This past Friday, 31 October 2008, ghastly ghouls, big bottomed gogos, and wicked witches roamed the dusty roads of Brooksby Village for the first time in history!  That’s right; Halloween came all the way to South Africa this year for at least one small village.    For the past two to three weeks I have been [...]

Presently, the third quarter school break is coming to a closure.  Break began for all teachers and students of Pudulogo Primary School on Saturday, September 27, 2008.  I hadn’t set aside much to do for that first week of break.  Knowing full well that the village can become insanely boring when you have nothing to [...]

I apologize for the long entry.  I know you are very busy and probably don’t have time to read all this.  If you want to read about just the race, skip ahead to “Chapter 2”.    CHAPTER 1: The Joys of Not Owning a Car in South Africa   Today marked the 3rd running event that I [...]

Ever since I have come to South Africa, I have made the 5:00pm evening run a daily ritual.  In all the countless miles and hours I have run around the flat, dusty, African bush, I have rarely encountered anything worthy of remembrance.  [Of course there was the one time that I got an offer from [...]

When we were being trained in South Africa as new Peace Corps Volunteers, one of the things they told us about was “unspoken appreciation.”  They told us that despite the hours of committment and devotion to our communities  and the improvements and changes we make as volunteers, expect unspoken appreciation.  Expect to leave your community with your [...]

“NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS!”         Some of you may be wondering what could be keeping me so quiet. It is true that I haven’t given any updates for quite a good stretch of time.  I apologize for that and any worries you may have had.  To calm your fears, you should know that, as [...]

I can recall when I was just new at this Peace Corps thing and had a discussion with some of the veteran volunteers about “integration”.  The question was, “how long does it take before you feel like you are fully integrated into your community?”  Some of the answers ranged from 6 to 9 to 12 [...]

On Sunday, June 15, 2008 I challenged, survived, but did not conquer the Great Human Race, the one and only Comrades Ultramarathon. Before I blast off like a starting gun and start my recollection of events from that day, it is only appropriate that I first begin with a short history of this legendary run. The founding [...]

This past weekend we had a HUGE sporting event at our school (well at least ‘huge’ for us).  Another school traveled two to three hours to our rural school “in the middle of corn and sunflower fields” as the opposing team put it.  They had come all the way to challenge our boys in soccer [...]

Dear friends, family, and visitors of this blog: I have quite a different post today compared to my previous one.  This one happens to be far less humorous.  I received another email from a friend of mine, Beatuss.  He is a young Maasai man about my age staying in a rural area of Tanzania.  Over the past month, [...]