Umm....yeah. So we actually wrote this blog a month ago but never posted it (and we thought we were bad at blogging then). Anyway, this should fill you in up to a month ago. We promise to blog again later this week updating you on the last month. Sorry! ................................................................................................................................

So as the title of this blog post should indicate, we recognize our failure to update this blog in over a month. And, so much has happened in this past month that it’s impossible to adequately summarize in one post. But we will try nonetheless. A month ago we went to Pretoria for a week of training. This was our midway training and it was a great chance to catch up with all our friends in our training class. One of the highlights of the week in Pretoria was that we went to our first rugby game. We got to see a Super 14 match (which is the elite league that features the top teams in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). The team from Pretoria thrashed the defending league champs from Australia, so it was a great experience. Now we just need to go to a soccer match to experience the other major sport in South Africa. Cricket is also big here, but no thanks. At the end of training we went to the half marathon that we’d been fundraising for. It was a lot of fun and there were about 75 PCV’s (peace corps volunteers) at the race. Together we booked all the beds in a Backpackers (hostel), and after the race we were treated to a huge feast that was prepared by a dozen PCV’s who didn’t run or walk in the race. As for the race itself, Matt got first place among all volunteers ..... who were not in shape to run it. He crossed the finish line in a blazing 3:05. Sara finished an entire hour earlier. The best part about the weekend is the fact that as a group, all PCV’s raised over $20,000. This money will send two disadvantaged children to one of the best schools in Southern Africa and will pay all their expenses from grades 7 until 12. Thank you everyone who supported us, and it’s nice to be a part of something that will truly make a positive and tangible impact in the lives of two children.

After the race weekend, we travelled with our friends Will and Rachael to Cape Town for a little over a week. Cape Town was, in a word, awesome. We went to Table Mountain the first day in the city, and the views were breathtaking. Then we spent a couple nights in wine country and spent a full day wine-tasting at various vineyards. Later in the week we had the sobering experience of visiting Robben Island, and we were fortunate to have a tour guide who had actually spent seven years on the island as a political prisoner. All throughout the week we enjoyed delicious foods, including the best Mexican food we’ve found in South Africa on Easter Sunday. Perhaps the best part of Cape Town was just the feeling of being in a city with a vibrant culture. We often commented to each other that Cape Town felt like a mix between San Diego and San Francisco. All in all, it was a great trip and we are so glad we went.

Now we’ve been back at site for a little less than three weeks. The second term is underway at school, and we are back in the swing of things. Recently, we have befriended an eighth grader whose mom works at the hospital. Her name is Wandy and she comes to our house basically every day. If she wasn’t such a great kid it would probably be annoying, but fortunately we enjoy her company. April 27th is a national holiday commemorating the 1994 elections, so we are now relaxing and having the benefit of a nice long weekend.

As Matt said over the weekend, “our home has become a Dave & Busters.” People (mainly kids) stop by for help with homework, to eat snacks, watch movies on the laptop, play UNO, read our magazines and even ask for legal assistance. Although it can get annoying from time to time, it’s fun for the most part. The high school closed yesterday for the term break and the primary school is closed today for Human Rights Day (in recognition of the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when peaceful protesters were killed, leading to international sanctions against South Africa), so it should be a quiet day.

In other news, we saw a cobra with its neck expanded to form the hood in our yard yesterday. We almost walked right by it without noticing. Instead of being properly freaked out, we ran inside to grab our camera. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), we were unable to find it again when we went back out. Also, Sara saw a large family of baboons on her run yesterday. Usually, our animal viewing is limited to cows and goats (which are everywhere!).

Friday we leave for Pretoria for a week of training. Saturday the 24th marks the one year anniversary of our swearing-in as volunteers, which is hard to believe. So next week is our midpoint training. After training, we leave for a 3-day weekend for the half-marathon, and then we have a week of travelling in Cape Town. In other words, our next three weeks should be, in a word, awesome.

We have been very busy lately and apologize for not updating our blog. We apologize to our loyal readers and hopefully this post will bring us all up to date. For starters, we are still teaching Reading at the Primary School. We are falling into a routine with the kids in Grades 4-7 and loving every minute of it. Well, nearly every minute.

A couple of weeks from now is the end of Term 1, and there will be a two week break. We will be spending our break in Pretoria (for a week of training and our mid-service doctors’ appointments), then off to the half marathon and finally a week in Cape Town. So as we’re wine tasting, relaxing by the beach or strolling through the markets, we’ll be thinking of you guys!

Two doors down from our house are numerous houses where teachers stay during the week. One of the high school teachers has a daughter and son who we spend a lot of time playing with. The girl is 9 and one of the best students in Matt’s Grade 4 class. Her brother Junior is in Grade R (kindergarten) but he’s only 3. The primary school principal permits him to attend Grade R as a courtesy to the high school teacher. 2-3 afternoons per week we play ball or Frisbee with them, and it’s gotten to the point where Junior runs screaming into Sara’s arms when we see him in the morning at school.

Matt’s chess club has also been very successful. It’s for the boys at the high school and it meets every Wednesday afternoon and Saturdays when Matt is at site. Today, they had a tournament and it was a big hit. About 25 boys participated. All of the boys who play are boarders who come from bigger towns. So, the next step is to try to involve some of the boys who live in the local community.

Sara has been busy with her three girls clubs. Currently, she is holding girls clubs for the high school boarding students (grades 8-12), but she is thinking about starting a fourth club for the local grade seven girls. The problem is finding a time to meet since many of them live very far from school. The purpose of the clubs is to teach life skills and also just to be (hopefully) a female role model. The girls have SO many questions about love and relationships, so that’s been our main topic thus far. We’ll eventually discuss topics such as self-esteem, dealing with parents, peer pressure and premarital sex as well.

We’ve also been busy helping students with homework. High school students are asking us for help more and more, and it’s not unusual for us to get a knock (or several) on our door requesting our assistance. We have made it clear that while we can help with English and Life Orientation homework, they do not want to ask us for help with physics.

So all in all, life is still good here on the mountain. We are slowly coming to terms with the fact that winter is coming once again, but at least we know that we won’t have water dripping on us during the nights! We will try to be better about updating our blog in the future, and we hope all is well with all of you.

Yeah, yeah. We’ve been promising to blog about the wedding for weeks. Now, of course, the memories are less clear, but we’ll do our best. The wedding was down in the valley from where we live. There is no electricity in the valley (only three families have generators) and people have to haul water from taps, but it’s absolutely beautiful. The wedding was at the home of the induna (headman). He works as a groundskeeper at the hospital, so we know him, but we had not met the bride and groom.

The wedding was supposed to begin at 10, but everything here runs on African time. We showed up at 1:30, and it was actually perfect timing. Ten minutes after we arrived, some of the older women began a traditional song and dance. The first hour or so at the wedding was awkward, as per usual. Many of the people attending the wedding had seen us around, but the bride’s family was from a different village so we still received quite a few stares upon arrival. We had a few people ask to take pictures with us as well. Soon though, the bride and groom arrived and the wedding party moved into the tent.

There was not enough room for everyone in the tent, so we were content to watch outside with the majority of the other guests. This was not to be. We were ushered through the crowd right to the front of the tent. There were not enough chairs, so extra chairs were brought out from the house for us. Matt ended up sitting directly behind the bride and groom. In fact, he was so close that when the best man dropped the ring, Matt picked it up. It was definitely awkward to be given such special treatment, but it is fairly common. I don’t think we’ll ever get used to being treated like celebrities.

The ceremony inside the tent was a fairly traditional Christian ceremony. It was in isiZulu, so we didn’t understand much though. After the ceremony we were fed. At the head table. Celebrity treatment again. After the food, however, the fun started. All of the wedding guests went outside for a traditional Zulu wedding.

The Zulu wedding consisted largely of singing and dance-off’s between the two families. The signature Zulu dance move is a high leg kick. Some of the younger men and women repeatedly kick their legs up to their heads and then stomp their foot on the ground in time with the music. It’s pretty awesome. Most family members were dressed in traditional Zulu attire: the women wore skirts and beads (traditionally women didn’t wear shirts, but everyone over 18 wore a bra) and the men carried shields and sticks. The two families (extended families with about 30-40 people) would always face each other. One family would sit down and watch while the other family sang and danced, and then they would trade places. Meanwhile, about 100 of us non-family members stood around and watched. The Zulu wedding lasted about 3 hours. We are not nearly good enough writers to capture the energy of the Zulu wedding, but suffice it to say that we had an amazing time and we are looking forward to the next one.

Well, we are running a half marathon on March 31, and we need your help. It's actually to support a really great cause (info below). We only need to raise $100 each, so even a $5 donation would help a ton. We're also probably going to send out an email about this, b/c we don't know who reads this. If you could send a small donation, we'd really appreciate it (and we promise we'll start training!).

Dear Family and Friends,

Well, we've now been in South Africa for over a year! With the holidays now over, we are looking forward to upcoming events.

One of these is the Longtom marathon. It's actually a half- and an ultra-marathon, and we plan to participate in the half, which is 21.1 Km. It's happening on March 31 in Sabie, Mpumalanga Province, not too far from Kruger Park. It starts at the top of the Longtom Pass and goes into Lydenburg. Many Peace Corps volunteers will be taking part, probably over 70 of us, so it's going to be a lot of fun to get together with them for the weekend and run in this beautiful part of the country, which we haven't yet seen.

In addition to having a good time though, the main reason for taking part is to support the KLM foundation. Their website is: www.klm-foundation.org; please check it out. We won't go into all the details of what they do since you can read that on the site, but we’ll just say that the organization was founded by two PCVs (Peace Corps volunteers) who served here in South Africa a few years ago. They decided to use the Longtom marathon as a fundraiser; they fund a worthy, needy child to attend an excellent independent high school in Mpumalanga called Uplands College. That's why we are so excited about helping them to raise funds; what better way to help this country than to educate a future leader? And the child they choose is very carefully selected, going through a four-tier application process. The seven children who have been chosen so far are excelling in all respects. We hope after reading about KLM you will find yourself as supportive as we are of their work.

There may be other projects we encounter along our way here, but this is very worthy indeed, and one for which we are asking your support. Please give what you can; any amount is appreciated. Even if you can only give $10 or $20, it is much needed. And it is tax-deductible. So please go to the KLM website to make a donation, just click on the 'donate' photo. Make sure to put one of our names in the white box where it asks for the Longtom runner you want to sponsor.

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

Please make sure to include a note that your donation is on behalf of one of us.

Thanks so much for your support, and especially for supporting the child who is chosen next year to attend Uplands College. We let you know how the weekend goes, and how many funds we, Peace Corps volunteers, collected.

Well, we went to the wedding on Saturday, and it was a really amazing experience. Today, however, was a sad day for the community where we live, so we’ll blog about the wedding later this week. Last Friday, a young man whom we work with and are friendly with, was driving with his 16 year old cousin when they had a car accident. Our friend is okay, but his cousin was thrown from the car and sustained a severe head injury. He passed away this morning.

Since he previously attended the primary school where we teach, the teachers went to the boy’s family’s house this afternoon to pay their respects and asked us to come along. As we walked up to the rondeval (round traditional dwelling) where the family was mourning, the teachers began singing. We took off our shoes and entered the rondeval, which was empty except for the straw mats on which we sat and six women. The boy’s mother was weeping the entire time we were there. It was terrible to witness such suffering. In keeping with tradition, after about 10 minutes Matt and the two male teachers left and walked outside to where the boy’s father and two other family members were sitting. It is customary for Zulu community members to pay respect at the family’s house, and the men and women of the deceased’s family stay in separate areas of the home.

On the one hand, we felt a little awkward being in the presence of such pain since we did not know the boy. But visiting a mourning family or attending a funeral is considered a form of respect, so ultimately we are glad we were able to attend.

Today marks a year in South Africa. And the new CHOP (Community HIV/AIDS Outreach Program) group arrived yesterday. It’s weird. It sometimes feels like we’ve been here forever, and other times it feels like we just packed up our apartment. The last year has been full of ups and downs – from sweating like crazy during our first two months of training, to changing to a site in the Eastern Cape where we were rained on from our tin roof all winter but met some really great people, to moving back to KZN last November.

But things are really falling into place now. We are enjoying teaching the kids at the primary school. Yesterday we taught Duck, Duck, Goose to Grade R (kindergarten) and it was a huge hit. We speak the Zulu of a 3 year-old (okay maybe 2) and so we can kinda communicate with the Grade R kids. We got them to appreciate that when you said “goose” instead of “duck” something special was happening, but instead of only one kid getting up to chase you around the circle, they treated it like an air raid. Every single kid would jump up screaming and run away from the circle. The teachers were cracking up.

Tomorrow the lawyer from Legal Aid is coming to the hospital to meet with people who have legal issues. We’re excited because this will be the first tangible work that we’re actually doing at the hospital, but we’re also a bit apprehensive because the lawyer emailed us at 4:00 yesterday and it feels a bit rushed. Oh well, it’ll probably be fine.

This weekend there is a big wedding down in the valley and we were “invited” yesterday. This is how our invitation was delivered. Matt was talking to a man who works at the hospital. The man mentioned that his brother was getting married this weekend. He then said something to the effect of “I don’t know if you’re invited but I’m sure you’re welcome.” To a wedding. What he meant was I don’t know if you’ve received a formal invitation that are only sent to VIP guests, but you, like everyone else within 100 miles, is welcome to attend the wedding. We knew what he meant, but when you consider what he said literally it provided a stark contrast between our two cultures when it comes to the etiquette of wedding invites. And today after asking around, it seems like this wedding is a pretty big deal (the groom is the son of the Head Man of the community), and we’ll keep you posted if we attend.

So, one year. Not quite halfway there (that comes next month) but still a milestone worth acknowledging. Thank you everyone who reads this. By simply reading our musings you have provided immeasurable support. You keep reading during year 2, and we promise to keep writing!

We woke up early on Saturday to take the taxi (public minivan) from our location 85k (~50 miles) into Vryheid, our shopping town. There is only one taxi a day from here to town. It leaves at 7 a.m. no matter how full it is, but if it fills before 7 it leaves as soon as it’s full. Anyway, we got to the taxi at about 6:15, and it left at about 6:30, so not bad. We spent the morning running errands, grocery shopping and eating. The taxi back to Mountain View leaves around noon (or, again, whenever it’s full). If we miss the Mountain View taxi, we can take another taxi, but it’s more expensive and drops us off about 1.5 miles from home. Luckily, we were able to the catch the Mountain View taxi before it was full.

The taxi home was a bit of an adventure. First of all, since our community is fairly rural, most people don’t come into town very often. So when they go to town, they stock up. Picture a van full of people and then adding 10kg bags of rice and dozens of shopping bags. After loading up the van, we started our journey home. About ten minutes outside of town, we stopped so people could buy chickens for dinner. Live chickens, of course. Feathers were flying and the taxi began to smell a bit like a farm, but we were on our way again after about 15 minutes (of course, there was a lot of clucking to be heard the rest of the trip).

After making it almost halfway home, we came across an accident. Tons of people were standing around, and our first thought was that someone must have been hurt in the wreck. Soon, however, we discovered that a large truck had actually hit a cow. Unfortunately, hitting a cow isn’t all that unusual for where we live. Cows graze along the road, and drivers frequently have to swerve and slow down to avoid hitting them. Anyway, the cow that had been hit was now being slaughtered by the side of the road, and people were watching the action. It had turned into a community spectacle. TIA (this is Africa).

On a side note, we tried to watch Blood Diamond last night and gave up after 15 minutes. Both of us had seen it previously and rather enjoyed it. The reason we couldn’t watch was because Leo had the WORST South African accent we have ever heard. It was almost offensive. We were really excited to re-watch the movie, so it was disappointing that we couldn’t stand his accent. As South Africans would say, “Shame!

After about 3 glorious weeks of travel, we are finally settling back into our site. Our trip began weeks ago when we met up with our friends in Pretoria. Seven of us set out for Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. South Africans do not need a visa to enter Mozambique (we did) so we only bought bus tickets to the border. Our plan was to find a public taxi once we crossed the border for the final 90 minutes to Maputo. The border crossing was kind of a mess. Many Mozambicans work in South Africa and only travel home for Christmas holidays, so the border crossing was completely packed. Also, it wasn’t readily apparent where we would actually find a public taxi once we crossed the border. Fortunately, our bus driver basically adopted us (maybe pitied is a more apt word) and he let us pay the difference for tickets to get all the way to Maputo. More importantly, he made the entire bus wait for us idiot Americans to get our visas (an extra 45 minutes). As we drove over the border in the comfort of our bus, we realized how lucky we were to have the nicest bus driver ever.

There isn’t much to do in Maputo. Apparently, the train station is one of the 10 most beautiful train stations in the world . . . so of course we didn’t go see it. But we were only there for the night before making our way to the coast and the beautiful beaches of Tofo. We promise pictures will be posted some day in the not so distant future when we go to an internet cafe. We just can’t do it at our site.

After 5 nights in Tofo we travelled farther up the coast to Vilanculos for 4 more nights. Our trip to Vilanculous was easily the worst transportation experience either of us has ever had. We had to wake up at 4:45 to walk a mile into Tofo to catch a public taxi to a nearby town, where we then caught a crowded water taxi across the bay (picture the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland with about 40 more torsos and 160 more accompanying limbs). And that was the luxurious leg of our journey. From that point we had another 4 hours to go in a public taxi with all our bags. Mozambican taxis are the same size of South African taxis, but they manage to squeeze another body into each already crowded row of seats...and then proceed to pack additional passengers in as well (25 people in a minibus taxi seems to be fairly standard). The situation is exacerbated when 7 of those passengers are average-sized Americans (read: much bigger than the average Mozambican) with backpacks. We’d rather not relive the hell of those 4 hours, but suffice it to say, had Vilanculos been anything short of paradise, the 7 of us might not have been on speaking terms afterwards. Fortunately, it was indeed paradise. We took a boat trip to a gorgeous island where we snorkelled and enjoyed a delicious lunch on Christmas Eve and spent Christmas in Vilanculos, a stone’s throw away from the water at all times.

After Mozambique we spent a couple of nights in Swaziland. There isn’t a ton to do in Swaziland, but it’s absolutely beautiful and we had a great time just hanging out. The Swazi people are some of the friendliest people we have ever met. Everyone we encountered went out of their way to ask how we were doing and to enjoy our stay in their country. We stayed at a fabulous backpackers in Mbabane (the capital). The place catered to Swaziland PCVs (peace corps volunteers), and after a couple busy weeks in Mozambique it was the perfect place to relax for a couple days.

After Swaziland we came back to SA and, along with about 10 other PCVs, stayed at another volunteer’s site in Mpumulanga. Nearby her site was a lodge (with a pool!) where we all stayed on New Year’s Eve. We didn’t realize it, but South Africans like to set off fireworks on New Year’s Eve. So at midnight (or somewhere around there, everyone was going off cell phone clocks and you could hear countdowns for a good ten minutes) tons of fireworks were set off. All in all, it was a great way to ring in the New Year.

The next day we went to Pretoria to get TB tests (our new site, the TB hospital, wants us to get tested every 6 months), and we got to relax for a few more days while awaiting our test results.

Now we’ve been back at site over a week, and things are getting very busy. This past week was the first week of the school year, and we found out that we will be Reading teachers to grades 4-7 at the primary school. We’re excited about being Reading teachers because no teacher was previously assigned to Reading, so we won’t be stepping on anyone’s toes. Also, because it isn’t a course that’s part of the core curriculum, we will have a lot of flexibility in what we will actually be covering. Teaching will keep us busy because each grade has Reading 5 days a week for about 40 minutes. Once we get some more projects up and running at the hospital, we should be extremely busy (which is a good thing).

Hopefully this blog post somewhat gives you an idea of how we’ve spent the past month. Things seem to be going well here, the sun has decided to come out more and more, and we are optimistic that 2012 will be a good year for us.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas, everybody! And Happy New Year! We know Christmas is still over a week away, and we haven’t lost track of the world that much. But in terms of wishing everyone happy holidays, this is our last chance. We leave this week on our vacation to Mozambique and Swaziland. To say that we are excited is an understatement. Come Sunday, we will be lounging on the pristine beaches of Mozambique for the next week or so. On our way back to South Africa we’re stopping off for a couple days in the tiny kingdom (yes, kingdom) of Swaziland. After that, we’ll be ringing in the new year with several other volunteers from our group in one volunteer’s village. All in all, we won’t be back here at our site until the beginning of 2012.

We are also excited because once we get back here we will, hopefully, become very busy with projects. We’ll have a few days to catch up on sleep before the new school year begins, and we’re optimistic about being able to help out at the primary school. Last week we attended the end of year ceremony for the primary school that included graduations for kindergarten and Grade 7 (high school begins in Grade 8 here). The principal seems to really like us (he gave Matt a 6-pack of Heineken out of the blue), so things are looking good at the school.

Well anyway, we won’t be posting anything here for several weeks. Happy holidays!

Food: We are treated as management at the hospital, which means that our meals are provided for by the kitchen staff. For the most part, this is great. We definitely save some money by not having to cook every meal ourselves. Plus, it’s nice not having to cook all the time. The food is usually fairly traditional South African food – rice, beans, mealie pap and MEAT. This country definitely loves its meat. If we eat any more chicken, we’re afraid we might start crowing.

Names: Many volunteers are given new names in the local language of their sites. Yesterday, we received our Zulu names. Matt is now Sbusiso (Sbu), which means blessing. Sara’s name is not quite so traditional. She was renamed Zahara, which is an extremely popular South African singer. News of our new names is spreading quickly, and we have heard lots of “Sanibona, Zahara!” and Sanibona, Sbu!” in the last 24 hours. (Sanibona means hello.)

Is awesome. Well at least by Peace Corps standards. It’s on the hospital compound. We have a bedroom, living room, dining/kitchen area and an indoor bathroom. No washing machine or dishwasher (we aren’t that spoiled), but we have electricity and running water. Okay, the electricity often goes out when it storms (3x in the last 1.5 weeks) and the water sometimes goes out as well and turns brown after we get a lot of rain (it’s been brown all week), but, hey, we’re not getting water dripped on our heads every night like in our last site. Plus, crystal light juice packets disguise the brown in the water, so all’s good. Don’t worry, we do boil it before drinking.

Thanksgiving Plans: a number of volunteers are getting together for the holiday, but since we just got to our new site (and it’s not a SA holiday, obviously), we’re staying here. We did find turkey lunchmeat at the store, so we’re having grilled turkey and cheese sandwiches. Just keeping it classy. Happy Thanksgiving!

We have now been at our new site over a week, and a proper blog post is long overdue. Here’s a brief summary of our new lives: We arrived last Thursday afternoon at our new home at Salvation Army Mountain View Hospital in Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN). The hospital is in a compound on top of a mountain, and we live on the compound along with many hospital employees. The hospital specifically treats TB patients (80% of whom also have HIV), and due to the length of the TB treatment many patients are here for 2-4 months. Adjacent to the hospital are two schools, one primary and one high school. The students at the primary school (kindergarten to grade 7) are all children from the local area which is called Ngwelu (pronounced Ing-way-loo). I call it an “area” because it is extremely spread out and isn’t really a village – although there is a local head man (sub-chief) who also works at the hospital. The high school is a combination of the local children plus children from all over the country. Apparently it has a good academic reputation and the cost of boarding is much more reasonable than the cost of other private schools, so that’s how it attracts students. To that end, the girls’ dormitory is right by our house and is the home to about 400 girls. The boys’ dormitory only houses about 200 boys and is about a five minute walk up the mountain from us.

So what are we going to be doing here? We are still trying to figure out which projects will work but our goal is to get involved with the children, especially the primary school. There doesn’t seem to be the same need for teachers as there was at our old site, but hopefully we can start some afterschool clubs for the children. With respect to the high school students, there is a young 25 year-old pastor who is in charge of the male boarders and he wants Matt to assist him. We have already helped him run 2 Friday youth meetings, and it seems like there will definitely be potential next year. The problem is that the South African school year is ending right now and the students are writing exams. The next school year begins in January, so that’s when we will really be able to start activities. The hospital staff also wants us to get involved with the patients, but we’re still a little unclear on what we can do to help because many of the patients come from rural areas and don’t speak much English. Ideas we have so far are playing games, teaching some simple crafts and doing puzzles with them, but hopefully with time we will come up with more ideas. On Tuesday we have a meeting in Vryheid (the closest city) with the Legal Aid Center. We are hoping to get some guidance from them on how we can help the patients with wills. The bottom line is we need to get through the next month. In mid-December we will be leaving on a trip to Mozambique (yay!) and when we return in January that’s when we will be able to really get some activities started.

The highlight of our time here on the mountain came last Friday night when we visited the girls’ dormitory. We went with the young pastor (who has basically been our personal guide this first week) at about 6:00 right after all the girls had finished eating dinner. And on a side note, this was our last stop on a looong first day of meeting everybody and awkward introductions. The girls were expecting us, and when we walked into the dining hall (basically a small auditorium) they went nuts. We have never heard girls scream like that EVER. It was like Beatlemania meets the Jonas Brothers on steroids. It was a couple minutes of pandemonium before the pastor could finally get a few words in to introduce us. When he finally introduced us he asked Sara to speak first. She only got a few words in before the screams erupted again. Sara probably only spoke for a net total of 22 seconds, but her “speech” lasted nearly five minutes with all the interruptions for screams. The same thing basically happened when Matt spoke. Never have either of us ever experienced anything remotely like that and, fortunately, never will we again. According to the pastor they were enamored with our American accents and the fact that we were from L.A. They would have cheered for anything that came out of our mouths. They even went crazy when Matt said “we’re not this interesting.” When we finally left, even that took a few minutes because everyone wanted to touch us. One girl lunged for Matt’s arm and ended up pushing him into Sara. Outside it wasn’t much better. Matt and the Pastor escaped out the gate but Sara got mobbed and ended up hugging about 30-40 girls in a couple minutes. All in all, it was a surreal ending to a good first day, and will end up being a highlight of our Peace Corps service that we will NEVER be able to forget.

We are at our new site in KZN and are loving it so far. We are literally living on top of a mountain (basically in the middle of nowhere), and it’s beautiful. We promise to write a longer post soon, but for now here’s our new contact info:

Sara and Matthew Henning

P.O. Box 1827

Vryheid 3100

South Africa

Also, our internet connection here is terrible, so we can’t do Skype to Skype (plus, the data is really expensive). Calls to our cell phones are, however, free, so give us a call if you want to chat – we can accept calls from Skype.

Sara: 0112 771 202 9006

Matt: 0112 771 265 1646

So what are we doing? Some of you may be asking this question. We are STILL in Pretoria, however we know where we are going. Next Thursday we will be leaving for our new site (number three for those keeping score at home) in Kwazulu Natal (KZN). We will be working at a Salvation Army hospital in Mountain View, about 80km east from Vryheid. Another 40 km to our east is the area known as Nongoma which is where the Zulu king resides. If you're picturing James Earl Jones in Coming to America, I don't think the Zulu king will be quite that awesome. His power is mainly ceremonial at this point. But, the pro of being so close to the king is that a number of cultural ceremonies are centered in Nongoma. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.

At this new site we will be living in a rondavel, which is a traditional circular African dwelling. Pictures shall ensue. Our living quarters will be a little cramped, but we have a flushing toilet, running water and electricity. In Peace Corps, who can ask for anything more. Our rondavel will be located on the Salvation Army hospital compound. On the same compound is a primary school and high school, and some of the high school students are boarders. So although we won't be in a village per se, it will be nice to have a sense of community just in our compound.

We are still enjoying our time in Pretoria, but we are excited to finally get to our new site and start working. The timing is fortunate though because this weekend we will be able to go down to Durban to celebrate a friend's birthday. We leave Saturday and get back in Pretoria Tuesday afternoon, with one last day to enjoy everything Pretoria has to offer (McDonald's!).

If we don't post before next week, we will definitely give an update as soon as we get settled in at our new home. Take care everybody and enjoy the fall (because Summer is coming here!).

We are in Pretoria waiting for a new site. Peace Corps has some sites they are working on, so we are hopeful that something good will work out soon! Sorry for the lack of communication, but our (new) laptop is broken so we are again without a computer. Otherwise, things are good. We'll update as soon as we learn more.

So it’s finally official, we are leaving the Eastern Cape. It’s a somewhat long story and we’ll fill you all in soon, but here’s the current situation. Matt has a meeting on Friday in Pretoria for a Peace Corps committee that he serves on. So he was going to have to leave tomorrow night anyway to arrive Friday morning. Today Peace Corps told us that we should pack up our things and both come to Pretoria tomorrow. We will each travel with one bag and on Tuesday Matt will return with a Peace Corps driver to quickly pick up the rest of our belongings. After weeks of uncertainty and waiting, it’s been a very surreal day. The awkward part is that our NGO still has no idea that we are leaving. They have known for a few weeks that it’s been a possibility, but Peace Corps is not notifying them until Tuesday (as you can imagine this piece of news doesn’t always go over well, but fortunately our organization is too apathetic to care!).

So for the foreseeable future we will be Pretoria residents. It’ll be nice for the first few days but we are anxious to get started at a new site as soon as possible. We will let you know more later, but back to packing now.

The water is not getting turned back on. We're still in Pretoria but taking the overnight bus back to site today. Peace Corps is giving our org 3 weeks to find us alternative housing. If that doesn't happen (which is very possible), we'll be moved to another site. We don't know where we might go, but it won't be in the Eastern Cape.

We're fairly disappointed and sad, but, as this point, we just want to know what is going to happen and move on. We're fairly anxious about going back to site. It's going to be hard teaching, working on projects, playing with the kids, etc. when we know there's a high likelihood of leaving in a few weeks.

Anyway, please hold off from sending any mail/packages for now. We'll keep you all informed.

Our water doesn't work. Our fridge doesn't work. Matt's ipod, watch and sunglasses aren't working. And our laptop is making crazy noises. At least it's warm.

Quick post to let you guys know that our water was turned off by the govt. Even though we have been paying what we owe, they shut it off due to the huge past bill from the owner. We spent the weekend in East London, and we just need to make it thru the week b/c we have a training in Pretoria (yes, again) next week. The problem is we don't have an outhouse or taps in our village, so our house isn't really livable. Our supervisor is going to try to take care of it this week, but it would take a miracle for it to be turned on w/o a significant payment. We have no idea what is going to happen, but we'll post more when we find out anything.

Week 2 of teaching is in the books (we only teach Monday, Tuesday and Thursday) and we can say that things are still going well. The challenge we still face is that we haven’t yet worked out a schedule with the man who teaches 5th and 6th grades (combined classes). Our tentative plan with the principal is that we’ll teach for an hour or so on each of the three days. This week, however, we taught for two and a half hours on

Wow, 7 months. Sometimes it feels like forever, but usually we just wonder where the last 7 months have gone.

Monday and Thursday and on Tuesday we taught the 4th grade all day. So at least for this week we became more like substitute teachers. But we are more than happy to do it because the kids love us and it’s very rewarding.

On Monday we took a short break between subjects to field any questions the kids may have about America. Two highlights were whether there is Vaseline and carrots in America?

Word of our teaching has spread very quickly. Actually, word of pretty much anything we do spreads quickly. But with respect to our teaching, we’ve been approached by children from two other primary schools and one high school student to come teach at their schools. So it looks like our fan club is slowly building unbeknownst to us.

When we haven’t been teaching this week we’ve been at our NGO and things are also going well there. We are still in the process of starting an afterschool drop-in center for orphans and other vulnerable children. We have been “in the process” for some time but there is definitely movement and we should know in the next couple weeks when we will actually be able to open the doors, so to speak.

We will post again when we have more to say. And on a side note, it’s very difficult to make these posts humorous when life is going well, so I guess as readers you should be rooting for something bad to happen. Maybe a drunk lady will kiss us this weekend. Fingers crossed!

Wow, we’ve been waiting a long time to be able to write those words. As most of you know, between being frustrated by not having much to do and having water drip on our heads while we try to sleep, our first few months here at site have been fairly challenging. This week, however, was actually great.

First of all, we’re now teachers. Or at least trying to be teachers. We visited the primary school in our village a couple of weeks ago, and the principal was very enthusiastic about having us help. We taught two Life Orientation (sort of health+life skills) classes this week, as well as a short math lesson. On our first day, we asked the 17 5th-6th graders which of them knew where we lived. All 17 of the students raised their hands, which made us laugh. The hope is that we’ll go to the school for a couple of hours three days a week. It’s definitely not going to be easy, and a number of the kids struggle with English. It is a national requirement, however, that classes past grade 3 be taught in English, and it is extremely unlikely that the kids will be able to pass high school (the Matric exam, which is an exam needed to pass high school, is in English) if they don’t learn the language, so hopefully our presence will be beneficial. Plus, the kids seem very excited to have us there, at least until our novelty wears off.

Secondly, our NGO co-hosted a community Women’s Day event this week, which was really fun. The majority of the people in attendance were kids from area schools. We watched kids play soccer and played with a number of kids from the school where we are teaching. There were performances by school choir groups, traditional dancers, gospel singers and way too many speakers. A man we are friendly with emceed the event and embarrassed us by making us stand up in front of everyone. We talked to tons of people and actually felt like part of the community for the first time.

Also, as we may have previously mentioned, the man who emceed the event works with Sports and Recreation and wants us to help develop a softball program for kids. He actually invited some members of the Eastern Cape Softball Association (or something like that) to the event. Our friend may have touted Matt as some softball expert, which of course meant the 20 year-old female softball player (who previously played on the under-19 national team) wanted to pitch to Matt. It was too late for Matt to explain that he played co-ed D-league slow pitch softball in Santa Monica. So Matt, wearing jeans stuffed with keys, wallet and cell phone, had to dig in against this South African softball whiz. The first pitch was inside and almost hit Matt in the kneecaps. When Matt swung at the next pitch it was the most pathetic imitation of softball, or athletics in general, these kids had ever seen. Matt was determined to make contact with the next pitch no matter what. And Matt certainly made solid contact, as he fouled the pitch off to the right …. directly into a boy’s forehead (luckily it bounced once). Fortunately, the boy is fine, though he may not be interested in softball anytime soon. The next day, our friend the emcee with a good sense of humor, told Matt that he had been fielding questions all morning from the police because the boy’s mother was angry. He said he was kidding, but only after Matt’s complexion turned ghostly white.

The good news, however, is that the kids showed a lot of interest in softball, and we’re thinking about buying a wiffle bat and ball to start playing with the kids in our village. And we will definitely be playing SLOW-pitch softball.

Finally, the other piece of news that has made our week good is that our NGO has funds again (after a huge delay from the gov’t), and our coworkers want to have a meeting on Monday to discuss putting a number of OVC (orphans and vulnerable children) program back in place (yay!). We are hoping to reinstate an afterschool drop-in center at the organization. Basically, kids would have a safe place to come for a couple of hours after school to do homework, play games and have a small meal/snack. Our NGO had such a program about a year ago, but the Department of Social Development (our primary funder) had them stop it for a number of reasons that we’ve never really been able to get to the bottom of. We are hoping to develop a proposal that will convince DSD of the value of the program and start having kids come next month. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, we realize that there will continue to be ups and downs, but we are more hopeful than we have been in a looong time about everything working out at our site. Plus, it was warm enough to sleep without our sleeping bags two days this week. That also helped morale.

As mentioned in the last blog post, all South Africa PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) were invited to Pretoria for a meeting concerning the arrest of a former S.A. PCV last weekend. Peace Corps put us all up in a lovely four star hotel (showers!!) and held debriefing and counseling sessions. Many volunteers expressed the same feelings: anger that a PCV would do such a thing, embarrassment that Peace Corps was receiving such bad press based on the actions of one individual and sadness for the victims. A lot of time was spent talking about our feelings (we are In the Peace Corps after all!), listening to and supporting each other and reviewing how to report any improper behavior that we may witness. (No volunteer knew what was happening with the former PCV, but Peace Corps is required to give us all training in reporting anyway.)

Our main concern was that our community would find out about the accusations and associate us with them. After all, when our community hears “Peace Corps,” they think Sara and Matt, and we’re not sure they realize that there are about 170 PCVs in South Africa. Luckily, we haven’t heard anything from community members about the news. Either they didn’t hear about it or they didn’t make the connection, which has been a big relief to us. 99.9% of PCVs are good people who genuinely want to help others. We would hate for people to think that we have anything but the best intentions. Anyway, so far, so good.

Besides the awful circumstances that necessitated the meeting, it was really cool to have so many volunteers in the same place. We not only got to catch up with friends from our training class, but we were able to meet a number of PCVs from other classes as well. It ended up being a fun weekend.

Peace Corps has unfortunately been thrust into the news here in South Africa thanks to the abhorrent acts of a former volunteer. Last week a volunteer who began his service one year before us (and resigned early last May for reasons now obvious) was arrested at his home in Connecticutt for child molestation. While serving at an AIDS center for young children he molested at least five girls under the age of six, one of them over the course of five months. Here's a link to a cnn.com article, and if you google his name you'll find countless more news stories: http://articles.cnn.com/2011-08-05/justice/peace.corps.sexual.abuse_1_peace-corps-volunteer-sexual-abuse-sexual-conduct?_s=PM:CRIME

In response to this mess, Peace Corps has called for an all-volunteer meeting this Saturday in Pretoria. These meetings NEVER happen, so it's going to be interested to see what happens with some 150 volunteers.

Sara is currently in Pretoria this week because she is on the Volunteer Support Network and they had training this week. Essentially, Sara is going to be a mentor to a group of new volunteers who are currently training near Pretoria. So the meeting doesn't inconvenience her in any significant way. I (Matt) on the other hand am disappointed. I had grand plans for Dorkfest 2011 (Star Wars and Lord of the Rings marathons) but, alas, they must remain on hold. . . .

Our trip to Los Angeles was fabulous. It was warm and sunny, and we had such a great time with our family and friends. Courtney and Nathan had a beautiful (and fun!) wedding, and we were so happy to be there for it. Needless to say, it was pretty difficult to get on the plane to come back here. Somehow, we managed to force ourselves to leave paradise. After 30+ hours of travel, we were in East London. Unfortunately, our bags were not.

Our plane was about an hour late into Joberg, so there was wasn't a lot of time once we cleared South African customs and rechecked our bags before our next flight left. While we weren't completely surprised that our bags didn't make it, we were absolutely exhausted and not up to dealing with the issue. We were told in East London that our bags would arrive on the 4:30 flight from Joberg that afternoon. Since we wouldn't be able to make it back to site before dark with our bags, we decided to stay at a backpackers in East London. We were called around 5:00 and told that Matt's bag had arrived on the flight, but Sara's had not. At that point, the guy we had been working with told us that he was going to call Joberg about Sara's bag. Seriously? He was just now going to call Joberg and let them know that bags were missing? I'm pretty sure that bags are scanned now once they enter and leave an airport, so you'd think it would be fairly easily to locate lost luggage. This isn't 1991. Anyway, Sara's bag eventually arrived on the 8:30 flight. We were able to have cheeseburgers (2 for 1) at the restaurant next to the backpackers, so the lost bags were ultimately worth the hassle. Food makes everything better.

Now we've been back at our site for a week, and already we are looking forward to our next trip!

On a sidenote, we had a pretty humorous interaction last weekend. Someone asked us where in America we were from. When we replied Los Angeles, the young woman got excited and said “LA! The Big Apple!” And no we didn't correct her because it was too good.

We have a laptop!!! Okay, we probably shouldn't be this incredibly excited about a laptop, but we totally are. It's our computer, tv, radio and entertainment system galore, so whatever. We hope to blog a few times a week now, but we'll see what actually happens.

Anyway, we are leaving Los Angeles today (boo!) after a fabulous week. It's been beautiful and sunny, and we've had so much fun. A big congratulations to Courtney and Nathan who were married yesterday! It was a wonderful day, and we are so happy that we were able to be here for it.

Sorry, our posting has been terrible lately. We spent the last week (a little more) in Pretoria for our in-service training. Although the overnight bus ride was brutal, it was fabulous to see the rest of our training class again. We were stuck in sessions most of the day, but we were able to hang out during the evenings (sorry for partying, St. George Hotel). We're now back in the Eastern Cape, but only for about a week. We leave next weekend for AMERICA! Yep, we are coming to LA for about a week for Matt's sister's wedding (congrats to Courtney and Nathan!). We didn't anticipate making a trip back to the States so early, but we're really excited to see everyone (and LA will be WARM!).

And we are buying a laptop when we're there. Thank god. We promise to improve the blogging once we return.

Otherwise, things are pretty good. Our organization has not had a lot for us to do, which has definitely been frustrating at times. However, now that our three months of community integration/lockdown is over, we have the freedom to find other things to do in the community. We might help this group start a softball program for kids. We're going to visit some schools (Sara might do some teaching if they need her). There is a legal advisory center that is interested in our help (Matt is more interested in this one than Sara). Anyway, things are looking up.

We've sort of gotten used to not having a laptop, but life definitely gets boring at times. On a positive note, we both have read 20 books since coming to South Africa!

We leave for Pretoria for our in-service training next weekend. This marks the end of our lockdown/community integration period and means that we'll be able to see our training class for the first time in 3 months! The 13 hour bus ride isn't going to be too fun, but we're definitely looking forward to spending a week with our buddies.

So the laptop cannot be fixed. Slammed. Sorry, but the blog posts will be pretty scarce until we get a new one. It's been raining A TON, so we basically sit around playing cards, reading and staring at the walls. Seriously.

It's been a while since we posted and for good reason. This past weekend we spent in East London with another volunteer. We had a lot of fun, saw the new X-Men movie, ate some good food, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. So posting to this blog was far from our mind as we soaked in the sunshine of East London.

However, this Monday we were dealt a vicious blow when our laptop stopped working. The last two nights have been a little stale to say the least. Last night we went to bed before 9:00. We depended upon that laptop for entertainment (movies, music, etc.) and work. For Peace Corps we need to submit a report next week based upon our community "integration." We interviewed about a dozen community members, and many of our notes were on our computer. More importantly, we're not crazy about handwriting (what is THAT?) our entire reports. So basically, we've been pretty slammed.

Currently, I (Matt) am in King William's Town hoping to get our computer fixed. I'm waiting for a call back from the technician to see if he can fix it, or if it's even cost-effective. So everyone keep your fingers crossed that our livelihood will be saved! Otherwise, don't expect a fresh blog post for a while.

Ah warm weather, barbeques, long summer nights...for us, that will have to wait until November. Meanwhile, we were hoping to meet another Peace Corps volunteer in East London for the weekend, but the backpackers (hostel=shower!) was full. Instead, we are meeting up with her next weekend. We haven’t seen another American (besides each other) in over nine weeks, so we’re really excited to have a fun weekend away. Plus, next weekend is payday, which means there will be A LOT of drinking happening at our site. It’ll be nice to miss this month’s debauchery.

Unfortunately, we only get South African holidays off, so we’ll be back at work on Monday. We are supposed to attend a child protection awareness event in a nearby village on Monday, so we’ll let you all know how that goes. Have an extra hamburger or brat for us.

Highlight of the week:

It all started with 2 young girls who live down the road from us who love running out when we walk by to say “molo” (hello) to us. This has turned into us exchanging both greetings and high-fives with them. Their mothers laugh whenever they see us, because the girls, probably about three-years old, will literally sprint when they see us coming. Slowly, other kids have begun joining in the ritual. Now whenever we walk by the area where they live, we have numerous children (ages 3-6) running up to give us high-fives and say “molo, buthi” to Matt and “molo, sisi” to Sara. It’s been a tough week (for many reasons), but seeing the kids, who we now call the "high-five gang" line up to receive high-fives definitely cheers us up.

Bizarre item of the week:

As I believe we’ve mentioned before, Sara found a dead worm under her pillow a few weeks ago. This morning, we found yet another dead worm in the basin where we dry dishes. Where are these worms coming from? And where else are they hiding in our house? Seriously, so weird.

Thanks for the comments!

I'm up at almost 5 a.m., b/c operation stop the condensation was a major fail. We have windows open, but I think they are only serving to lower the temp in here down to frostbite levels. I may be exaggerating due to the lack of sleep, but my fingers are definitely turning numb.

We'll blog again as soon as we get some rest. Hope everyone is having a good week!

Well, we’ve figured out the problem with the leaking roof. It’s not that the roof itself is actually leaking (except when it rains extremely hard for several days in a row). Instead, condensation forms on the inside of the tin roof, which is also our ceiling. During the night, the condensation builds and gathers until it eventually starts dripping down, usually around 3 or 4 a.m. And again last night, a significant amount of the dripping took place over our bed.

After burying ourselves under the blankets didn’t help us go back to sleep (dripping water all over is fairly loud), we tried wiping the condensation off the tin with our precious paper towels. Yes, paper towels are precious these days (PC cut our allowance, which we will probably blog about soon). Anyway, despite attempting to wipe up the water and opening a window on a cold night in hopes of drying the house, we didn’t get much sleep last night.

We do, however, have a plan. We are going to try to cut down in the evenings on anything that creates steam. This means no more bathing or boiling drinking water at night, and rice and pasta must be cooked in the afternoon. If this doesn’t work, our next strategy is to become nocturnal. The dripping doesn’t usually begin over our bed until about 3 or 4, so we should be able to get in a nice sleep from the hours of 5 to midnight.