Orangpples

Note: If you haven’t seen my previous blog post, I’m running a half marathon next month to help raise money for a Peace Corps Volunteer started organization Kgwale le Mollo to help send two rural South African kids to one of the best high schools in South Africa. Please consider helping me with a donation! Thanks.

One of the things I’ve been doing since the beginning of the year is taking the kids on my street to the town pool once or twice a week. I’ve known about the pool since my first few months here, but until December of last year never checked it out, however since then I’ve been trying to swim once or twice a week. I actually feel sort of bad about this because there are so many things in the community I could be doing during this time after work; such as volleyball or playing trombone at the Salvation Army, both of which I used to do but now don’t have the time for. There’s not enough time in a day for everything I wish I could do, so one must pick and choose and at least for the remainder of summer the pool will win out.

It’s R10 per time at the pool or R100 for a family membership which lets you bring 6 people in for a month, figuring that even if I couldn’t go to the pool 10 times in a month I could at least take the kids on my street as my “family”. I started out swimming laps on Tuesday and Thursday and taking the kids to the pool on Saturday. Weekdays the pool is almost empty and I can swim a kilometer or so is relative peace. The pool officially closes at 5pm but on weekdays that’s never really upheld and I’ve stayed in as late as 5:45. I don’t really understand how it all works because the manger always leaves at 5pm but the old man in charge of maintenance seems to never leave and I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually sleeps there. It’s not quite like doing laps at UVA’s pool back home but swimming there on weekday afternoons is relaxing and a great way to clear my mind.

Weekends on the other hand are completely different. At anyone time on a Saturday afternoon there are about 150 kids at the pool. Keep in mind the fact that there is no adult supervision, no lifeguard, and many kids don’t actually know how to swim. I’ve seen so many things that make the part of me who grew up going to a Northern Virginia community pool all summer cringe just watching. Like the dog who remembers the now none existence electric fence every time she approaches the edge of her yard; every time I see a kid running on the slippery deck, doing back flips into the shallow end, or standing on someones shoulders right next to the pools edge I some how expect the lifeguard’s whistle and yell of “NO RUNNING”. But it never comes and some how amazingly I’ve yet to see a kid hurt themselves. You can read into that what you want, either how an overly litigious and precaustous American society needlessly hampers kids free play or how kids here are so much better at doing things with out hurting themselves even though there seems to be so little attention payed to personal safety. My guess is that its a combination of both.

Another hallmark of my childhood pool experience draconianly enforced by the very same lifeguards which would be just as impossible to enforce here is the hourly “break” where all kids under 14 had to get out of the pool. On weekends when the pool is swarming with kids the manager and maintenance Baba (as far as I can tell the only two people that actually work at this pool) start telling kids to get out around 4:30 and continue to do so for the next 45 min or so before actually succeeding. A far cry a whistle quarter till the hour signaling all the kids to stop having fun in the pool and get out. As so many kids do, I remember spending most those breaks siting at the edge of the pool eagerly anticipating the next whistle indicating I could jump back in. Now if the first time kids here went to the pool and there were lifeguards to enforce the rules and signal break time, I believe they would be even more well behaved then American kids. In everything from the schools to family life kids are taught to be unquestionably submissive to adult authority and power.

Ngiyakushaya (I’m going to hit you) is one of the most common things a child here’s growing up on my street and in the schools I work in. It’s used so frequently that kids respond to little else other than that. Ask them to pick up the trash they just dropped on the ground, close their door, or any number of other things and they normally wont. Tell them you’ll hit them if they don’t and they will. It’s interesting how the use of physical force makes the authority weaker not stronger. In schools a teachers authority is obeyed not out of respect but fear. Often kids have been scolded and even hit enough times for wrong answers that they are fearful even to try in classroom. Obviously, there are other forms of discipline besides physical force that are more beneficial to all parties involved, but if all a child knew was physical discipline you can’t really expect them magically understand this, it has to be learned.

All that is background for the story that happened last week. As usual I took the kids to the pool on Thursday and when 4:45 came around I told them it was time to get out and get ready to go home. Most of them got out but one of my favorite little boys, Mafera, refused to get out of the kids pool (he’s deathly afraid of the deep pool and even though on our street he’ll jump from an 8 ft wall into my hands he wont jump for the pool edge to me when there’s 4 ft of water around). He just looked at me with this silly grin that partially said your going to have to make me get out and partially showed how much he was enjoying still being in the pool. He kept jumping up as high is he could and falling backwards into the water. Even though I was amazed at his simple joi die vire just to be alive and jump in the the water I’d been in the pool for the last 5 hours and was quite tired and easily irritated. I guess at this point I saw how easy it would be just let my annoyance turn to angle and physically pull him from the pool like he expected me to do. Instead I told him if he didn’t get out now he wouldn’t get to come to the pool on Saturday. I’m pretty sure the full meaning of this didn’t sink in as he continued to goad me into getting him out of the pool. After watching him jump about 10 more times and asking him to get out after each I finally turned around told him that was it he wasn’t coming on Saturday. Again, the full meaning of this didn’t sink in, but he understood that the game of trying to get me to come after him was over and there wasn’t any more fun in it so he got out.

Come Friday night when I was telling all the kids to get be ready to go to the pool at noon the next day I told Mafera he wasn’t going because he wouldn’t get out of the pool the last time. Now the full meaning what I said on Thursday came to him and it was heart breaking to see his face at this understanding. The next morning at 9am Mafera shows up at my door asking if he’s really not going to the pool, “Not this time, but you can go next time” I tell him. As I got ready to go do math at the high school he followed me around trying to appease me. Asking if he could take my bike out of the garage, “Yes, but you still can’t go to the pool” or if he can carry my backpack “Yes, but you still can’t go to the pool”. This is where the tough love comes in. It was much much harder for me to enforce the consequences I’d set up for him then it would have been just to hit him on Thursday at the pool and go on. Personally I wanted him to go to the pool and I told him that, but I also told him his actions last time meant that he couldn’t (in the end I did give him a two tennis balls to play with while we were at the pool, little consolidation given all the other kids on the street were gone and he had no one to play with).. However hard it was on me, and how ever much he hated me that Saturday morning I’m confident that he learned more from that experience then he did at school since the beginning of the year. And next time I ask him to get out of the pool, it won’t be a game of trying to get me to force him out, he’ll understand that there are consequences beyond, and worse, then physical force. And maybe, just maybe, someday he’ll apply this lesson to something of much bigger significance and because of that he won’t get HIV, won’t start smoking, or will achieve better in school and in that case I don’t regret that his long sad face as he stayed behind and we all walked to the pool

Friends are often surprised to see how often I tweet or how frequently I’ll email back home. And in ways I find it amazing how I can know what’s happening in almost real time all over the world from my room, not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Peace Corps. But its a fact of the modern world that communication technology has permeated all aspects and all areas of life throughout the world. However, the internet I get here is most defininetly not the same internet I got back home in Virginia. Yes, technically it’s the same webpage that is served up – well almost there is quite a lot of redirection so www.google.com goes to www.google.co.za and www.amazon.com goes to www.amazon.co.uk and my facebook ads are about South Africa, other than that its all the same – but it’s still not the same internet because the bandwidth is limited both in quantity and quality (speed).

I connect to the internet by tethering my cell phone to my computer, something your not actually allowed to do with most phones back in the States because cell phone companies don’t want you sucking up copious amounts of data. However, here we don’t have unlimited data bundles like back home. I buy a set amount of data and when that is up I have to buy more, or if 2 months goes by and it’s not finished I lose it. Because the pre-paid model is so ubiquitous here it’s really easy to check your remaining balance and thus insure that you don’t unexpectedly run out.

Since every single byte that leaves or comes to my phone counts, I’m meticulous about where all my data goes and keep a close watch on the current usage throughout each session (ifconfig ppp0 | grep byte is by far the most used command on my terminal). There are many ways you can conserve data and I like to think I’ve got it down to an art. The first week I was here I switched over from IMAP to POP email, which means that all of my mail for the last 5 years can be viewed offline where I can read, replay, and compose before connecting my phone and sending email. When I browse not only is all flash off, but pictures as well – thus the internet I see is most definitely not the one you see, even if all the text is the same. With all my hacks to decrease my data usage I can normally get by on just 250MB in one month (that’s 1/3 of a CD) and when I splurge on data I use 500MB in a month. Back home I could go through 500MB in 30min. Below is a graph the data left on my bundle each day from March to June of last year.

As you can see, my day to day use of the internet barely uses any data. With that I can read my email 3 times a day, follow my top 10 favorite blogs, check twitter and facebook, and browse a few other random pages each day. Every now and then there’s some program I want, or someone sends me an email with pictures attached, or (and these are the worst) I get an email from someone pointing to a Youtube video. What I normally do is put the link in a list of things to maybe check online if at the end of the week I didn’t go over my data allotment.

Yes I could just buy 1 or 2 gigabytes of data each month, but then I’d spend all my hours watching Youtube videos and not actually getting out and experiencing the community. Plus to be fair about once every 3 months I get package from my Mom filled with about 4GB of podcasts that range from TWIT, FLOSS and a few others from Leo’s network to NPR’s Speaking of Faith and This American Life all of which make hand washing laundry, 4 hour taxi rides, and long walks much much better. You might think it’s crazy for my Mom to send me podcasts all the way across the ocean when I can download them right from my room. But I did the calculation (see tables below for Vodacom data prices): for me to download 6GB of data it would cost just over half of what I make in a month R 1200 or $160, the average price of a package from Virginia to South Africa containing a few magazines, DVD’s of podcasts, a letter or two and a few other surprises is less than $15, plus the knowledge that my parents put the package together is priceless.

Vodacom Data Bundle Prices

Obviously it pays to buy the larger bundles, and if they can really give me data for R0.20 a megabyte I don’t know how they get away with R2 a megabyte for no bundle. And I know plenty of people who don’t buy bundles, I’ve tried to explain this chart to them but spending R88 at one time sounds more expensive then spending R150 in R2 intervals. Part of the problem is that many people I work with have know concept of what a megabyte is and how much data it represents.

The best metaphor for explaining megabytes is to compare them liters. Just like water takes up space, so to do all the pictures, text, and videos you download or have saved on your computer. A 4MB of data will be twice as much information as 2MB just like 4L of coke is twice as much as 2L. Still a little abstract but at least it gets the concept of data taking up space across.

I’d be interested to know how these prices compare to data costs back home. I never actually used internet on my phone when I was in the States (Peace Corps opens up your world in so many ways!) so I have no idea if pay by the byte/megabyte plans are comparable to these. If I’m not mistaken the iPhone unlimited plan is around $60 which would get you 2GB on this plan. It’s going to be interesting going back home because I’m definitely used to having internet on my phone, but really like the prepaid model since I can control how much I spend – in 2MB chunks if I so please.

During training we would often hear that life in South Africa was unique because of a concept fundamental to its culture: Ubuntu. In Nguni languages (isiZulu, siSwati, isiXhosa, isiNdebele) this is most often expressed through the adage “Umuntu ngaumntu ngabantu” – A person is a person through other persons”. We were told that because of Ubuntu there is a closer sense of community and unity then elsewhere. Ubuntu is commonly explained as similar to the Golden Rule: “Love thy neighbor as they self”. But even if there is some overlap in the core sentiments invoked by both Ubuntu and the Golden Rule, there are also some key differences; which make translating the ideas between cultures difficult. Most importantly, embedded in the Golden Rule is a sense of “I”, and in fact that individualism is found throughout western thought – epitomized by René Descartes “I think, therefore I am”.  While embedded in the idea of Ubuntu is community and unity.

If you followed the link to the Wikipedia article on Ubuntu you saw Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s definition of the Ubuntu philosophy:

A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

As an American living among South African culture it’s often difficult to see the ideas of Ubuntu in daily life here. I’ve often participated in conversations with other volunteers centered around the idea that Ubuntu is dead. Perhaps the only times we are able to see it is at weddings, funerals and cultural events where everyone is invited and often times a cow or two is slaughtered. But these are big important events, when looking for Ubuntu in daily actions it’s elusive at best. Certainly in most aspects of the education system, the political system and the way children are treated and raised it’s nonexistent. Perhaps the the culture norm that bothers me, as well as other volunteers, the most is the casual way trash is discarded wherever one may be. If a sense of community and interconnectedness of all people is so important to the concept of Ubuntu why do people just drop plastic bags as they walk, unwrap a candy and let the wrapper fall to the ground where they stand, and throw coke bottles out the window. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve finished a snack or drink on a taxi and the person next to the window offered to through it out for me! Or the weird looks I get when I’m handed a coke can to through out the window and instead put it in my bag to place in a trash can. As American’s we take all these things to mean that Ubuntu is dead, but I think this sentiment comes our different cultural backgrounds. And every now and then an aspect of Ubuntu that we can relate to our understanding of the Golden Rule seeps through.

This blog post is really about one of those times.

Last week as I was biking to a school my chain locked up on the way down a hill. I’d never seen a bike chain get stuck like this one; somehow 5 chain links had got caught between the smallest and middle gears in the front. I flipped the bike over and tried pulling them out, which only served to get my hands dirty. I next tried to use some near by rocks to hammer the chain outwith out much luck. I’d been working on this for maybe a minute and a half before someone asked what was wrong. When I explained she stopped someone going someone going in the opposite direction and told him what was wrong. He immediately turned around and told me to follow him to his house, which was about a block away. There with the help of a screw drive and hammer we proceeded to unlock the chain (and luckly this hasn’t reoccurred). I thanked him for all his help and was about to jump on the bike and continue to school, but he insisted on taking me back to the sink and having me throughly scrub my hands. I’m pretty sure my attempts to unlock the chain with out real tools would have failed and forced me to walk back home, but thankfully I didn’t have to.

I think this is an important example of why Peace Corps is a 2 year commitment. I can’t help but think a similar situation would have played out if this had happened not after I’d been biking around the township for over a year, but in my first month here. I’m sure someone would have helped me eventually, but I doubt it would have been that fast. Having lived here for the last 15 months I am now part of the community and that has certain benefits. Maybe to much sometimes, because I also can’t help but wonder how fast someone would have stopped to help if it wasn’t “that weird umlungu American that lives in the township” and just your average person on a bike. But I can never know, for I can only experience life here being treated a 23 year old American and never as someone who was born and raised here. But I’d like to think the fact that I’m the only white person living in the township had little to do with the help I got, and that the same would have been extended to anyone.

Wow it’s really been a long time since I’ve written anything here. And you know what, with a few exceptions, that seems to be the a general trend within the Peace Corps community. There are tones of blog posts about the leaving America transition as one contemplates all the unknowns in their next step along life’s journy. During training their might be one or two posts, but in general your so busy, overwhelmed, and scattered brained to find the time (that and the fact that during training there’s very little access to the internets). Then in the first few months at site there’s a consent stream of posts. The volunteer is like a child in a toy store, everything one does is amazing, new, and exciting. You wish you could put on special glasses and pipe video back home as you walk down the street because its all just that cool!

But one thing that makes Peace Corps unique is that by the time that phase has died down and daily life at site begins to feel normal your not packing your bags to go back home, instead you have 20 more months to live here and call this place home. You now know everyone on your street, you have contacts with people all over your village (in my case a township), you become part of the daily ebb and flow of daily life. This means that blog posts become rarer and rarer. And when they do arrive their not about how unique and exotic life here is, but about people, projects and life philosophies.

Over the last 6 months since I last posted there have been many ideas for a post I’ve head and I’d diligently put “write blog post” on my to do list. But then the kids across the street would call me over to play catch, there’d be an amazing sunset and I’d just have to climb up on my roof and watch it, I’d be taken on a trip to a village for the day. It always seems like there is a choice to be made, between going out and living life and being a Peace Corps Volunteer, and sitting in my room chronicling what its like. The computer screen is this magical window into a different world and can so easily suck you in. But when I enter that world I leave behind the world outside my room, and it’s to experience that world that I decided to go on this grand adventure. So, as my twitter feed will attest, instead of blogging I’ve been off living.

But, I’ve decided I need to start blogging again, because there is just way to much on my mind that I’d like to share here. So I’m going to do my very best to do a blog post a day for the next week. That really sounds like a lot, but if your going to jump in the pool you mind as well do it all at once and with great enthusiasm. After a week we’ll see if I keep it up, but I know I have enough to say to fill that up, and by committing to that now, in this post, hopefully I’ll stick to it.

This week I returned to site after my second extended trip through South Africa. Traveling in South Africa is always great fun, partly because there are so many great things to do, great (cheap!) places to stay, and great things to see. The Rainbow Nation’s landscape and geography are even more diverse then its people and there is a bit of anything you could ever want with in it’s boards. This trip was made all the better because I was accompanied by one of my best friends since 9^th grade Christine Breton. She actually went to UVA as well but we each had separate groups of friends which only occasionally overlapped. So it was great to travel around such a wonderful country and see so many great things with her. She brought her iPhone along on the trip – it’s true, once you get an iPhone there’s no turning back they change how you interact with the world, truly a revolutionary piece of technology – and was able to blog the whole thing from her phone as the trip progressed. You can check her blog out here. Also joining us for most the trip was one of my best Peace Corps friends Steve Gerner.

Since we packed so much into a two week period I think I’ll make the whole trip multiple posts. In this post I’ll give a general overview and talk about beginning of the trip. Below you’ll see a map of our complete trip.

As you can see we traveled a good portion of South Africa. With the exception of Cape Town and Barberton each night we stayed at a new, and often very interesting, place. I never thought South Africa was so big. The CIA fact book states that it’s “slightly less than twice the size of Texas” so maybe I should rephrase that to: I never thought Texas was so big. All together we traveled over 3500km (2100mi) and I spent I little under R6000 ($750), which considering everything we did is extremely awesome and since I’m on a Peace Corps budget extremely necessary. The first leg from Jo’burg to Cape Town was done on a bus. It was supposed to be on the Shosholoza Meyl, but they canceled my reservations 2 hours before I arrived at the station to pick the tickets up (sent them feedback saying they shouldn’t do that during the world cup). As it turned out this was quite fortunate for two reasons.

First, it gave us time to do the Soweto Bike Tour. I bike through a township everyday, although not as large or of as much historical significance as Soweto, and still really loved the tour. It was very well done and I highly recommended and hope to to go on it again with other Peace Corps Volunteers (or if anyone else wants to come visit I’ll do it two more times!). Second, we had a very unforgettable 17 hour bus ride from Jo’burg to Cape Town. SA Roadlink, like most bus companies in South Africa, has large double decker coach buses. Christine and I were lucky enough to sit in the top front and so for the parts of the trip when the windows weren’t foggy (not very often) we got a great view. The bus seemed to stop about every two hours for reasons beyond comprehension, though as veterans of many a long Marching Band bus trip Christine and I coped fine. Starting at around 6:30 am we even got to watch all three Back To The Future’s in reverse order!

We got to Cape Town around 11:30, only 30 min late despite leaving Jo’burg 2 hours late just to give you an idea of the type of driver we had. Cape Town is a beautiful and fun little city with so many things to see that we couldn’t even come close to seeing everything in just 3 days. Some highlights included: our trip out to Cape Point where the rain seemed to always start when we were furthest from our car, normally up some rocky path. And “accidentally” walking half way up Signal Hill in search of a tea house that was only 70 street numbers but about 10 steep blocks from where we started. On the plus side we got to have an amazing tea with some great views of Table Mountain, the city, and the water front. By our last day we’d rented the car we would use for the rest of the trip and decided to do both Table Mountain and Robben Island in one day before driving out of the city to stay further down the coast. Table Mountain was covered in a giant tablecloth of clouds and we could barely see people standing 10 feet in front of us, let alone the city. But when it comes down to it I would much rather have had good views of Table Mountain then good views from the top which is exactly what we got.

I think that’s enough for my first post about this trip. The next one will be about our fast passed journey from Cape Town to Barberton, almost exactly opposite sides of country. I would also like to mention a couple we met in Cape Town staying at the same place we were. They’ve been traveling west around the world from South America through Australia and Asia for the last 8 months and plan to continue up through Africa and Europe. Their blog, which is filled with lots of pictures and longish articles, can be found here. It was quite cool to talk to people who had seen so much in the past year and managed to do such a trip on limited savings. I invited them to come visit me in Barberton if they make it this far in their months stay in South Africa. They say they don’t really plan much before entering a country and figure it all out day by day. The best way to travel in my humble opinion.

I got back yesterday from a week away from site. I spent all of last week with 10 other volunteers preparing for the next group of volunteers – SA20 – to arrive late next month at what Peace Corps calls General Training of Trainers or GTOT. This means I was at the training college in Marapyane were my Pre-Service Training (PST) was held last July. Instead of spending a night in Pretoria to catch the Peace Corps provided transport at 10am I decided to stay with my PST host family before GTOT started. It was great to spend the night with them and see how they were doing. In the morning I made my way vie public transport from their small village to the training college. It was amazing to realize how easy that actually was, but I never once did it during the three months of PST last year.

We put a lot of work into designing the schedule and divided up when we will all return to facilitate sessions at SA20’s PST. SA 20 will be replacing the SA 16 education volunteers leaving over the next few months and will mostly be on the opposite side of the country from me in the North West Province so I’m glade I’ll get a chance to meet them at PST. They will also all be learning Tswana. At our PST people learned 5 of South Africas 9 official languages: Sepdi, Tsonga, SiSwati, iNdebele, and Zulu. With so many languages being learned large group sessions had to always use English and practicing with people not in your language group was basically impossible. Our PST was a microcosm of the linguistic soup that makes up South Africa, but it wasn’t very conducive for learning or cross communication. It will be interesting to see how SA 20’s language training goes.

Sunday also happened to be the start of the FIFA Confederations Cup here in South Africa. There has been lots of build up to this international event in the news media. The Confederations Cup is a test run for the World Cup next year and from what I saw in Pretoria earlier this week I think they’ll be ready. I actually got to go to the USA vs Italy game on Monday night, and although it was 1 – 3 Italy it was very fun. There were plenty of buses between remote parking centers and the stadium and roads were closed around the stadium making it easy to walk there. Wait lines going in weren’t very long at all, though it did take a while to get out. My one complaint would be that there was very little order in the concession and bathroom lines during half time, it was pretty much a free for all mob and you had to force your self to the front to get anything. Never having been to a World Cup game before I’m not sure how much of a chaotic mad house half time concessions are but I think there’s was some room improvement. Maybe putting up queuing lines or something.

Coming back to site always requires a major mental shift. Your going from constantly being around other Americans where conversations that seem normal and not forced to being the only person from your cultural back ground and understanding. But its also nice to be back to the familiar routine, sounds, and feel of my little street in the township. There’s about one and a half weeks left in the school term here before a month long break. I want to try to get the ground work for projects I want to work on next term done in that time. The first week of break I’m planning to do math prep classes for the grade 12 students at a few high schools in this area. In November all South African 12^th graders have to take matriculation tests to pass high school and over the next few months they will all put enormous amounts of energy into studying. I’m hoping to give them some tools that will make their studying easier and more efficient. After that I’m planning to go on a trip from Cape Town through the Eastern and Western Cape with a few other volunteers and a good friend from high school who’s coming to visit. So I also have a lot of work to do planning all the details of that trip.

Schools started back up this week after a two week hiatus between first and second terms. So much has happened in the last three weeks that it seems like almost half a year ago when I ran the Longtom marathon.

The week after the marathon was the science camp I’d been planning. For about half of the month of February and all the month of March organizing this camp was my main focus. The primary goal of the camp was to excite 7^th and 8^th grade students from around the Circuit about science and math. I invited 72 students from 10 different schools that span Barberton and Emjindin asking each school to nominate the students most interested in science. This was one of the best decisions I made because working with highly motivated curious students made it much easier to introduce concepts like centripetal force, inertia, or density. But most importantly I wanted to make the camp as hands on and interactive as possible to show that science isn’t words in a text book or memorized facts but a way of interacting with the world.

The last two months were a long bumpy road as I attempted to urge the initial idea for the camp into a reality. I went to countless local businesses proposal in hand trying to get some support. I made extensive list of supplies we needed but hadn’t collected any. I’d come up with over 25 lesson ideas and assigned them to other volunteers but still needed 5 more. Planning a project like this is rather like jumping off a cliff with the leap of faith that you can build the parachute on the way down. Its like jumping of a diving board; once you make that initial commitment there’s nothing you can do about it – your going to hit the water. The only option you have is to decide if its going to be a giant belly flop, messy cannonball, smooth dive, or spectacular reverse three-and-a-half somersaults tuck.

It wasn’t until the last two days before the Longtom marathon that I felt the camp might actually be not belly flop. My friend Steve had come to town to help me print over 80 activity books, I’d gone with my supervisor to collect equipment from participating schools, and the circuit office’s drive had driven me around town to buy supplies. But even then I had no idea if any kids would actually show up the next Monday, the first official day of their break.

The camp was scheduled to start at 8am and myself and the four other Peace Corps Volunteers that came into town to help showed up around 7am to start getting ready. Already there were a few small groups of kids waiting around. In the next hour and a half, right through a mild rain, we registered 74 students for the camp. It was a hectic mess of kids and paper, but finally we had everyone in a large circle ready to do some ice breakers before breaking into small groups and starting some science. Through out the week attendance went up and down. Some kids didn’t come back, others brought friends – this is Peace Corps after all, got to have some spontaneity and randomness. In the end, on Friday we passed out 78 certificates so if numbers were all that mattered the camp was definitely a success.

But numbers aren’t all that matter. Quality is often much more important than quality. I mean I’ll give the first person who asks 1,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwean dollars. We wanted to make sure the students had fun and were exposed to advanced concepts in an interesting and engaging ways. And by that measure I’d say the camp was also a success.

As expected there were some lessons that completely flopped (I was really excited about making and using abaci – turns out their not that exciting to 13 and 14 year olds). But the majority of activities were pretty good and some really really great. Here’s a list of some of my favorite.

• Mento’s and Coke – Almost as good as soda bottle rockes and always great fun. Turned this into an experimental design simulation by doing three different experiments with different independent variables.

• Egg Drop – 12 pieces of paper might have been to much though, we had to dig pretty deep to find some groups eggs.

• Surface Tension – I remember putting drops on pennies way back in 6^th grade and thought it would work well on the 10 cent coins here.

• Scale model of the solar system – Did this in 8^th grade and the incredible amount of space between planets has always stuck with me.

There were lots of good activities and I’m starting to think of more so I can hopefully do this again as well as give ideas to other volunteers. If anyone has great science activities that can be done with very minimal equipment please pass them my way.

One of the side effects of working with over 76 teenagers for a week is that I can’t go anywhere in the township now with out people calling out my name (at least it’s my name now and not “Hey Malungu”). Almost every day over the week after the camp I would run into students who attended the camp. They would ask

“We want the camp this week too. Why isn’t it happening again?”

“Because I didn’t plan it” I’d say.

“Well, why didn’t you plan it on Sunday” they’d replay.

That always made me laugh, but I didn’t feel like explain the month and a half of work I’d put into that one week. I’d also get kids who would come up and say they wanted a camp in July “But this time make it a sleep over camp, and have more kids.” I’m really glade they liked it but I’m not sure I can come up with another weeks worth of material, and even if I could I’d have qualms about targeting the same group of kids when there are over 1000 kids at some of these schools and over 40 schools in the Circuit.

I’d love to do another science camp sometime in the next year and a half. That one week was one of the most rewarding of my Peace Corps service so far. Plus I learned so much from doing this one that it should be much easier and much better if I do it again. But for now I have two other big projects I want to focus on that will hopefully reach more students and teachers. I’ll try to share them here over the next few weeks as they develop.

Two weekends ago on the March 28^th I ran a half marathon with about 70 other volunteers as part of an annual fundraiser for the KLM foundation. I would first like to thank everyone that helped support this wonderful project started by former volunteers over five years ago. Together everyone in Peace Corps raised over $20,000 and KLM will once again be able to send a bright young person from a rural area to Uplands College for 5 years of high school. The original volunteers who started to project returned to great us after the run and it was great to be able to meet them. It must be truly amazing for them to come back and stay involved in a project started such along time ago

The Longtom marathon itself is actually two different runs. The 56km goes from Sabie to Lyndenburg, which involves running 30km up a very step mountain. Two Peace Corps volunteers ran this and I having been bussed up the mountain I can only drop my jaw in admiration for their feat. The race that I ran was 21km and mostly all down the other side of the mountain, though there were some up hills. Over all I must say I really enjoyed the run. I’d never run anything that long before (the longest training run I did was 13km). I finished the race in 2h15min which I thought was pretty good. Next year I’ll aim for under 2 hours.

It was amazing how many people actually ran the race. At one point I passed a heard of cows walking single file along the road. I can’t imagine their impression of thousands of people streaming by in such a hurry to get nowhere as they ambled along. But running a marathon is one of those things were hurrying along to get it over with is definitely a reword in of its self. I’ve never been one for running, preferring biking or swimming more, but being here in South Africa with my horrible bike and no pool as made me into some what of a runner. I try to run at least 3 times a week and actually rather enjoy it. This weekend I ran into town and back (about 10km round trip) and after the 21km last weekend it was a piece of cake.

For the race I wanted to get my hair braided so I wouldn’t have it in my eyes the whole time. The Thursday before I asked some of the people I play volleyball with if they knew of anywhere I could get my hair braided and one of the ladies volunteered to do it her self. I’ve attached two pictures below of my hair right after getting braided and then when I took it out after the run. Not having cut my hair the whole time I’ve been here its getting pretty long.

This is going to be one of those post where I start by saying I haven’t been good at keeping up with posting, because its true. But to make up for it I’ve posted new photo’s of some things from around my township and town. You can check them out here. I’ll try to put more photo’s there every now and than and let you know through the blog.

At the begining of this month I attended a Life Skills Training with the 33 other members of my Peace Corps Group and counterparts from the community.  Contrary to what you might think Life Skills Training is, it’s not how to how to go 3 days out in the African Bush on your own. Rather it was a series of work series of workshops on how to to teach character building skills and personal responsibility to South Africa’s youth so they can make smart informed decisions about how to live their lives better. This is a very important topic for the youth of this country. The South African government recently announced that statics from the last census that said at least 28% of the population is living with HIV/AIDS. And in Mpumalanga province, where I live, 25.2% of girls have had a child by the time they are 20, meaning they’ve most likely dropped out of school before receiving their diploma. Empowering young people to make intelligent decisions about their future and define set goals is the only way to combat these horrific statistics.

I’ve also been really busy planning a Science and Math camp for 72 7th and 8th grade students from 10 different schools. The goal of the camp is to bring some of the fun thrills of exploring science I remember from experiments I did back in Elementary and Middle School to students here. Hopefully it will inspire a few of them to take science and math in high school (hard science and real math are optional depending on what your specialization is). Its been alot of work so far and I have 2 more weeks before the camp (its two days after the Longtom marathon), but I’m excited and hopefully everything will work out. I’ll definitely post pictures and a blog post once its over.

One of the things that being in Africa has taught me is that life isn’t the meritocracy the American Dream teaches us. One where the son of a Boston candle maker can run away from home to start life in Philadelphia to one day become an emissary to kings and queens in Europe, or the son of a Kenyan immigrant can Harvard law school and one day become the President of America. We like to think that if you have the skills and potential the sky is the limit. But if the teachers at your local high school spend more time in the break room than the class room, the class sizes peak between 40 and 50 students, and the average pass rate is below 25% your not thinking about flying, you don’t even know where the runway is.

A few years ago several Peace Corps volunteers in South Africa started the Kgwale le Mollo (KLM) Foundation to not only guild a few young South Africans to the runway but provide them with wings. Each year the foundation grants a 5 year scholar ship to one 8^th grade student to attend on of South Africa’s top high schools. As part of the scholarship the students are required to return to the impoverished communities they came from to assist with development work. In this way they don’t only help train students from rural South Africa to become part the next generation of leaders, but also bring much needed talent and experience into the rural areas.

In order to raise money for this scholarship the KLM Foundation has teamed up with the annual Longtom marathon, and this is where you come in. On March 29^th I’ll be running the half marathon and would love it if you could help sponsor me by donating to the KLM Foundation in my name. Donations can be done through a secure web form on the Foundation’s website (when you click donations your browser will most likely ask you if you want to see the pop, this happens because the KLM site sends you to name of site to securely handle any financial data). Or by snail mail, see details below. Please give what you can. It doesn’t have to be much, $10 and $20 donations add up and you’ll be providing a child in rural South Africa with the gift of a lifetime: an education (plus its tax-detectable!).

Over 68 volunteers participated and raised just over $20,000 for KLM, enabling them award the scholarship to two learners. This year they are hoping to have a record turn out of over 70 volunteers and raise even more money. So please help out!

I highly encourage you to go take a look at the KLM Foundations website. Even if you don’t plan on donating its gives you some great background on the state of Education in South Africa. The wounds of Apartheid are deep and slow to heal. For the last 14 years South Africa has been trying to fix an education system designed not to empower students to reach their full potential, but to oppress both their mind and spirit. It’s come along way in those 14 years, but, especially in the rural areas, still has a long way to go.

Snail Mail Instructions

The online donation is preferable, but if you need to mail in a check, please make it payable to “Kgwale Le Mollo (US)” and send it to:

KLM Foundation (US)

c/o Bowen Hsu

461 So. Bonita Avenue

Pasadena, CA 91107

Also make sure to include a note that your donation is on my behalf.