciting work. Though we are not here to do the work of our schools' administrative assistants, it can be difficult not to provide a lot of help in this area as we are more proficient (and most importantly fast) when it comes to anything involving computers. Actually all of the admin assistants are pretty proficient on the computer, but time management can be an issue for some of them. Anyway, this means that we've been helping out some which the schools really appreciate but is leading to us being asked to do things again and again. One thing we've been talking about doing to help in this area is creating templates and organizing them well on the computer so that in the future people don't have to retype everything. This helping with administrative work led me to work both Saturday and Sunday this weekend for a few hours at one of the schools to help them have everything prepared for the year. It's kind of crazy how they have to have all their work done now (time tables, schedules, inventories) for the opening of school because they are always getting inspected while the 'good' school still hasn't done their time table for the year yet which means that teachers just kind of decide when to teach randomly.

I've also been busy cleaning up and organizing the library at one school. I have a table to sit in their now and made pictures for all the initial consonants and consonant blends (tl, sw, kg etc.) in Setswana that I put up on the wall. Now I have to do English. One of the teachers who hasn't talked to me much asked me to explain the new lesson plan format to him so that was a victory. I've gotten educators to facilitate two after school clubs with me. And I had my first meeting of my teacher research seminar today. It's hard to tell how it went. There were 13 educators there, mostly because the one school that is hosting required their teachers to attend (though some of them were absent) so it was them and 4 educators from other schools. Some people seemed really interested but most didn't really show much emotion. It was mostly me talking and explaining what teacher research is and what we'll be doing this year so there wasn't that much time for participation. We'll see how it goes next time. I am a bit nervous because though I'm structuring it over the course of a year, I am requiring a bit of work from everyone (they have to write a paper and present it). We'll see how it goes.

James has been busy with much of the same stuff. He just discovered another messy library to organize as we're receiving some books that the old volunteers got donated soon. He's been setting up e-mails (or as they like to call them, websites) for everyone at the middle school because they now have the internet.

On Friday we're off for our IST (a Peace Corps training) for a week. It will be fun though weird to see volunteers we haven't seen since September again. It's weird to think that in just about two months my parents will be coming to visit and then in another couple of months we'll be off to Liberia for Matt's wedding and then Thom will be coming. I think the next year is going to fly by.

twenty ten!

Well we've made it back home after a relaxing and amazing trip to Coffee Bay. In fact the last month or so has really been non-stop, so it's crazy to sit back and chill at home this week until the beginning of school next week. The end of the school year was chockful of parties and meetings so it went by pretty quickly. Then after school officially ended, our friend who we work with (she manages the education support center in our village) took us to Sun City for the day. It was quite the adventure, we mostly stuck to free activities (sadly didn't get to go to the valley of the waves waterpark which was super crowded since it was a holiday but we snuck into a hotel pool instead), walked around a lot, had some falafel, and met a talking bird. The most ridiculous part was waiting in line half an hour to ride the Sky Train which is literally like a metro car that goes 2 miles an hour (they have a commuter rail here so I don't know why it's such a novelty).

Then we made the speediest excursion to Botswana ever. We went one day and came back the next so the majority of the trip was spent in the taxi they had hired. Our cousin (the younger brother of one of our principals also) is getting married to a girl from Botswana so we went as part of the family delegation to the negotiations for the details of the wedding. He had already paid lebola (the bride price) so this was just about the details of the wedding. They both are really educated, independent people so it was interesting to see how they reconciled what they wanted with the tradition. James got to go and sit with the men during the negotiations while I sat with the ladies. The men did the actual discussions between families and would come and consult us at various times throughout. And of course we had lots of food including an amazing breakfast prepared by the bride's aunt who we stayed with. What we saw of Botswana wasn't too different from South Africa, poorer but the infrastructure was great, and the absence of Afrikaaners was noticable.

When we got back, it was almost time to head down to the coast for our vacation. We met up with 9 other volunteers in Pretoria and took a pretty excruciating overnight bus ride (with everyone who wanted to make it home by Christmas eve) to Mthatha where we got picked up to go to the Coffee Shack in Coffee Bay. We had an awesome time there. The coast was beautiful...rolling hills meeting cliffs. We went to the beach a lot, went surfing twice (the first time, our lesson, was more successful as we both stood up and rode waves into shore about 10 times each). We did a bunch of hikes...trekking through the dense forest next to a river to the sacred pools, a long hike to a waterfall that you had to swim the last part of, along the coast to the Hole in the Wall, and to the Mapuzi Cliffs where James did a pretty daring cliff jump and I did a less scary one into a river. It was really fun to get to hang out with other volunteers who we hadn't seen since September and just relax. It was crazy how unaccustomed we are to being catered to so we were kind of shocked by how nice and accomodating everyone was. We're definitely happy to be back at home, but also excited to think about future vacations and seeing more of the country.

Here are some photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2364478&id=23307843&l=e7c5d912d1
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2364477&id=23307843&l=b4dbe3a87d

Merry Christmas!

Well we are about to head off to the Wild Coast for 10 days of fun and sun relaxing on the beach! But before we go I wanted to compose the traditional fake Christmas letter, I'm not going to attempt to write about what the rest of the family is up to so it will be even more egotistical than ever...

Dumelang Family, Friends, and Peace Corps Blog Stalkers,

At the end of 2008, we left our heroes Thabs and Lebza on their way to the Outer Banks for another New Years Eve extravaganza with brother Thom and his posse. After narrowly escaping being swallowed whole by the ocean miles away from the nearest road only rescued by the internet's knowledge of Suzuki gear shifts, they returned to dusty Tucson to finish their studies at The Academy for Superhero Studies (known to laypeople as The University of Arizona). They were blessed with visits from both of their families which, contrary to expectations, were actually quite fun. In May, they earned their masters' in Bilingual and Multicultural Shapeshifting and Teaching and Tail Growing Education.

They left Tucson after destroying all their opponents at Himmel Park at one last kickball game and all the beers at Bob Dobbs' (well Thabs did, Lebza was still taking a unique shapeshifter medication that did not allow the consumption of alcohol.) They trekked across the country, accompanied by their magical kitten Omar who entertained them by whistling 'The Farmer in the Dell' the whole way. They stopped at such exciting destinations as the Grand Canyon, Arches National Park, Vail, and some Days Inn in Nebraska.

They spent a month in Ohio and a month in Virginia using their newfound skills to rid the dangerous streets of South Denmark Road and Spring Beauty Court of crime for years to come. Numerous side trips were taken to relax from all the crimefighting they were doing in the peaceful and crime-free spots of New York City, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Islesboro. Lebza made her first foray into the great white North gambling the night away at Niagara Falls.

Finally, they felt their training was complete and were ready for their next challenge. Under the guise of Peace Corps Volunteers, they undertook the journey to South Africa. Though they easily could have teleported themselves directly to their training site, they chose to undertake the 18 hour flight so as not to reveal their identities to their Fellow PCVs.

After two months of nightly crime fighting practice at their training site, they were well versed in the ways of the supervillans of rural South Africa, and they moved to their permanent site. There they began to delve into a number of crimes committed by unruly giraffes and hungry hungry hippos. During the day, they continued their front, working with the schools and district office. They actually managed to convince some people that they knew something about education when they were really plotting their revenge on their giraffe adversaries.

Now we must leave our heroes again until next time as they head off to the next adventure, a week of shark fighting on the Wild Coast. Will they be able to fight off a pack of hungry great whites? Will Thabs ride a dolphin to Atlantis? Will Lebza ever stick to one eye color?

Until next time, sala sentle...

Thabs & Lebza

P.S. This is obviously not true.