Rain Rain

First weekend at my site without all the students staying at the house.

Saturday my host mom left me alone in the house almost the entire day. This is quite a change from not leaving me alone for five minutes. While trying to cook dinner, I managed to blow a fuse and shut off all the power to the house. Apparently my host mom has good reason to not leave me alone. I was able to solve the problem though but was then too afraid to try and cook again. Luckily, we have a microwave, and I was able to have something to eat.

Sunday was my first laundry day since moving to site. I had about three weeks worth of laundry saved up. My arms are sore now. I was dressed in my worst clothes because I wanted to wash all my other clothes. My host mom was catering an event and she wanted me to go with her, which to told me after I had all my clothes wet and hanging on the line so I had to wear what I was wearing to do laundry. It was a budget meeting for the municipality in which the whole village was invited to attend. I was the only girl not wearing a skirt, not that it was the only reason I stood out. My host mom is a very good cook, I got to eat some of the food before the big meal. Clouds were looming the entire day and I was concerned about all my wash, i.e. all the clothes I own, out on the line. I managed to get home just as it started pouring and rescue the clothes. I don’t have anywhere to put clothes yet so I am still living out of my bags. I managed to take everything and spread it around the floor. So now I am unpacked but everything is on the floor. It rained all night and is still raining now. The temperature has dropped and I am now wearing all the warm clothes that I brought to South Africa. It is about 60 degrees and all the little children were dressed for a blizzard, hats, scarves, winter coats.

Uno, a simple card game or cross-cultural facilitator?

I broke out the Uno cards this evening while about four of the trainers were watching music videos. They only have a few music videos between them and we watch them over and over and over. So playing Uno was a lot of fun, definitely more fun that just watching the videos. Everyone was crowed around watching, squeezing 20 people in the living room. All the players were so into it, getting really competitive. I soon realized that they were not really playing the “American” way. The purpose was more the prevent someone else from winning than from trying to win yourself. If you needed a red card next and you knew the person next to you could win if you played your red card, you would pick up cards from the draw pile until you got a draw 2 or draw 4. So every round, all the players would have 15-30 cards in their hands at one time, leaving little for the draw pile. This made for some very long games, we played most of the day, with up to 8 players at a time. I can now successfully play Uno using only Zulu.

There is no way one can make beetroot and not have it taste like dirt, end of story. The sad part is that it looks just like cranberry sauce so you think you are getting a treat, then you take a bite, dirt.

One of the girls at the house had a hair dryer and she let me use it. I was so excited. When I looked in the mirror, I though, wow, this is what I use to look like.

After one week, I feel I am a pro at taking the public taxis. I have successfully made it to work every morning and this weekend I went to St. Lucia.

Swearing in

Zululanders

SA-17 with the US Ambassador

Pictures from training

Limpopo

Beach near my site in St. Lucia

Monkeys on the roof

I made a pizza!

Getting food ready for a wedding

Pabello in Children's Hospital Hat

Pabello is her dress from America

See more pictures here http://picasaweb.google.com/reford

New address for now

Becky Ford
Postnet Suite 88
Private Bag X013
Mtubatuba
KwaZulu-Natal 3935
South Africa

After much anticipation, I have found out my permanent site and I am on site visit this week. The NGO is called Mpilonhle, which is a mobile health unit that serves four schools in the area, doing health screenings, counciling, health education and computer training. The organization works out of the town of Mtubatuba but I am living close to the town of St. Lucia. My home is about 7km from the beach and about two hours north of Durban. I am living in a house with a host mom.

There are only two kinds of people in Africa, those infected with HIV and those affected by it

I wish everyone could see the stars from Africa.

I am having a great weekend. friday evening, as Christi and I were walking home from class, we spotted one of our supervisor's filling water jugs from the outside tap. He does not have a host family, s he has to do all the work for himself. The water is only on one day a week, so we helped him fill the jugs and carry them inside. Then we all enjoyed some orange fanta and cookies while looking at pictures and discussing his life in South Africa. it gets dark at about 7pm, so we had to go home. My host faily was starting dinner so I played with baby Pabello. i taught her the Itsy Bitsy Spider song last week so now I have to sing it about 50 times a day. She is about 13 months old so i do pretty much anything to see her giant smile. I took a successful bucket bath which means that I was cleaner after the bath than before I started. For dinner, we had buttered bread, a hard boiled egg and chips (french fries), this is my favorite meal! We also had coca-cola which means i got two cold drinks during the day. We ate while watching Generations, the world's cheesiest soap opera and my favorite show by far. Later, the baby fell asleep while I was holding her, which is the gretest feeling in the world.

Today, a few of us are in town. We are going to get pizza and candy!

Training is going well but I can't wait to go to site. I feel like I will never understand Zule, but it is difficult to practice because I live with a Sepedi speaking family. I have a great family, but I am looking forward to having some independence. Right now they have to do everything for me, I only wash dishes sometimes.

I will have to wait til site to post pictures. For now though, check out Christi's blog, she is my neighbor and in the language group, so we see a lot of the same things. http://twentysevenmonthsinafrica.blogspot.com/

I think it is important to end with the fact that my bedroom is covered with posters of 2 Pac.

Peace Corps has been going well so far. I moved in the my host family three weeks ago and they are great. We have a little baby in our family and a 12 year old, along with a mom and grandma. The house is really nice and I have my own bedroom.

The vllage I am in is beautiful with mountains and flat plains. There isn't much in the village and I am in town now using the internet to and to buy cheese!

I will post pictures when I can, just a quick update though.

Saw some animals a few weeks ago at a game park. food is good here, eating pap is fun, making it is difficult.