Long, long ago – half a century, more or less – and far, far away from where I am this minute, Harry Baker taught me to do what I'm doing this minute – touch typing. I've been thinking of him every day lately, and wishing I'd paid more attention, because I'm trying to do for the South African teachers I'm working with what Mr. Baker did for me. I'm trying to teach them to use computers, which means I'm trying to teach them touch typing. And let me tell you: Not so easy.

I've got tools Mr. Baker never dreamed of. I've got personal computers and typing tutor software and video projectors. But what I don't have is Mr. Baker, who knew how to get the job done.

I took two semesters of touch typing in summer school. It was the thing for college-bound students to do -- take typing in the summers so they could squeeze in an extra academic subject during the regular school. I was particularly interested in typing because I was going to be a writer. And I got even more interested after the first class started – mostly because Cindy Morris was in it, and I had a wild crush on her, even though she was two whole years older than I was – not so important as I contemplate my 65th birthday next week, but a pretty big deal when I was 15 and couldn't even drive yet.

We were in class all morning, with one 15-minute break (we would all pile into as many cars as we had and race out to the A&W for root beer, then race back to the high school). I wish I could remember what Harry Baker did in that class as well as I remember the back of Cindy Morris' neck (her hair was short, light brown). I wish I could do it for Sophy and Segofatso and Dilwe and the other students who struggle to compress their hands into that peculiar bunch-fingered knot that lets you get all eight of your digits onto the home keys what Harry Baker did for me. But I'm struggling.

I think of myself as a pretty good typist. When I sit down at the keyboard to show my students how it's done I can dazzle them. I close my eyes tight and reach out for the computer keyboard and find the right keys by touch (thank you, Bill Gates or somebody, for those little bumps on the F and the J) and then start talking and typing what I'm saying. And they're amazed. They should be. It's a neat parlor trick. And I should be pretty good. After all, I made a living at it for nearly 45 years, writing millions of words for newspapers and magazines and books and Web sites and company newsletters and marketing brochures. I put my fingers down on the home row of hundreds of keyboards from Royals and Underwoods to IBM Selectrics to Apple Macintoshes and IBM PCs, and most recently on a tiny little HP Compaq netbook computer with a keyboard so small it feels like I'm typing inside an ashtray.

I've still got a lot of those millions of words. I've got boxes of clips from the publications I wrote for, and I can Google up more virtual boxes of Web pages any time I want. But there is one thing I wrote that I'm afraid is gone forever. It may live on, in fact, only in Mr. Baker's memory. During one of those summers in the typing room at Salem High, I took my eyes off Cindy Morris long enough to write an assignment. The class was typing a newspaper, a tricky assignment, because you had to justify the columns, which is easy to do on a PC, but meant you had to count each line and figure out how may extra spaces to insert between words on the typewriter. I volunteered to write the advice column for the newspaper, and I turned out “Goody Gootch's Advice to the Lovelorn.” It was probably exactly what a 15-year-old boy who was trying to be funny would have turned out, but Mr. Baker liked it. In fact, for the half-century since, whenever I've seen him, he's called me Goody Gootch.

So thanks, Mr. Baker. And just how do I get these people to keep practicing JMJ JNJ JUJ JHJ until they can actually do it without looking at their fingers?

Love,

-- Goody Gootch

David says this blog has been shamefully neglected and that’s true, but we have been so busy since January that we have had no energy after work to write a blog. We come home and collapse. Previous volunteers had told us that we would likely have lots of free time: they told of afternoons kneading and baking bread and taking leisurely walks around the neighborhood. That is not us -- or most of the other volunteers in our class. We are the first group of education volunteers who can actually work in the classroom teaching classes (as opposed to advising and assisting teachers) and several of us are extremely busy. I am teaching four full days each week and still trying to learn Setswana with a tutor. I have two very active 7th-grade classes in one school and different groups of 4th-, 5th- and 6th-grade classes in the other school. My 7th-graders are eager for me to start an after-school book club—as soon as I can get some books for them.  I’m finding handling 40 or more students in one classroom to be very challenging. The students have varying degrees of ability or skills. Some are at or above grade level and some are not really able to read. We have no remedial services so I have to try and work with all the different skill levels. It is very demanding and exhausting. I work with my 7th-graders all day Monday and Tuesday and I am their only teacher of English, although most of the teaching of other classes is done in English. On Wednesday I switch schools and work with the other grades at a school where I team up with teachers by taking half their class and working on reading and comprehension skills.  I like these young people. They are full of energy and many are very bright and full of ambition. Recently when I asked them to describe their dreams of their futures they said they wanted to be pilots, doctors, singers (Beyonce is a favorite role model), chartered accountants and police persons.  David is very busy fixing computers that are overrun with viruses and teaching adults basic computer skills. There are so many computers here that have been attacked by viruses — usually transmitted by thumb drives. He is getting tired of fixing viruses and is looking for an apprentice who might take over some of the work.  We are both also on Peace Corps committees. Sally is on the IRC (Information Resource Committee) and David on the VAC (Volunteer Advisory Committee). David also is editor of the newsletter that the South African Peace Corps volunteers receive each month. These committees require our presence in the Peace Corps office in Pretoria about once a month.  We are enjoying our work here most days but we are very tired at the end of the day. A week-long fall break is coming up soon and I am looking forward to sleeping long and late. 

The new school year started this week, and we are officially no longer adrift. In fact, we're suddenly scrambling to catch up.

The month-long summer vacation that ran from December 11 to January 11 was too much of a vacation: now we've got a month's worth of story to try to catch up with. It's all good: we had a guest for the Christmas holidays, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer from Louisville, a woman who once taught at Jefferson Community College, where Sally used to teach, and who lived in Irish Hill, near where we lived when we first moved to Louisville 40-plus years ago. Once again we fixed a holiday dinner -- this time with two small turkeys, but we're still trying to convert South Africa to pumpkin pies.

Doing Christmas in the middle of summer has a disconnected feel to it. It was hot, and it didn't really begin to feel like Christmas until Father Mark took us to a Christmas Eve festival of carols at his church. The choir sang beautifully, and the music made the season right.

We took a vacation ourselves right after New Years, and flew from Pretoria to Capetown to spend a week at the Nine Flowers Guest House, a wonderful B&B very centrally located in the Gardens district. We walked all over Capetown, and rode the tour buses up to Table Mountain. We ate wonderful meals in lovely restaurants, went to the movies, and visited some wonderful museums, and took a too-brief tour of the wine country. It was just about perfect (and if it sounds like I'm doing a commercial for the Nine Flowers, I am. It was fabulous.)

We came back on Jan. 8, and schools reopened for teachers on Jan. 11, so we were back in the thick of it immediately. Sally began the work she's going to be doing, teaching English to seventh-graders in two schools, and David put in a week trying to get past doing computer tech support -- for him it was a week of installing anti-virus software and trying to clean viruses off computer lab servers and teachers' laptops. Sooner or later he'll teach basic computer classes to teachers and run computer clubs for students, and in spare moments help with some technology courses.

There, now we're all caught up, the slate is clean, and we can try to move on with our lives, right? So get ready for it -- pretty soon I'll tell you about the warthog sausage salad.

It′s the end of the school year and we are feeling a bit adrift.

Although school isn′t officially out until Dec. 11, students at the middle and high schools are no longer attending school because their exams are over. Teachers are still grading exams, so they are at school, but it seems ghostly without the students. The primary schools are still functioning, but even some of them are not doing the same kind of class work they did when we first arrived. They no longer have to teach so that the students will pass exams.

The holiday vacation will last for a month, until Jan. 11, and then we will start the new school year and things will probably be very busy.

We are in the rainy season. The rain is not a steady rain or a misty rain but intermittent torrential downpours. It will be very bright and sunny, and then clouds will move in and we′ll have a powerful thunderstorm, with dramatic lightning and crashing thunder. When it beats on our tin roof it can be intimidating. The storm may go on for a couple of hours and then passes on. Often the storms occur at night and when we get up in the morning the dirt paths have changed into muddy ruts filled with water. It makes walking to some of our schools challenging.

Electricity has been a problem for the past two weeks, and rain and electrical outages are related – the one often seems to cause the other. Last night, during a particularly loud thunderstorm, the lights went out. We have candles at the ready, but often there′s not much to do but go to bed.

While the electricity is usually back on in time to heat our morning coffee, the schools seem to have more trouble. The electricity has been off in our schools all week, which that means that fax machines, copiers and computers don′t work. This is frustrating to David who goes to the schools only to find he can do nothing. One day a principal had to drive to another town to fax an important document.

We′re already feeling technology-deprived. More than once we′ve wanted to do a computer-based presentation, but we have no way of doing it – nobody seems to have a video projector anywhere around us. And even if we had one, could we count on having electricity to power it? It is instructive how we Americans take reliable electrical connections – and hot water and cellphone service and Philadelphia Cream Cheese in the grocery stores -- for granted.

Thanksgiving: The Turkey Story

Speaking of cream cheese (how′s that for a transition?) we had a wonderful Thanksgiving with nine other Peace Corps volunteers as guests for the weekend. The Peace Corps doesn′t observe most American holidays unless, like Christmas, they are also celebrated in South Africa. Thanksgiving, however, is an exception. We were given Thursday and Friday off to celebrate it.

We started our preparations with an ingredients hunt – Thanksgiving means cranberry sauce and stuffing and pumpkin pies and turkey. We took a couple of taxi rides to shop for things like ground nutmeg and pumpkin and chocolate chips – and, of course, a turkey.

We rounded up most of what we needed, but we hit a real problem with the turkey. We′d been told that most places wouldn′t sell turkeys, but we would almost certainly find them at the Pic ′n′ Pay in Brits. And we did. There they were, in a freezer case, encased in white shrink-wrapped plastic. But we wouldn′t have recognized them if they hadn′t said ″TURKEY″ on their wrappings. They were all no more than the size of a football, and weighed around 3 and a half kilograms – about 7 and a half pounds. That′s a pretty good chicken, but it is no Thanksgiving turkey for 11 Americans, three priests, and assorted other guests. We panicked.

One of the nuns who lives here asked what we were doing for Thanksgiving and we shared our fears. She volunteered to help. She was going to Pretoria, she said, and she was sure she could find a real turkey in the big city.

And sure enough, late Tuesday afternoon she drove up a 17-pound turkey in her trunk – a genuine Jennie-O bird imported from Willmar, Minnesota. We traded her our 7-pound squab. David made pumpkin and Derby pies. Sally made an apple coffeecake (that′s where the cream cheese went). Each of our Peace Corps guests brought a dish or made something after s/he got here. We had a wonderful spread: mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce (made from dried cranberries, and it turned out well), green bean casserole, bread stuffing, mushroom gravy, macaroni and cheese, butternut soup, green salad, and a couple of vegetarian dishes. And turkey. Plenty of turkey.

Our guests stayed for two nights, and we had fun catching up and telling each other about what we have been doing since we were together in training. There was also a hike up our mountain that was cut short by a thunderstorm, and we played card games. Taboo, a word guessing game, was a favorite.

The only problem was that some of the educators we work said, ″Why weren′t we invited?″ It′s a major cultural difference: Here in South Africa a celebration carries an open invitation – even a wedding or a funeral calls for an open-house event with a LOT of food and anyone who lives around can come and eat. It′s not unusual to slaughter a couple of cows, and local women will come and cook for two or three days. Our co-workers are surprised when we tell them that in America we do not attend weddings or most parties unless we are invited by the hosts themselves, and when we have a party we prepare just enough food to feed the people we′ve invited.

Next time we′ll have to think of some way to show our hospitality to our South African friends -- without slaughtering a cow.

At a party Thursday evening I sat next to a lekgoa like me. (″Lekgoa″ is a Setswana word that might originally have meant ″European,″ but nowadays means anybody who′s white.) He began telling me about his explorations in the hills around our village, and what he′s found there. Caves he says were inhabited by bushmen in prehistoric times, with paintings on the walls. Of course, he said, so many of them have been ruined, desecrated and defaced by vandals, and even though he′s tried to get the authorities to do something to protect the archeological heritage of the area, there′s little interest and less action.

″They′re hunting diamonds,″ he said.

Diamonds? I thought that was a different part of South Africa, Kimberly, away in the Northern Cape province, not around here.

″These are alluvial diamonds,″ he said, ″washed out by the rivers.″ We do live on the edge of a wide valley, obviously formed by a sizable river over the course of many thousands of years, though the river is now shrunk to insignificance.

″These were real gems, big ones,″ he said. ″The bushmen would find them, and collect them, and play with them. Their traditional healers all included a couple of alluvial diamonds in their ′bones,′ the collection of objects they cast to tell fortunes and predict futures.″

″And the healers were always buried with their bones,″ he said.

And now people, greedy people, are looking for those alluvial diamonds. ″They dig up ancient graveyards. They dig out the earth over an area a hundred meters on a side, and who knows what they do with the contents. But they leave holes with skeletons exposed, bones sticking out of the sides of the pit, that they fill in with rubbish.″

I haven′t seen any diamonds, but rubbish, at least, I′m very familiar with. It′s everywhere in South Africa. Everything that will burn casts a haze in the sky, and everything that won′t litters the environment. Bottles, cans, containers, plastic bags, construction debris deface even the most beautiful places. There′s enough trash by the side of any road to fill several pits.

Are the diamond-hunters finding anything? Who knows. But bulldozing ancient graves in search of quick riches is surely bad karma, especially in a country that places such a high value on respect for elders. Whatever the truth of alluvial diamonds, my companion′s story rang true. And on Halloween, I thought about those bones sticking out of the sides of pits. Surely those disturbed graves, filled with rubbish, won′t go unrevenged.

We have spent a lot of time this past week attending special events at our schools and in our community.

The Catholic primary school experienced a tragedy last week when one of the sixth grade teachers died very suddenly. We went to a two-hour memorial service Thursday at the church. It was an uplifting ceremony. Students from the high school and primary schools sang and sang. Primary school learners played recorders and African drums. One of the teachers said after the service that one way Africans deal with their grief is to sing. Whatever motivates the singing, they do it beautifully.They sing in parts, in tune, and in time in a way that few American congregations can manage. Any gathering will include a lot of beautiful singing.

Several of the teachers and students and relatives got up and spoke about the departed teacher and the Father gave a short and fitting homily about being prepared when God calls us home. The children were incredibly well behaved. We probably fidgeted more than they did.

We Monitor an Election

We had been asked to observe a special voting day at one of our primary schools and we weren′t sure what that meant. On Thursday afternoon we walked over to the school (it was really hot – we wonder if we′ll be able to make it when summer really comes) and found out.

We arrived just as the learners were starting to vote. It was impressive. They registered, voted, turned in their ballots and then a group of learners helped count the results. The learners all brought their chairs outside and sat through the process even though it was brutally hot. We took some pictures with our cameras and the children went crazy wanting us to take their pictures.

The learners were voting on candidates for “The World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child.” Nkosi Johnson was the winning candidate our school – he was a South African child born with AIDS, who in the 12 years of his life advocated for mothers and children with AIDS (he died in 2001). Nelson Mandela and his wife Graca Machel were also on the ballot, as were 12 other people from countries around the world. The voting takes place at participating schools all over the world. The idea is to promote unity and democracy among the world’s young learners as well as instill in them the importance of voting. The worldwide winner will be given money to use in his or her children’s rights programs. Queen Silvia of Sweden will officiate.

We met the young people who manage the program in Northwest Province and they seem very dedicated. We were given a copy of “The Globe,” a magazine used in the schools as curriculum material, that describes the program and includes stories about children and their rights. Some of them are heartbreaking narratives of children sold into slavery. One of the program guys was saying how much better things are in South Africa where children are treated better than other places in Africa and Asia.

We Attend a Graduation

Friday morning we spent five hours at the Catholic Church. The first two hours were a mass for the graduating -- or “matric” -- students at our Catholic high school. (Here you don′t graduate, you matric.) Then after a short break, we went back to the church for a three hour awards program.

There was singing again, and some of it was simply outstanding. The 11th-graders did the choral part of the mass, and the awards program included several smaller groups -- a quartet of three girls and a boy were amazing.

The program was a lot a high school baccalaureate and graduation combined – only longer. Much longer. There were motivational speeches. One of the students who gave a short, impressive speech got the majority of academic awards. And awards were given out. It seemed that 12th grader was a winner at least once – if not for academic excellence, that at least for attendance, wearing the school uniform correctly, or cooperation in class.

A Birthday Party for the Chief

Saturday was our friend the chief’s 70th birthday and he had quite a nice party. About 12:30 PM we walked down to the chief’s house. The party was supposed to have begun at 11:30, then it was changed to 12:30 and it actually started about 1:30. One of the Catholic priests had been asked to give the opening prayer and he had an appointment in Ga-Rankuwa at 2, so he was getting a little nervous.

It was a gala affair in a tent. The chief entered accompanied by a group of singing and dancing older women. Later his wife, beautifully dressed, came with attendants. Many nice speeches were made (though we understood little, because they were in Setswana), and songs were sung, including one that sounded like the clan′s fight song. There were some darling children from one of our primary schools who performed traditional dances. We sat down about 1:45, and lunch was served about 4:15. This is what is meant by ″Africa time.″

The Boss Comes to Lunch

After church today we had a visit from the new Director of the Peace Corps, Aaron Williams. Williams is brand-new – was sworn in in Washington Sept. 17, the same day we were sworn in as volunteers. He is in South Africa for a conference of Country Directors (the Peace Corps is active in 30 or so countries in Africa) and his visit was part of a brief getting-to-know-you tour.

He arrived at our door with our boss, South Africa Country Director McGrath Thomas, and a crew of about eight others from Washington and the Pretoria office. Mr. Williams is an impressive guy – a former Peace Corps volunteer himself (Dominican Republic, 1967-70) he has had a long career in global development. He′s lived and worked in several countries including South Africa during the transition years after 1994, and know the issues.

He quizzed us about our experience as volunteers, and we did our best to advocate for older volunteers. McGrath had organized a nice brunch, so we didn′t have to strain the resources of the Ga-Rankuwa Shoprite (or our Peace Corps stipend), and we sat out in the yard under the canopy and had brunch and talked to Mr. Williams and the others.

Our baboons provided a floor show – they were out in full force and we had to chase them away a couple of times. They do provide a kind of perverse entertainment, but they were very bad today and got into the priests′ garden and ate some of the produce. The visitors were fascinated, though, and filled much space on digital camera cards with photos. We really should find a way to book the monkeys to show up for sure when we know we′re having visitors.

We got to our site, the village where we′ll spend the next two years, just in time for a week-long school holiday. We read for a week and worked on our communications infrastructure – both of us now have Internet access and cellphones. We finally moved from our temporary quarters with the local tribal chief (chief not like in a Tarzan movie, but like a small-town mayor) to our permanent home at the Catholic mission a week ago, late on Saturday night. The pick-up truck (or ″bakkie″ in South Africa) that was supposed to come transport our stuff had engine trouble and for two hours the owner and his friends tried to start it. They finally showed up about 6:30 PM – pushing the bakkie. In the meantime the principal in charge of our move had called another friend who also had a bakkie and he came and moved us even though it was dark.

The chief was sorry to see us go, and told us repeatedly “we are together” (a phrase you hear a lot here) and insisted that we come visit as often as possible. We will miss seeing him every day.

It turned out that the move wasn′t our last. We are still in temporary quarters, with a couple of more weeks to go while some arrangements are made and work is done. But the big news is that at last we have our own kitchen. As soon as we could we bought a stove and refrigerator. The stove is small by U.S. standards (narrow, and three burners rather than four, but a regular oven -- not the little countertop two-burner with a toaster oven underneath that so many people use here) We also bought a set of 6 pots and pans so we could cook on it. The refrigerator is what we′d think of as ″apartment-sized,″ not fancy (the freezer section isn′t self-defrosting), but it does have a freezer section, so we don’t have to buy all our food on a day-to-day basis.

We only moved about a kilometer away from the chief’s house but uphill – the compound where we are living is set at the foot of a ridge on one side of a wide valley. The hills are not very big but they are high enough and quite beautiful, outcroppings of reddish rock and trees that with spring well underway are blossoming and leafing out.

Right now there are lots of big blue jacaranda trees in bloom and they make the hillside look spectacular. We are blessed with a beautiful view and a gorgeous setting up here.

We are also blessed with wildlife, up close and personal. Daily a troupe of baboons comes down from the hills to forage for food. Sometimes they jump on the tin roof of our building – a sudden and unsettling sound. They go all over the compound – the clinic, the two schools, the training center, the church. The teachers at the schools assure us the monkeys won′t hurt us, but we are cautioned not to carry food outdoors, because they will grab it from our hands. We can′t leave windows and doors open when we are not around, either, because the baboons may get in and take things like food and small objects. So we have to be vigilant.

We′ve also discovered that mosquitoes are bad here. The first night we left the window open and were chewed up. We now have a bug spray called Doom and we ″doomed the room″ well the next night and it was much better—for us, not the mosquitoes. We′ve now acquired two kinds of mosquito repellant to wear to bed, and we′re planning to start using the mosquito net the Peace Corps provided for sleeping bug free.

We are beginning to feel a little more settled. We finally unpacked our suitcases and put them away. It is nice not to be living out of the suitcases.

Today, September 17, 2009, we took the oath to become Peace Corps Volunteers.

Yesterday we traveled on a chartered bus from our training site to the casino/hotel where we were sworn in. We were sad to say goodbye to our host mother and her comfortable home. We met at the college with all our luggage. The bus was so full that the back several row of seats were stuffed with luggage and the Peace Corps also had a truck and trailer full of stuff we had bought earlier this week on our Shopping Day excursion to Pretoria.

It was a long ride. We were supposed to have arrived around 2 p.m. and it was a little after 4 when we finally arrived. The training manager, who was driving the truck, was calling David in the bus and texting him with messages updating us on what to do about our luggage. David, in turn, was relating the updates to the whole bus. It got kind of funny, especially when David announced he was impersonating the training manager.

We arrived at a lovely hotel casino with nice rooms and bathrooms.

We hauled all our stuff to our rooms and then had a session with Country Director McGrath. It covered stuff we had already discussed such as blogging and travel and leave and last minute details.

(You may have noticed the disclaimer in the upper right-hand corner of this page. The Peace Corps insists that whatever active volunteers write has to avoid controversy and respect the security of other volunteers. That's the reason we don't but place names or very many personal names in this blog. If you're really dying of curiosity about where we are, email us. We can tell you in private, just not in public.)

We had a delicious buffet dinner outside near the pool. We sat around for a long time talking with fellow trainees and then went to bed.

This morning we awoke and had a nice breakfast. Then we had to move our entire luggage out of the rooms into the same room where we had the ceremony. I was glad we had not bought a refrigerator or a big stove.

We had had our clothes pressed by the hotel housekeeper and we looked quite nice when we were dressed for the ceremony.

At a little before 11 a.m. the new U.S. ambassador-designate to South Africa, Donald Gips, arrived and we had a group picture taken with him. The school principals we will be working with were in the audience. Then the ceremony began. The first two South African speakers were from the Department of Education and both gave thoughtful speeches and expressed their appreciation for the Peace Corps. Then the Country Director spoke and administered the oath. It was quite moving. We all stood and raised our right hand and promised almost the same thing the president and other officials promise when they take the oath.

After the oath our language training staff came up and sang two African songs for us. Finally, the ambassador-designate gave a short speech encouraging us and promising to support us. (We are his first group. He has only been in South Africa for three weeks – not even time enough to present his papers for acceptance by the South African government and move from being ambassador-designate to ambassador.)

Afterward we had a buffet lunch. Our supervisor had arranged for a kombie to pick us up and bring us back to our permanent site. We are staying with the chief of the village and his wife for another week until we can move into a place near the Catholic school where we will be working.

It was sad leaving the hotel because we were parting from all the trainees we had become so close to in the past very intensive eight weeks. The next chance we'll have to see most of them will be in January, when we have an in-service training conference. Nonetheless, we're glad pre-service training is over. If we survived that two months, surely two years at our site will be easy by comparison.

The day after the farewell party (see previous post) we went to a tombstone unveiling. This is a major event for South African families – and, like weddings and funerals, its the occasion for a big and expensive party for the community.

Yesterday three stones for members of our host mother's family were unveiled, and she has been cooking and preparing all week.

Saturday night and Sunday morning the house swarmed with visiting family members. We left at 8 a.m. (unveilings always occur early in the morning) and went first to the home of our mama's brother-in-law not too far away, where there was a religious service run by the ZCC (Zion Christian Church). It was conducted under a rented tent set up in the yard. The men's choir was dressed in beige military-style uniforms and they sang and danced and from time to time while they were singing they all jumped or stomped together. We caught the tail-end of that service as they choir was slowly dancing/recessing out to a waiting bus. We got in a relative’s car and drove quite a long way, over very dusty roads to a very rural cemetery. The three family tombs had lace coverings on them so they were easy to identify. Some 200 people had come out, family, friends, and church members. Our hostess said that really wasn’t a huge gathering because the persons for whom the tombstones were made had died many years ago and were not remembered by everyone. A tombstone is not necessarily carved within a year after a death. It can be erected decades later.

At each tombstone the ministers had a little service and a family member was invited to say something about the departed person. We heard poems and songs too, all in Setswana. It took about an hour and a half to get to all three tombstones. It was spiritually meaningful, even though we did not know the people being honored. When it was over we drove back to the relative's house where there was a feast.

Before we could enter the house we had to either wash our hands or submit to the substantial water spray the ZCC church performs to cleanse people. That is traditional. We chose to wash our hands in a tub near the entrance. Then we were sent down to a buffet of all kinds of home-cooked food. This was an even more lavish party than the Peace Corps thank-you event. Two cows had been slaughtered at the house (we missed that part, fortunately), and the ladies of the neighborhood had been cooking for days. There were huge pots and buckets of food to try.

By afternoon we were back at our house sitting under the trees and talking with our host mother's company. Her daughter and little grandson came, as well as her niece, who is in law school and a friend, and also our host's sister and her children. It was a most pleasant afternoon with our new family.

Our eight weeks with our home-stay families is winding down as training nears its end, and Saturday we trainees put on a farewell-and-thank-you party for our host families. The Peace Corps bought a whole cow (slaughtered somewhere else), and village women came to cook the bogobe and several kinds of vegetables, including butternut squash, green beans, cabbage, and spinach. It was a traditional braai, with lots of grilled meat and chicken -- cooking the meat is a job that men traditionally do over an open fire. David proudly demonstrated his skill at grilled chicken.

I wore a traditional dress that my host mother had made for me. It was quite a hit, especially with the local women who came up and hugged me and told me how good I looked.

The trainees put on a show for the hosts and we gave our families certificates of thanks for hosting us for the last seven weeks. Many of the hosts got up and talked about how much they had liked having the trainees. One tall, large woman told us that her husband had died a few years ago and she was lonely now. She liked having the trainees in her home and she had a couple living with her. She had decided to give her male trainee the name of her late husband so, she said, she felt she had her husband back for a short while. The trainee in question turned bright red, but it was really very touching.

Many of the speakers began by singing a short song. The audience knew these songs and joined in. The wife of the tribal chief was present and she, too, began her talk with a song.

The trainees put on a hilarious skit. It was about an African family that takes in a trainee and all the funny things that happen. The trainee asks where the shower is and the host says the only time she will see a shower is when it rains. It went on to exaggerate the amount of the trainee's luggage and the difficulties of language training and was quite a hoot.

One trainee gave a short speech in Setswana and another read an original poem.

After the program we had a big dinner with lots of food. Besides the meat the men had cooked we had vegetables and salads that local women had made and a custard for dessert. It was all very good. We are going to miss our host mother and our neighbors.

Public transportation is very different in South Africa is from what we're used to in the United States. Because so few South Africans can afford cars, most people travel by public transportation, which mostly means taxis – but not the U.S. kind of taxis.

A U.S. taxi is a car that is rented by an individual to go from one specific address to another. Here that is called a ″meter taxi″ and it's found only in big cities. Out in the countryside where we are there are a couple of other kinds of taxis – ″local″ taxis that run a more or less prescribed route, picking up and dropping off people along the way, and larger vans that run longer distances from one "shopping town" to another, or between a major city like Pretoria and a smaller town or village. (In small towns there are often no large grocery stores. The small stores that exist are ″tuck shops″ that are expensive and usually have a limited supply of non-perishable goods. So people who want to shop at larger stores with less expensive food have to travel to a "shopping town" to buy their groceries and clothing and furniture and fixtures.)

The local taxis in our area are uniformly Asian-manufactured copies of American mini-SUVs with a little added headroom. They look like Jeeps with high foreheads, and hold a nominal 10 passengers – or more if they can be crowded in.

The long-range vehicles, also Asian-built look like American minivans (Toyota Sienna, etc.) but they're larger, and hold more passengers. Factory-standard they have 13 passenger seats, and most are customized to carry another three or four people. They are called "kumbies." We don't know why. Maybe because they "come by" on an irregular schedule.

The schedule is irregular because no kumbie leaves with empty seats. It has to fill up completely before it starts out. The first time we went from our village to Pretoria we stood on the side of the road and when we saw a minibus we held an index finger up. It had room so it stopped and picked us up. Then it continued to go around on local streets until it is full. When it was full we started for Pretoria.

(The taxi gesture language in South Africa is much more sophisticated than just standing on a curb and waving your hand the way it's done in New York: if you're going "local" you point down and local taxis stop for you. If you're going "to town" you point up and kumbies stop for you. And in some places you point back toward where you came from in order to get a ride home.)

Once in the outskirts of Pretoria passengers would shout ″short left″ or ″short right″ to indicate to the driver that they wanted to be dropped off at the next left-hand or right-hand street, and the driver pulls over and lets the passengers off.

We ended the first part of our journey to town in at a ″thekisi renke,″ or taxi rank. That is a where kumbies congregate. In big cities a taxi rank can be an underground garage or an open parking lot where kumbies wait for passengers. A queue marshal controls the area. He is the final arbiter if there are problems. At the taxi rank we changed to a different kumbie for the final leg of our trip back to the training college. (The kumbie left the taxi rank full – we waited for about 45 minutes for it to fill up – but once it got out of the city and into the countryside and began to drop off a passengers the driver began to pick up passengers going ″local″ to fill the vacant seats.)

These kumbies are very snug when loaded with people and their possessions. When we traveled we had two flexible suitcases that fit in the small trunk and under a seat. One fellow Peace Corps volunteer had a large, hard-bodied suitcase, and had to pay for an extra seat for it – but it is unusual to have something that large on a kombie. On our trip people got on with babies and diaper bags, lots of groceries, big bags full of clothes, and more. One of the passengers had apparently been to a vegetable market and had about 10 separate bags full of produce. He had to sit in the very back row of the kumbie and when he left he handed his produce, bag by bag, to passengers in rows in front of him who in turn passed them on over the seats of the kumbie until they were up front near the door. A person sitting in the front somehow managed to hold onto them while the fellow struggled to climb over the passengers in front of him. We were so crowded and the spaces for moving in and out so narrow that it took him a while to extricate himself. This kind of crowding – and cooperation – is the way kumbies work.

We have now been in Peace Corps Training for a month and so much has happened. We are kept VERY busy, Every day we have two to three hours of language training, then about five hours of lectures or classes on everything from classroom management to dealing with poverty to safety to cultural differences. It is all challenging, especially Setswana, the language we are learning. David and I are struggling with it. Some of the sounds are not ones we use in English and forming your mouth to make those sounds is difficult.

We began this adventure at a defunct teacher training college where we lived in dorms for our first week here. It is winter here. The weather was SO cold when we arrived and central heating is not common in rural South Africa, so we just had to endure. Fortunately, the Peace Corps provided a couple of very heavy blankets that kept us warm at night, but getting ready for bed or getting up in the morning was very chilly. The temperature in the morning was about 50 degrees and it took some time to get used to it. We both wore our coats, sweatshirts, scarves, gloves and hats whenever we went out. The classrooms were very cold too. In the last week I’ve noticed that it is getting slightly warmer. Winter is ending here, but I’m not too sure I welcome summer as they say it is very hot.

In the afternoons the weather warms up considerably and when you are in the sun you don’t need the extra clothing, but as soon as the sun goes down it gets very cold again.

It is also very dry and some of us have had minor breathing problems because of it.

After our first week here we were moved to host families in the village. We lucked out with a lovely widow who has a nice house with running hot and cold water, a nice kitchen and bathroom and even a washing machine. It works differently from an America washing machine, but it is easier than hand washing. Of course, when we go to our permanent site we will probably have to haul and heat water and wash clothes by hand, but for now, I’m enjoying a little more luxury.

The one thing that is very different is that many houses like our host’s are not completely finished. Our bedroom has no ceiling. We just look up at the rafters and the tin roof. She has drywall to put in a ceiling but has probably never felt like she had enough money to hire some one to do it. David thinks it may also help keep the house cooler in the summer by not having a ceiling.

The food so far is good. Other than the bogobe (see previous post) we have lots of vegetables—cabbage, green beans, Swiss chard (they call it spinach), beets, carrots, potatoes, etc. The apples right now are small but very crunchy and delicious. Many families have orange and lemon trees in their yards.

We have learned to take a minibus or “kumbi” to town. In the smaller rural towns the kumbis are the main means of transportation. They hold 15 passengers and as a rule do not leave for their destination until all seats are filled. This can mean waiting a few hours for a kumbi to be ready to leave. Since we are not supposed to be out after dark, it means we have to plan well and make sure we leave with plenty of time in case a kumbi is slow to fill up.

There is a lot of reference to “Africa time” around here. It means that things to not always happen in the punctual way things often do in America. It is more relaxed here but that can drive an American mad. It takes some getting used to.

After the first two weeks we were allowed limited use of a computer lab that has very slow access to the Internet. It can take 20 minutes to load a page. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. It also is fussy about the type of computer. My Macintosh has no trouble connecting, but David’s PC and some other PCs cannot connect.

We have attended some interesting events with our host families. I went to church with our host mama and her sister-in-law. The service is much different from the one I am used to. It lasted about three hours. I really enjoyed the singing, but I did not understand the preachers.

We had a field trip to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. It is really well done. The entrance recreates the building entrances during Apartheid when whites and blacks had separate entrances. There are large displays of the hated passes that all people had to carry on them at all times. If blacks were caught without their passes they could be sent to jail. The passes also had to be filled in correctly. Then there are film clips of incidents that occurred while the blacks were trying to get the right to vote. It was a very moving experience.

Today we attended a traditional African wedding. We left for the wedding at 11:30 and Sara’s mother (Sara is another trainee who lives near us) got into our Peace Corps kumbie (minivan) and directed us first to some relatives of hers who were bringing some food to the wedding. They lived on a farm and we me their old grandparents as well as the rest of the family.

Then we drove a long way to the wedding. It was in someone’s yard and a big tent had been set up for the guests of the bride and groom. We were not invited into the tent except to dance briefly as we left in front of the bride and groom. However, we were definitely part of the celebration.

The wedding was quite elaborate. First we sat around with a very loud sound system blaring out music. People danced and we were served bogobe and meat. Then the bride and groom and their attendants came dancing into the yard. The dance to their wedding tent took quite a while. The groom did not actually dance. He walked with a cane and I was told he had been injured in an accident. His bride walked in with him and them danced with another member of the wedding party.

The wedding party changed costumes three times and each costume was quite elaborate. Apparently the bride pays for all the costumes and it can cost a lot of money. They were quite beautiful and varied for each dance.

After the second bridal dance, we were served a big meal with lots of dishes to choose from.

The dancing is largely a kind of line dancing but folks can get up whenever there is music and dance. A couple of quite old folks days a lot during the day.

Peter, our language trainer, is quite a dancer as is Sarah’s mother. Her son said she is a party girl but very kind. David drew quite a crowed when he and Sarah’s mother started to dance. He let loose with the kind of dancing he and his sister Patricia often do (jitterbug) and he added a little Michael Jackson. The crowd really loved it and the guy who was filming the wedding insisted he do it over so he could get it on video.

Many of the men tended to sit in corners of the yard drinking and smoking marijuana. Some of them were annoying but for the most part we could brush them off. I can see why alcoholism is such a problem in SA.

We finally left after the third dance. We had been at the wedding about seven hours and even though we spent a lot of that time sitting, it was warm and we were very tired when we returned.

We are now into our second week of training and almost everyone agrees that it seems we have been here longer. That is probably because we have been so busy with all the activities and language learning. Our days are packed with mostly interesting work.

We heard an almost three hour lecture today on the history of Bantu education that was most interesting. The speaker was an older man who had lived through the pass system and had nearly been denied the right to study physics and chemistry (which he later taught) in college because they were disciplines Blacks were discouraged from learning.

This past Saturday we met our home-stay families. For home stay, each volunteer is assigned to a family that lives in the community near the college for the remainder of training. We were fortunate to be assigned to a lovely widow who is treating us so well. She has let us have the run on the house and is a great cook. In the evening she helps us with our Setswana vocabulary. I’m happier here than I was at the dorm. It is much more comfortable and our host has hot and cold running water – a nice luxury. Her house is quite nice and we have a large bedroom all to ourselves.

The house is in a sort of suburb of the rural village near the campus. The lanes are all dirt, and the houses are a mixture of very nice modern homes and tiny tin shacks next to each other. Other trainees are staying in houses near us and we took a walk around the neighborhood yesterday. People are very friendly. In the mornings we are picked up by a Peace Corps kumbi, a mini-bus, for transport to the campus where we have our classes.

Our mama's house and those like it in our area are brick with tile roofs, and they wouldn't look out of place in any American town. But the yards are mostly red clay, not much grass, and each lot is surrounded by a fence. You need a fence because there's a lot of livestock wandering around – chickens and dogs and cows and donkeys. Yesterday, the gate to the yard was open and donkeys came in. David chased them away. I don’t have any idea who they belonged to.

The yard is a combination of very nice parts and not so nice parts. There are some trees and bushes, but right now it's winter here, so the grass is brown and there are no leaves on the trees. Each fenced plot has a plowed garden area and some outbuildings. Everybody has an outhouse. Most of the new brick houses have a smaller place in back, cinder block or tin. Our host told us that the old shed in the back of the yard was a little house where she and her husband stayed while they worked on the house. We have seen others like that around here. That seems to be common for a family to buy land, built a little shack where they live while they are building the house themselves. It can take years doing it that way, but mortgages are not common, especially with people who do not have white-collar jobs. Some things never get finished: Some rooms in our house have ceilings, and some don't. We can hear about everything our mama says and I’m sure she can hear us. We try to be quiet and our mama is very quiet, so we cannot complain about noise.

Running water is a luxury. Most of the modern houses around have JoJos – big green plastic tanks on tall towers behind the house. An electric pump pulls water from a well and keeps the JoJo filled, and gravity does the rest. (JoJo is a brand name, but it's become generic, like kleenex: our first day back in class after we moved to our homestays, the standard question was, “Do you have a jojo?” The lucky ones did.)

(Hot water is even rarer. If you have a geezer you're really lucky. A geezer is a water heater: like “jojo” its a corruption of a brand name -- “Geyser” became “geezer.” In our house there's a 150-liter hot-water tank lying on its side in a big red plastic tray up in the rafters, and in the bathroom there's a huge sort of free-form bathtub. We are in heaven.)

The disparities are striking. One house may be like our mama's, up-to-the minute, with a jojo and a geezer and an electric stove and refrigerator, and next door there's a tiny shack made out of corrugated tin. Four or five 20-liter plastic drums beside it are the family's water supply (they're put in a wheelbarrow and carried down to the public pump for filling every couple of days), and while there may be electricity in the house, much of the cooking and water-heating are done over an open fire in the yard – and dry donkey dung is a standard fuel.

At least burning the donkey poo helps clean it up. There's not a lot concern for the environment. Litter is everywhere, and everybody disposes of their trash by throwing it in a hole at the back of their lot and burning it – not a pretty smell some days.

We awoke at 5:30 to HOT showers. What a treat!. It was a heavy day for language training and we got the first of three rabies shots. Victor, the medical officer, gave another talk on health and discussed what would be in the medical kit.

The morning was cold. The temperature in our room was 52 and the rooms do not warm up during the day.

The language is coming slowly. I don’t feel confident about it at all. Today Lydia and Morgan came to talk about the area where we would be located and what we can expect. It sounds pretty rural. It was even suggested that we might want to purchase a donkey and a cart to get around.

Meals have been good but a little on the starchy side. South Africans' staple food is bogobe (pronounced “boh-hoh-bay” and also called pap, pronounced “pop”), which is made from cornmeal and looks and tastes like grits, but cooked very firm, so you can pick it up with your fingers. I don’t particularly care for it, but it is not awful. We have had a sliced beet salad that is very good, and for lunch there is usually a piece of fruit. Breakfast has been oatmeal or sorghum bogobe – sort of whole-grain bogobe, but made like Instant Ralston. It's pretty good on these cold mornings.

The flight to South Africa was the longest we had ever taken. We were in the airplane about 18 hours. The flight was an hour late due to bad weather. We flew to Dakar, Senegal in 7.5 hours, stayed in the airport about an hour and then flew another eight hours to Johannesburg, South Africa: 15.5 hours total.

After we left the airport we traveled by bus for another couple of hours to the site where we'll have Pre-Service Training before our service begins -- eight weeks of introduction to South African culture, language, and the educational system we'll be working in. It is a former teacher’s college that has been closed since 1994. Some of the buildings are used by the provincial Department of Education, and some by the Peace Corps.

A good dinner was awaiting us and then we were assigned to our rooms. We are in the married couples dorm -- there are five other married couples in our group of 43 volunteers, of them much younger than us. (We do have some more senior single women in the group.)

The weather has been unusually cold and we crawled into our beds and covered ourselves with the heavy, warm blankets they had provided.

On Day 1 we awoke at 5:45 to a very cold morning and no hot water. We were not brave enough for a cold shower. We wore our warmest clothes. There is no central heat in the buildings (there is apparently no central heating anywhere in South Africa) and it was SO cold. The dining room was not too bad, but the classroom was very cold and we sat with coats and gloves on. By afternoon it had warmed up enough so that we did not need heavy coats, but as soon as the sun went down it was very cold again.

The activities of the day were lessons in Afrikaans and Setswana and introductions to the Peace Corps Country Director and the training staff.

The medical officer came and talked about keeping healthy and we also got shots for MMR and typhoid. We were both very tired and had a slight reaction to the shots. We came back to our dorm in the afternoon and took a two-hour nap and felt much better. Then we had dinner and crawled under our covers and slept. We both feel better today.

Already we have lost three people who started with our group in Washington. A young couple dropped out the day we were flying to South Africa, and a man dropped out on Day 1 of training. So far we are still here.

For weeks, when we tell friends and family we're going to the Peace Corps we've been besieged by questions. "What town will you be in?" "Where will you live?" "What will you do?" The answer to all of them has been pretty much the same: We don't know.

(Most of what we know is that our bags have to be less than 107 inches in total height, width, and length, and less than 80 pounds. Sally is having trouble imagining how to live for two years with less than 80 pound of stuff, but it's David who's more overweight at the moment.)

But pretty soon we're going to begin finding out. This Wednesday, July 22, we fly to Washington for "staging," our introduction to the Peace Corps and the other members of the group we'll train and work with in South Africa. Thursday we take off from Dulles for Johannesburg.

Where do we go next? We don't know.

But we do know we'll be in training for 10 weeks or so as a group. We don't know where. We do know it's referred to as "lockdown" for its intensity. (We don't know what Internet access will be like, so you may not hear much from us.) Part of the training involves living with a family. And when it's over, we'll finally have some answers.

We are going to South Africa. The Peace Corps has finally decided. We'll be part of the Schools and Community Resources Project. We'll be assigned to a village secondary school. Sally will teach English and do some teacher training, and I'll be a Technical Resource. We got the invitation at the end of April, just a little more than a year after we began the application process, and we depart on July 21.

As you might expect, we have been frantically trying to clean out and sell our house and get our lives in order to be gone for two years. Fortunately, the house sold in four days. (We had a great real estate person who gave us very good advice on strategy.) We've picked a moving-and-storage company. And we've burned out one office-sized shredder and started on a second.

So we have two major bits of advice: (1) Do this, or something like it: life is too short not to spend it on adventures, and (2) Clean out your stuff.