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.

I’ve always been fascinated by the country comparison pages on the CIA Factbook. So much so that I actually carried an offline version of all the information with me into the Peace Corps. It’s amazing the type of patterns and astounding facts you can find in that data

Earlier this week a 10^th grader had come over to my house for physics help and we started talking about the world map on my wall. He mentioned how much bigger the United States was than South Africa which immediately made me think of the Area Comparison on the CIA Factbook. I brought it up and showed him and he was just as amazed as me to think that there was an entire country 2 sq km with a population greater than 30,000 or a country with less than 50 people living in it. Looking through the list of country comparisons I saw the HIV/AIDS adult prevalence rate and figured it be a good thing for him to see where South Africa fell on this list. He stared at the list for a good 10 to 20 seconds in complete shock mouth almost open. When I looked at the list again I tried looking from the perspective of a 16 year old South African and had almost the same reaction.

If you didn’t click the link to the list, do it now.

Here’s what I noticed after studding the list:

• The top 9 countries are all the southern most countries of continental Africa.
• All of these countries have an HIV rate over 10% while the 10^th country (Kenya) is at 6.7%. A percentage gap that large occurs no where else in the table.
• You have to go all the way down to number 23 to get off the continent of Africa.
• Less than 1000 miles off the coast of South Africa (#4 at 18.1%) is Madagascare (#116 at 0.1%)
• There’s no trend between GDP, war and conflict, or many other measurable statistics. Somalia is at 0.5%.

To help visualize this data I made a color coded map from a blank SVG map of Africa on Wikipeida and the effect is even more obvious. In the graph, the more red a country is the higher the percentage of HIV/AIDS in the country, when multiple countries through out the world have the same percentage the ranking is done alphabetically.

As the true impact of these numbers slowly materialized in front of the young man he asked me the next obvious question: Why? Truth be told I didn’t really know how to respond to him and would appreciate any thoughts from others more knowledgeable on this subject. Looking at the data and the astounding fact that the most affected countries are all grouped together in southern Africa I figure there has to be some explanation for it. I fumbled through an answer about differences in culture and the like, which in no way satisfied him.

After he left I went to the place that knows all answers and googled for information on the subject. As you can imagine this is a pretty controversial issue with people suggesting things that I’d never heard before and seem pretty preposterous such as the majority of HIV cases are actually spread through immunization needles (does nothing to explain this trend) to the prevalence of concurrent sexual partners in some African cultures (goes a long way to explain the trend I feel).  And making the map from the CIA Factbook data made me remember a Hans Rosling TED Lecture I watched about a year ago. I just rewatched it and highly recommend it, it will be the most enlighting 10min of your day. If you’re a PCV in South Africa I’ll give it to you next time I see you, that lecture is a must watch for every volunteer in the country in my opinion.

It really is a simple invention that in hindsight seems as obvious as the wheel, but apparently it wasn’t until 1861 that the putting wire mesh over a hole in the wall became common place. While it’s rare to find a house in the United States without window screens, it’s just as rare to find one that does here. Part of this might be due to the type of window used here. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve seen a Sash Window here. That classic sliding window that I had in every room growing up just doesn’t seem to exist here, and I can’t figure out why. Originally I thought maybe that’s what they used in England and Holland, but no Sash windows were in use in Europe by the mid-17th century.

So if there aren’t sliding windows here, what are there? They are all Casement Windows. And not the type you sometimes see back home with the crank shaft to open them up from behind a window screen. No, these you just slide a latch and push right open. If you can visualize that for a second it means there can’t be any window screen, because you’ve just pushed right through it to open the window. I’ve seen and heard of some usual solutions to this problem. Some volunteers in the group before me used double sided Velcro and an old mosquito net to try to bug proof their room. Every time they wanted to open the window, they’d peel back the mosquito net, unlatch and push out the window, and then reattach the Velcro. Even more elaborate, at a guest house in Kimberly on my recent vacation the had build giant screen cages to go around the open windows! Some volunteers, and most people on my street, go with the the closed window option. But, when it’s over 90 degrees in my room I consider that to much suffering and much prefer to sleep under my mosquito net and feel a slight breeze to sweating it way on top of my sheets.

All this got me thinking about what a screen window or door really represents. Living here without AC or central heating sometimes its hard to remember how in the States a house is a bastion of control and stability against the chaotic elements and seasonal fluctuations outside. My room here is a sauna in the summer and I have to ware a warm hat to sit at my desk in the winter. I am not in control of the inside temperature and must adapt accordingly. A screen on the window is a selective sieve by which we can bring the outside in. It lets the cool breeze and humid air pass right through put keeps the insects out of the pristine home. It represents both our control over our environment and our eagerness to escape the stuffiness we feel at that control. As a kid I always loved sleeping with the window next to my bed open, even on hot summer nights – where I’d put my head right next to the window urning for the smallest breeze – and crisp fall ones – where I’d wrap my self up in a warm blanket and feel the nights chill on my face. Maybe that’s also why I ended up here in the Peace Corps; I didn’t want to be locked up behind a window looking out, but wanted to through that widow right open and experience what ever was on the other side.

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.

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.

Rainy season has most definitely come here. The last week while I was biking home I suddenly noticed how green the fields next to me were and remembered how just a week ago they had been brown and dry. And when I looked up at the surrounding mountains the trees that used to be the only dark green spots in a see of brown where absorbed by the new growth all around them. I wish I had taken some pictures of what this place looked like just 2 weeks ago so I could do a comparison. The change must have been really gradual before I actually noticed it but I wasn’t paying enough attention. Next year I’m going to try to take weekly photos of the mountains from mid October till mid November.

For the last week now almost every other night starting around 6pm there has been a giant thunderstorm. The storm clouds billow up on the horizon getting dark and dark as you watch the far off lighting approach. And then all of a sudden the wind picks up really fast and it starts raining and then in less than a minute it’s pouring. The electricity was knocked out during the last storm so I sat by my window and watched the neighboring houses get illuminated in lighting strobes as pouring rain came down in horizontal sheets. The shear awesome power in a thunderstorm is amazing to behold and I’ve seen more in the past 2 weeks then in a typical year back in Virginia.

The rains are very nice. On days that it rains the high will be about 27°C (80°F) but on days it doesn’t rain it can get up to 38°C (100°F). After the last two days of overcast raining weather I’m actually wearing long paints and a sweatshirt right now. Biking around on days it doesn’t rain isn’t that much fun. On the other hand biking around while it’s raining isn’t that much fun either. It’s the time right after the rain when it’s nice and cool that its the best out side. But then you get really really muddy.

And that leads me to the vicious circle that the rainy season causes. The rains might be really good at alleviating the hot temperatures but they’re also really good at carving valleys into dirt roads, turning walking paths in to frog ponds, and making the local soccer pitch a mud bath. All this mud means your cloths get dirty faster. However, doing laundry not only requires 2 hours of hand washing outside but preferably a nice sunny 3 hour period to dry the cloths on the line. So the rains make your cloths more dirty requiring you to do laundry more often and and the same time prevent you from doing laundry at all. It’s the rainy season Catch 22. Normally I wait till the weekends to do my laundry since I have my computer class and schools to visit during the week. But I think I might just have to take advantage of the next sunny day when ever it occurs because the probability of there being clouds and some rain on the next weekend is pretty high.

Makes you wonder how they did laundry in Seattle before dryers were common.

One major aspect of Peace Corps Training is the home stay, the purpose of which is to teach you through cultural immersion what would could never be taught in the class room. Here are some of the things I learned while living in a small South African village for two months where the water flowed out of the communal spicket about once a week, the cows and chickens roamed free, the garbage was thrown over the fence for the goats to eat and every house had an identical government build bit latrine.

On bathing in a 2 ft basin with half a bucket of water

• Always start with your face because you wouldn’t believe how dirty the water is by the end.
• Blow out your noes while you dunk your head to wash your hair because sneezing shampoo out your nose is worse then soap in your eyes.
• Dead bugs don’t teach live bugs how not to die because ever morning there will inevitable be a few dead bugs in last nights bath water.
• No matter how good the book you’re reading is don’t wait two hours after the water is ready to bath because after taking an ice cold bath in the bleak July winter not even three blanks on your bed will warm you up.
• Don’t forget to put the lid on the bath water while it boils over the fire because smoke scented bath water can’t be masked by your Old Spice deodorant.
• The phrase don’t throw the baby out with the water finally makes sense to you after a month of throwing your dirty bath water over the fence.

On hand washing your cloths

• Always soak your socks for a good 2 hours because it makes getting the African dirt (there’s really nothing special about it that makes it African dirt its just that there’s so much of it) our of white socks so much easier.
• Don’t bring white socks or any other white clothing to Africa or any place you’ll be washing cloths by hand unless you have always wanted to tie-die them a nice tanish color.
• The answerer to a mud stain isn’t magic bleach but more elbow grease.
• It is always best to check the 3 day forecast (if you have access to a semi accurate one) before planing to do laundry because a cloudy day or dust storm ruins your plans.
• If everyone washed their cloths by hand once a year quite a few of the worlds problems would be solved because there’s nothing like 3 hours of scrubbing to let your mind come up with the best ideas.

On using a pit latrine (mine was really nice as pit latrine’s go)

• The first 3 times not flushing seems really weird, then after that its so normal you hate doing it when you use a flush toilet.
• Always care a flash light with you at night because light is the best way to scare the cockroaches back down the hole.
• Cockroaches really are going to be the only things to survive a nuclear holocaust because they seem to thrive in places you don’t eve want to see.
• On the cold July mornings you actually welcome the heat coming out of the bottom of the pit.

You ask questions you never would have asked before: Like did humans sense of smell evolve to detest the pugnacious aroma of feces or did the pugnacious aroma of feces evolve so that humans detested it?

On English

• It’s Maths not Math

Sample Conversation:

Me: My favorite subject is math.

5^th Grader: You mean maths.

Me: Yeah math like arithmetic and geometry.

5^th Grader: Yeah thats maths not math.

• American TV is not always the best teacher of English because young kids understand when to use swear words but not what they mean.

Sample Conversation:

Me: That’s actually 4.75 cm see you it goes to this small tick and not the tick half way in between.

1^st Grader: Shit. Asking for eraser.

Me: (cringing at a 6 year olds use of such a word). What did you say.

1^st Grader: Shit. It’s English my mom likes me to speak English, it means I did something wrong.

Note: The 1^st Grader’s English in question was not really good enough for me to communicate in full sentences with and was probably only a little better then my understanding of Zulu but that’s what I imagine he would have said if I could have asked him.

On other random facts of life

• Cows have much more intelligence then I ever thought, they’ll go wondering around all day and then an hour before sun set trot back home in a nice line. Its blew me away to see a double file line of 20 cows running down the street taking weaving their way through all the cross rodes to get home.
• The best way to shut the back door of a taxi van when no one is in the back is to slam the breaks really hard being sure to give the passengers a good 2 second warning.
• Breast feeding on a 3 hour taxi ride is perfectly acceptable but listing to an MP3 player will earn you strange looks.
• The best way to make sure the wild grass in your front yard or a crossed the street is to light it on fire.

One of the things I was most apprehensive about before coming to South Africa was learning a brand new language.  Unless it has the structure and logic of a programing language my mind has no aptitude for language.  I can barely keep the intricacies of grammar and idiosyncrasies of simple spellings my native English straight.  Some peoples minds act like ridged C compiler when reading and writing throwing segfaults at the smallest error and nonconforming type, while my mind treats language like a javascript interpreter and as long as it works at run time will let anything slide by.  All that being said I wasn’t looking forward to learning a new language, but have so fare have found the little progress I have made to be very rewarding.

I figure a good place to begin would be the beginning and the start of Pre-Service Training. Over the 47 years the Peace Corps training process has continually evolved searching for the fine line between overwhelming new trainees and boring them to death. That line is incredibly hard to find because it’s different for every single trainee, but riding that line is important not only because it’s efficient, but also because pushing hard builds the strongest bonds of trust and friendship among the trainees. My group of Peace Corps trainees was one of the most diverse groups of people I have ever had the opportunity to work with. Sure, at some deep level there must be common reasons that made us all decide to leave behind friends, family and lives that we knew for the totally unknown, but other than that we came from all walks of life, from all around America and where born in many different decades. Even so because we were all experiencing the same new adventures and working 6-8 hours together each day, Peace Corps training forged strong bonds of friendship and cooperation.

PST can sort of be thought of as multiple stages designed to push your threshold of cultural awareness and immersion. Just as your feeling comfortable at one stage the next one comes to push you further and faster along (see nice graph I made). It all started way back on July 12 when 44 complete strangers mingled in line, comparing how many socks each had packed, while waiting to sign in to Peace Corps Stagging for the 18^th group of volunteers to go to South Africa. After two days of getting to know each other we woke up really early on the 14^th , were bused to the Department of Health to get our first series of many more shots, took a quick picture in front of the capital, bused to Dullas International Airport boarded a plan, 17 hours later landed at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg and where promptly bused the 2 hours to or training site in Marapyane. The first week we all stayed in the dorms of the old Teaching College training would be taking place at. We learned the greetings to six of official South African languages, got introduced to the training staff and got to know each other better.

After 4 days life seemed to have stabilized we packed one of our two bags with everything we would want for the next 8 weeks sent the other one to Pretoria for the duration of training and went to live with our assigned host family. It was during this time that the meat and pap (pap is the staple food of South Africa made out of boiled corn meal and very very filling) of training occurred. A typical day would start with 2 hours of language lessons with our language groups who all lived close by. We would then be bused to the training college for sessions a range of sessions on everything from the educational history of South Africa, cultural diversity, cell phone companies and options, or what our life might be like for the next two years. This part of PST lasted for quite a while and we had all adapted to the daily routine when the week of site visits came.

Ever since week 1 we had all anxiously been looking forward to the site visits. All questions and answers were just hypothetical until this occurred. We may have traveled over an ocean and half a continent but still Shrodinger’s cat was in the box and we had no idea what the next 2 years would actually bring. Sites where announced on a Friday and the following Monday we would all leave for a two day workshop with our new supervisors and then meet brand new host families and explore a new town. When your site was announced you were handed a small slip of paper with the name of your supervisor, the name of your host family the name of your shopping town and then name of the village. It was a weird feeling, here you sat finally holding in your hand the answer to everything you’d been wondering since the first letter of acceptance to Peace Corps came and yet it was just words on a paper with absolutely no meaning to you. Over the course of the next exciting week those names would take on meaning, would become a face with a voice, would become busy streets and would become coworkers and friends. But for now a giant 42 could have been written there and it would have meant just as much.

After a week exploring our new sites we had to all find our own way back Marapyane. For me this was a interesting and exhausting day of travel. I made it all the way from Barberton to Pretoria and then from Pretoria to Marapyane kumbies, small 15 person vans that travel a vast network of taxi ranks connecting South Africa). The journey took about 12 hours, but would have only taken 8 if I hadn’t tried to meet of with some other trainees in Middleburg. I ended up calling them right as their kumbie was driving past me and then had to wait 4 hours for the next ride to Pretoria. It was a great sense of accomplishment knowing that all alone I could get me self half way across South Africa. When we all got back together each one of us shared about our experiences over the past week. This was probably one of my favorite sessions during PST. Sure everyone had has some bad experiences, but the enthusiasm and excitement everyone had it talking about their sites was electrifying. We had reached a point in PST where no amount of additional lectures and lessons could have taught us much but were demotivating and unpractical. Going out and seeing for our selves what we would be doing and meeting the people who would become our counterparts over the next 2 years brought back the realities of why we had decided to sign up for Peace Corps in the first place: to experience apart of this vast world first hand and maybe in some small way change it as much as it would change us.