White Rabbits! I can’t believe its December already! I hope everyone had a fabulous fall break and a terrific Thanksgiving!
Our PC community integration assignment for last week was to visit neighboring volunteer’s site and that is just what we did!
Travel Log:
Monday-
2pm Andrew and Leah meet in Lebowakgomo to head to Mphane to visit Kelly. Wait in a taxi for about 75minutes.
4pm Arrive in Apel Cross. Wait 58 minutes for a taxi.
6pm Kelly cooks us a wonderful dinner of meatballs, mashed potatoes, rolls and apple crisp! Forget to close the window in bedroom.
8pm Play some Phase 10, create a fabulous new game called Phase 9.
11pm Try to go to sleep. About 100 degrees in the room.
11:15pm-1am Every twenty minutes some jumps up screaming because a bug is crawling on them or the plastic covered bed is sticking to strange places.
Tuesday
10am Head to Molly’s village, Wonderboom (pronounced Voon-der-boooon). Check out her seriously well funded school and the river where she washed cloths (no hippos or green mambas spotted).
1-3pm Wait for taxi at Molly’s house.
3:06pm Greatest Taxi Ride Ever!! Brand new, empty taxi and really cold beer- courtesy of the driver. Amazing…
4pm R2.50 Icecream cone at KFC
5:30pm Salon del Molly in Leah’s yard.
7:30pm Kelly stabs Leah while trying to eat spaghetti out of a communal pot with a sharp knife. Ahh PC eating habits….
Wednesday
9am Visit Leah’s schools and host family. Meet Chief Maja at the post office.
2pm Find out Leah and Andrew get to go to the next PST! “Training for trainers” is next week. (That is really what its called….)
4pm Catch taxi to Bochum
4:43pm Cross Tropic of Capricorn
8pm Toast and Rummy for dinner at Beth’s
Thursday
9am Tour of Beth’s village and work places.
12pm Lunch of delicious bogobe, nama and morogo.
6pm Leah and Kelly babysit Roscoe, bake cookies and watch TV. Got to love American media.
Friday
2pm Big Chickens/wee turkeys get started. Jam and juice merinade and cooked upside down (to make the white meat nice and juicy!)
2-6pm Supervising of cooking.
7pm Leah peer pressured into eating a termite. “The monkeys do it! They taste like peanut butter” Turns out they don’t really taste like much of anything.
9pm-2am Afrikaaner night club. Techno music, and terrible dancing.
Saturday
8:30am Afrikaaner neighbor offers grain alcohol to drink in celebration of Thanksgiving. “Umm no thanks, its 8:30am”
9am-4pm Leah and Kelly direct the cooking of pies, stuffing, mashed potatoes, yams, green bean casserole (including the creation of a fried onion topping), salad, etc.
5pm Dinner! Everything turns out great, even with some interesting substitutes of key ingredients (ie Pumpkin pie made out of butternut squash)
5:25pm Food coma sets in. Nap and watch rugby for the rest of the day.
Sunday
9-11am Sit by the pool. (Sometimes its hard to go back to village life).
1pm Home again! My bed has finally been delivered. Yay.
Well there ya have the run down of Thanksgiving week fun. Check out the pictures too!
I mentioned that I founded out last week that I get to be a part of the group of PCVs that help with the next training session for SA19! This means that I need to go to the “General Training of Trainers” or GTOT (don’t you love our acronyms?) starting Saturday for a week. Add this to the big Christmas trip and I will be gone for nearly a month!
For the big Christmas trip, 7 other PCVs and I are going to try to see Blyde River Canyon (3rd largest canyon in the world), Kruger, Mozambique, Swaziland, Wild Coast and Durban- all in about 3 weeks! Its going to be amazing. Plus, I will be pretty hardcore if I can live out of my backpack for a month. I will have my phone, so I will be able to check emails and get calls, but please don’t be sad if I don’t write lengthy responses. Its hard to type on the tiny phone buttons. But please write emails or call!
Also, if you were going to send a package, procrastinate a bit more and send it in a couple of weeks so I will be here to pick it up. The post office only holds them for three weeks before sending them back.
I love you all and will be missing spending the holidays with all you!
Enjoy the Joy!!
PS Christmas music just isn’t the same when its 95 degrees!
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