Yebo! Yebo! Yebo! Internet at Last!

Jess writes:

So first and foremost, two key notes about internet here in South Africa:

1. It is sometimes expensive.
2. It is often slow.

So with that in mind, we will do our VERY best to begin updating, once again, at something resembling our American fervor!! We are SO happy to be back to the digital world… yay!

But where on earth do we begin…

Okay, most importantly for the families, Adam and I are safe and healthy! We’ve only mildly endured some health annoyances – bug bites, angry tummies, weird rashes, the normal – ha! And since staging, we’ve only had to add one major medication to the routine: Doxycycline, a once-a-day antimalarial that makes you photosensitive (that is, overly-reactive to sunlight)… great side effect for Africa, right? Other than that, we’ve felt surprisingly safe in most all places we have visited and wonderfully safe in those areas that we have stayed – a huge relief for us both!

Next, and almost as important as health and safety, we are FINALLY official Peace Corps Volunteers!!! Our “Swearing In Ceremony” was held Thursday, March 25th with the PC South Africa Country Director, Associate Directors and other regional staff. It was short and sweet, but after 3 years of waiting, it was all we needed!!! Yay!

How to catch up?... As our last, very brief post mentioned, we spent an incredible first two months with our host family, the Mhlangas’, in Machipe – a small village near the border with Limpopo. We were quickly given our Swazi names: mine was “Sesi”, which means “Sister”, due to my willingness to fumble through the languages and hug all the women – ha! Adam’s was “Jabu”, which means “Happy”, because our host father, Johannas, was so happy to have a volunteer “son”. So perfect! Our parents there were wonderful and we met some wonderful friends in the area as well – not to mention our herd of yard (and sometimes mountain) goats, the obnoxious chickens, the sad and adorable town donkeys, and all the cows (I had a favorite set of baby cow triplets that refused to let me pet them… oh well.) Our days in Machipe were usually filled with long trainings at SS Skhosana, a private nature reserve where the “farm” animal scenery quickly turned to more African expectations – enormous baboons that howled from the rock tops, sneaky little monkeys (Adam adds: “Damned thieves.”), black and gray wildabeasts, an occasional water buffalo, and the very rare sighting of a white-faced springbok – so beautiful! It was a truly great place for training… and helpfully “escapist” for those super-long afternoons. All in all, Machipe was a wonderful start to our South African life. We were extremely sad to leave our host family and friends last week and MamaChristine sobbed through our whole departure!

So what’s next? We’ve finally arrived at our permanent site, which is… drumrole please… Eastern Mmpumalanga! Greatest part about our locale, we are a 10 minute drive to a primary entrance to Kruger National Park – the largest and most populated (animals, that is) natural park in all of Southern Africa! Cool, huh? We think so too! But there are some catches of course, the main one being… it’s HOT. And I mean HOOOTTTT. It averages about 38C right now (that’s about 100F)… oh, and by the way, it’s Fall. That’s right, we’re entering Winter, which apparently averages a wonderfully cooler 28C (and that’s 80F). So, Summer you ask? It meanders annoyingly around 42C (that’s 108F) most days… but its reached 46C (…115F!!!) in the past. Ugh. Did I mention that it’s humid also? But hey, we wanted Africa… we certainly got AFRICA. And speaking of those catches… they’ve switched our language again. Grrrrrr. Just when our SiSwati was far surpassing our initial skills in Zulu, we’re now in an area that speaks neither. In fact, we’ve now switched to an entirely new language family, called Shangaan. Specifically, we will be learning a local dialect of Tsonga. And in case you’re wondering, it’s not too similar to SiSwati, or Zulu. Oh well… bring on African language number three…

Luckily, we’ll be working with an awesome organization called Swa Vana, which translates to “For the Children” in Tsonga. You can (and should!) find them online at www.swavana.co.za and you can “Join” or “Become a Fan” of them on Facebook – so please do! We have a wonderful supervisor based in Jo’burg named Charmaine and an equally wonderful supervisor here on the homefront named Happy. (We love that his name is Happy, by the way! It matches Adam’s Swazi name!) The organization runs three full-time Drop-in Centers (initialed DIC) for Orphans & Vulnerable Children (initialed OVC). They have also begun a Home-Based Care branch (initialed HBC) focused on work with patients suffering from HIV/AIDS, TB and other chronic diseases. Our work with Swa Vana may be extremely diverse – ranging from physical building (they are in desperate need for a new, larger, center for OVCs), related business management skills training (especially for those boys involved in the building), mentoring and life skills guidance (via Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs), primary and secondary school teaching (English, Math & Science), the creation of Income Generating Activities (initialed IGAs), and of course, HIV/AIDS education and prevention (by way of all the activities described above). Needless to say, we have our work cut out for us these first 3 months, during which time we are to “observe” and “integrate” in order to better grasp the greatest needs of our communities. Whew….!

Finally, we have new cell phone numbers and hopefully a new P.O.B. soon, so we will be sure to draft a new “All the 411” post in the near future to keep you all up to date. We may have mentioned that we like mail…. Just a little… ha! In the meantime, we are able to communicate best with Facebook as our new phone has a nifty Facebook app that doesn’t eat too much of our data bundle. So please, PLEASE, send us messages and comments to keep in touch! We can’t explain how much we love reading little notes from friends and family members… I think it is actually a primary source of our continued sanity in this often stressful and somewhat insane process called “service”.

As always, we love and miss you all tons and are very much looking forward to keeping you entertained with some more posts in the near future. The list of things to blog about has just become overwhelming… oh gosh, we’re becoming one of those “bloggers”.

Talk again soon! Until then, Salani Kahle!!!

Adam writes:

First and foremost, I miss all of you. A lot. I knew when I left that I wasn’t going to find friends like you in South Africa. I knew that whatever adopted families and host families we had along the way wouldn’t be at all like our family at home. And they’re not. Of course we have been making friends and we are on our second host family and all of them are great. Just not the same. So before I go on with the observations about this country that I have been dying to tell you, let me just say again, I miss all of you very much. I always knew that you meant so much to us, now I just know exactly how much.

So interesting things about South Africa and our stay here so far:

The word for grandmother here is gogo. It has become already so ingrained in our vocabulary as women seeming to be retirement age or older is addressed as gogo. And there are a lot of gogos in SA. This leads me to two observations. First of all, I think this is the perfect word for my own grandmother as she will be turning 90 soon and she is always on the “gogo”. And that is what SA has done to my sense of humor so far. Secondly, this puts a whole new spin on the venue “Whiskey A GoGo”.

I miss home and I think of family and friends often. But not a single day has gone by in SA that I haven’t thought about my motorcycle. The weather is gorgeous and the scenery is unbelievable.

It is very weird to be in Africa and to be constantly mistaken as a native. People assume at first that we are Afrikaans or of British decent. Then we speak and they are immediately interested in who we are and what we’re doing here. It still strikes me as odd that it’s our accent and not our skin color that they find interesting.

There is something eerie about walking through a rural African village and hearing Beyonce or TuPac blaring from an unidentifiable source. At first it seems like it’s coming from the heavens, but it usually turns out to just be the shebeen, or tavern. Oh, and for some unexplainable reason, South Africans LOVE Celine Dion. We hear “My Heart Will Go On” everywhere, and only “My Heart Will Go On”. Nothing else by her.

This one is more specifically for Matt. They drive on the left hand side of the road here. Almost everyone drives manual. We’ve seen several Fiat Pandas, Fiat 500’s, a slew of new and old Alpha’s, and even a Ferrari in Pretoria and an R8 in Jo’Burg. Opel is still doing well here, though they no longer make the Cadet. And we actually see the different cars reviewed on Top Gear here including MG and Rover. Though come to think of it, I have yet to see a Porsche.

Braiing is a huge thing here. It is their word for Barbequing. And since it never really gets cold here they do it year round. I guess that one was also mostly for Matt’s benefit.

We have seen a lot of animals here and mostly up close as Jess has mentioned. Wildabeasts, springbok, zebra, antelope, warthogs, water buffalo, monkeys, baboons, and hyenas. But don’t worry Al, we have been nowhere near hippos. Although, we have seen “hippo crossing” signs on the highway. Apparently they like to wander across the road at night and people run into them. Usually the hippo walks away. And people think hitting a deer is bad. See Al, they are far more dangerous than you thought.

So that may wrap things up for now. We will update more often now that we have internet access and I will probably see most of you on Facebook. Until then, please inundate us with updates. We really are starved for information from home. And thanks to all of you who have already been commenting.