la gripe

The best part of being sick is not being sick anymore, and being sick in Africa is not so exciting when you have a cold or flu as when you have malaria, dysentery, or cholera (which are things we are not likely to acquire here in SA). So we fell sick after a fun visit to one of our Fellow volunteers Anne who lives up in the mountains outside of Rustenburg. Though it's not very far from where we live (driving, it's maybe an hour and a half, but taking taxis it was more like 3 hours), it's a totally different world, beautiful green rolling hills, tall trees, monkeys, and a swimming pool. But we started to feel a little sick even then (well mostly James did) which made the trip back and stop at the grocery store a bit hellish. It was so nice to get home and crash.

So James spent the first part of week in pain, and it caught up with me on Thursday, but by Friday we were both well enough to go to work. Spending the day at school (and at one of the schools we haven't spent much time at yet) was quite a shock after a week of doing nothing. It's kind of weird how big the village is that we can spend the whole week at home and aside from the kids who come to check up on us, most people in the village aren't even aware that we're incapacitated. In Chad, if I was gone for the weekend, everyone knew, but here, we are almost anonymous. I say almost because of course we really aren't, but we can definitely fly under the radar.

Our host mom has been home for the past week which has been nice. She should be home permanently pretty soon as her daughter's baby is growing, slowly, but it's growing. Maybe by the beginning of December. We have so much fun hanging out and working in the garden with her. Watching the fruit grow is one of my favorite pastimes and I think it won't be too much longer before we are eating figs, mangoes, and peaches.

Though we've been working on our plans for next year and completing our assignments, we've also been distracted by planning our life after peace corps (taking a quiz online of what the best city for you to live in is and looking for jobs in West Africa), our upcoming vacation to the wild coast for Christmas and New Years, and my parents' visit in April.

Anyway, I feel like this update seemed much more interesting in my head than it is in reality so I will stop. Next time, James is going to post so prepared to get enthralled.

Oh by the way, I did not really like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I like Pride and Prejudice a lot and I felt like the whole zombie thing was not funny after like the first 10 pages so then it was just annoying intruding into Pride and Prejudice so yeah that was disappointing.