Graduation Party

The graduates

Set up for the meal, note all the balloon animals on the tables

Children with the balloons that all turned into hats by the end of the party

One of my neighbors with all the broken balloon pieced back together

Every caterer got her own special hat!

My mom catered a graduation party this weekend. She said my job would be to make balloon animals for decorations. I never thought this was a skill I would pick up in the Peace Corps, but they say to not have expectations. Luckily all the children just wanted hats, which was pretty easy. I became quite good at the giraffe, and dog too. Unfortunately I underestimated the amount of children that would come to the party and only had about 30 balloons for the 1 billion children that showed up when I started handing them out. In addition, it was very hot so all the balloons popped almost immediately but the very resourceful children found a way to patch all the holes and we were able to make more balloon.

If you go to a graduation party, anyone who has ever graduated university is suppose to wear their cap and gown. My host mom told me to wear mine but you know, my old cap and gown did not even make the first draft of the packing list.

Community Outreach

This past weekend, my NGO held a community outreach event at a local farm to counsel and teset people for HIV. We also brought computer units to introduce the people to the technology.

This was the first event that I organized for Mpilonhle and I am happy it went well. I was concerned that no one would show up, that the counselors would not want to work on a Saturday, that we would be late, and so on. My fears were relieved though when almost all the farm's employees came to the units, took part in the counseling and about half participated in the computer training. We had five counselors, an IT trainer, health educator and a nurse all working with the community.

Health education class for employees on the farm

Mobile health unit

Computer training

Hluhluwe Game Reserve

Me, Linda, Amos at the Game Reserve

Elephants!

Rhinos

Baboons

Impala

I went to the Hluhluwe Game Reserve this weekend with another Peace Corps volunteer, Linda, and two others from her site. We didn't see all teh Big Five, but we saw a lot, elephants, zebras, impala, nyala, baboons, giraffes, warthogs and wildbeasts. I had such a great time, more phots are in the photos section.

Four day weekend

I had four whole days stretched out before me with nothing to do due to public holidays and the weekend. My past few weeks in the village, I haven’t wanted to cook anything for the simple reason of not wanting to wash any dishes since I couldn’t really figure out a good method. Since I had many days of nothing to do though, I decided to go ahead and cook. My first attempt was a cheese omelet. I think it turned out well, it tasted like scrambled eggs with cheese which I am not sure is how an omelet is suppose to taste, but good nonetheless. I also cooked mashed potatoes and pasta. I quickly learned that those are the only three things I know how to cook. I need to branch out because none of those options are very healthy.

I spent the rest of my time reading Infinite Jest, a very long book about tennis players and drug addicts. I am really enjoying the book and came across some lines I felt fit the Peace Corps experience as well as they described life in a halfway house fro recovering addicts:

That you do not have to like a person to learn from him or her

That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person

That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them

That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear

That cockroaches can, up to a point, be lived with.

That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.

That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

Yesterday I did laundry again. I got back at noon from a parent’s meeting at a primary school and even though I knew there would not be enough time for the clothes to dry before it got dark, I decided to go for it anyway. It is not that I don’t like doing laundry, it is just that I don’t think the clothes get very clean the way I do them. My host mom hasn’t made any comments about me wearing dirty clothes yet, so I assume I am doing a passable job. At 6 I had to go take down all my still-wet clothes from the line and then had to get up early to hang them out again.

My host mom had to cater an event on Friday and ended up staying the night there since it was far away. I, subsequently, spent my first night alone since coming to South Africa. I woke up at every noise, which was a lot, but overall, survived the night.