Thankful Saturday, Lake Edition

 I spent a wonderful week at Lake Mokoma in LaPorte, PA with friends this past week. I'm thankful for:

1. This week being exactly what I needed. I needed friends, nature, and to get out of my too quiet house for a few days. 

2. The temperature was PERFECT. It was 60s at night and 70s in the daytime, perfect for lots of walks around the lake and hiking. One of the hikes felt like we were in Lord of the Rings- everything was green and moss covered like the Shire.

3. Kayaking on the lake twice. Easy launch area and beautiful paddles.

4. I got to swim in the lake too! We had a rainy week, so we were fitting our hikes and paddles in between showers and storms, but I was able to swim a little bit the last day when it was warm enough.

5. Fun friends. We laughed all week at the refrigerator in the cabin that made a soft 'whoop' noise every time you opened it. We had good conversations, we watched corny movies, and just had a good time.

6. I got to hear Mary Beth preach at the local Presbyterian church.

Thankful Saturday, Calmer week edition

 This week has definitely been better than last week, although that was a bit of a low bar lol.

Lots to be thankful for!

1. I got to camp with my Girl Scouts after all! I was scheduled to camp with them Friday and Saturday nights, but mom in the ER meant that another parent went in my place for the weekend. As it turned out though, I was able to go Saturday night and had a lot of fun! The funniest part was our troop moving our tents into the Glen Shelters because it was going to rain.

2. Luna is walking almost normally now. We're still sorting out her digestive system (maybe too many meds?) but she seems in less pain and is excited to walk again.

3. I just read the book 'The War That Saved My Life' by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley and it was so good. Historical Fiction set in England in WWII, YA. 5 star read.

4. I had a day of rest and small adventures. I slept in, made muffins for breakfast, checked out a new bookstore in Kentlands, went birding for an hour at the lake, and bumped into 2 friends there. I also went looking for owls in a different spot and discovered a new to me trail that I want to fully hike at a later date.

5. A Pileated Woodpecker basically posed for me while I was birding and I got some beautiful shots of a beautiful bird.

6. Two of my cousins have moved to Arizona! Their new place looks so nice and I can't wait to visit them.

7. Mom is doing better. Saw her Saturday morning and Wednesday for lunch and she seems like herself and can walk relatively normally (with her walker). 

Adventures in Birding

 A medium adventure! My friend Carol and I went to Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge for the day on Saturday (2/10/2024). Winter is one of my favorite seasons for birding for a few reasons. One, its not beastly hot outside :) Two, its much easier to see birds in the trees when there are no leaves. And three, its weird duck season. Where I am on the east coast, we get lots of interesting ducks that migrate here from Canada for the winter. 

Blackwater is about 2 hours away from us, so we got there about 10am. 

Thousands of snow geese flying over the water.

Unfortunately I didn't have my good camera with me (it's trying very hard to die, I need to replace it), so I just have some landscapes from my phone. 

We saw lots of eagles, tons of ducks, several great blue herons, 3 different types of woodpeckers, and a Great Horned Owl peeking out of its nest. Also thousands of tundra swans mixed with Canada geese.

Canvasback ducks, ring necked ducks, and American Wigeons in Cambridge, MD, about 15 minutes north of the refuge.

We stopped for a yummy dinner at Fisherman's Inn on Kent Island on the way home. Yum!

Small Adventures

 

It's been a beautiful few days here in the mid-Atlantic. I'm unsure of the long-term weather predictions of rodents from last week, but we had a lovely weekend of sunshine and almost 50 degrees. That's a small joy for the beginning of February, so Luna and I took a hike on the C&O canal towpath at Pennyfield Lock.

I can take selfies of just me, but I haven't figured out how to do one with Luna. So you get Luna staring at probably a squirrel. We both would have had a slightly better hike if the squirrels had not been running DIRECTLY ACROSS THE TOWPATH IN FRONT OF HER. Suicidal squirrels is a good band name. So is kamikaze squirrels, if Luna had been able to chase them and pull us both into the Potomac.

There's a beauty in the starkness of nature in the winter, in the shades of brown and gray. It's easier to see the birds, and it's just a good time to take a walk or hike and think your thoughts.

Here's to remembering that not all adventures need to be grand. There's plenty of beauty, wilderness and adventure within 30 minutes of home.

I'm back!

Wow, I didn't mean to not blog for almost 2 years. So, same blog, but new adventures.

In a nutshell...

I completed Peace Corps and went to Mozambique for a week!

Then I came home, saw lots of family, and enjoyed the holidays in the states.

Babs and I went to Williamsburg right before New Years.

Then I became interim youth director at my church, and got to hang out with lots of fun teens for most of 2015.

After I finished that job, I took a roadtrip down to Tennessee and Atlanta, to see friends and family.

I also went with friends to Frank Beamer's last football game at UVA.

We got a LOT of snow in January of this year. 

I also started being more of a bird nerd and photographing birds.

Karen and I and a few hundred thousand of our closest friends went to see the cherry blossoms on the national mall.

I went to the National Zoo a few times this spring, and PANDAS!

My church went on a mission trip to Charleston, SC and I got to help lay some floors.

I visited Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion (pictured) National Park with friends.

I also went white water rafting down the grand canyon again. 

And now I have a job! I'm a project coordinator for a public health project in Malawi with a cool public health/international development company in Maryland.

So, more adventures coming, and I'll back-blog on some of these and other things from the past 2 years as well. 

House guests and potential roommates

Living in the bush, I get a fair amount of creatures in my house. By far the most common are ants, spiders resembling daddy long legs, and house flies. The latter is the most annoying by far. I've also killed 2 scorpions and a few bigger spiders, without stopping to photograph them ;)

But some of the larger things that have tried to move in with me include: 

Curious baby goats

Setotojanes, or corn crickets

various lizards, possibly living in my suitcase

a preying mantis

a bat

a non poisonous whip snake, which involved calling my neighbors to help me find it and get rid of it

a mouse

and a bird that got lost in bathroom, with lots of resultant flapping.

All creatures made it out alive except the snake and the mouse. People here kill all snakes, and the mouse had already died because I sprayed too much doom trying to get rid of some ants. Most things I was happy to live and let live, just you know, not in my house. 

Fall in the Kalagari

It's fall in Botswana. You wouldn't necessarily know just by looking; there are no colorful leaves on maple trees, or pumpkins carved outside of huts. Fall here doesn't mean that Christmas is just around the corner.
Fall in Botswana is the rains gradually letting up and nights becoming cooler. It's realizing that walking across the village in the middle of the day wasn't as hot as usual; maybe summer is waning. Visually everything looks the same; the rains were so heavy this year that my village is still completely green, and I hope that means that there are good crops and healthy animals this year. People's livelihoods depend on it.

Fall means change. Changes in the weather, and changes for me. I'm realizing that whether or not I admit it, I'm in the final stretch of my service. There are two and a half weeks left of school this term, and the students spend most of that testing. I'll be busy coordinating the logistics for a big camp in the middle of May during the school break. Hopefully going on vacation afterwards, and June brings the second term of school. I have two friends visiting at the end of June, and a week after they leave my group has our close of service conference in July. One more school break in August, and two to three* more months of teaching and living here, and I am finished. Hopefully travelling for a month or two before I return stateside in time for Christmas.

I write this, but it hasn't sunk in yet. Six to seven months still seems like a fairly long time, although not nearly as long as I've been here, which is nineteen months and counting. I'm still in a good place, which is happy where I am, and also happy that time hasn't stopped; it's still nice to know that each week and month I live here is also one week or month closer to being home again. But I've also been trying very hard to mentally be here, and not continually wishing myself home. That's not to say I've never homesick, and the changing of seasons brings that on the most, because I think of fall on the east coast, and the holidays, and it's the time of year that it feels the least like Africa here. I've been trying to keep busy, and I feel like the next few months are going to be even busier. While I'm not a huge fan of the PC policy of lock down** for the last few months at site, I think I will appreciate the down time to mentally prepare for returning home.

So change is in the air. I'm taking a few days to get rid of a cold that won't leave, and catching up on some reading. Since the students are testing there's nothing for me to do at school for 2 weeks. I'm enjoying the slightly drier, cooler weather, knowing that soon it will be freaking cold at night and that at least 1/3 of my waking hours will be in my sleeping bag on my computer, trying to be productive and warm at the same time. My fingers are crossed that the grant money that myself and a bunch of PCVs applied for comes in on time for the camp we've planned in a few weeks.

Fall has always been one of my favorite seasons. It's different here in Bots; Easter, for instance, instead of Halloween, but its not necessary bad different. I would still love some hot apple cider though.

*My official COS, close of service, which means end of my service, is November 14th. But there is a chance I might end a month early if another volunteer is replacing me and need my house. I'll find that out in a couple of months.

**The official PC policy is the first 3 months and the last 3 months of service are supposed to be in my village, aka not travelling or on vacation. Some people follow this policy more than others ;)

The week that wasn't

I had all kinds of plans for last week. I was coming home from MST/Gabs on Sunday, going to my friend’s village on Monday for a couple of days to help her put a fence up at the preschool she’s renovating, and then going to a Motswana friend’s wedding on Saturday, staying in Gabs again for the weekend.

Almost none of that actually happened.

Sunday afternoon I went to the hitching post in Letlhakeng, usually my final stop on the way back to my village. And waited. And waited. I waited three and a half hours, and NO vehicles were going to my village. There was a crowd of like 25 people under the hitching tree waiting for a ride and it was going to get dark. So I cut my losses, not willing to hitch home in the dark on a partially flooded dirt road, and stayed with another volunteer in Letlhakeng.

Monday morning I got a ride home, luckily in an SUV since it was raining. And raining. And raining. It rained a lot the week I was in Gabs at MST, and it just kept raining. Letlhakeng looked like a swamp in places. On the way to Aileen’s village I saw cows wading. I live in the desert people. Parts of it currently look like the Okavango Delta. If this is what rainy season is supposed to look like here, no wonder people said the rains didn’t really come last year. Because I promise, this did NOT happen last year.

My current desert.

Our school football pitch (soccer field)

It rained so much I wasn’t sure if I could get out of my village again (or if I wanted to try…), and my friend didn’t think we could build a fence in the mud anyway, so that didn’t happen.

I took a photo tour of my village near my house and school, complete with flooded field and destructive goats. I missed getting a picture of my neighbor digging a trench around her mud hut to keep it from flooding as much.

Standing water on the school grounds.

Trees down from a storm.

Lock your lockers or the goats mess things up a LOT.

The goats ate my homework.

Thursday I had a perimeter of goats around my house trying to keep dry in one of the storms. More pictures on that in a separate post.

Friday I went to Gabs, and Saturday I tried to go to my friend’s wedding. After getting to the village, finding someone else also looking for the wedding, walking around for an hour, and multiple phone calls… we realized we were in the wrong village. We were in Pitsane. The wedding was in Phitsane, or Phitsane Moloko. Which was another 2 hours or so farther from Gabs. It was noon when we figured this out (weddings last all day here), and by time I were to get to the correct village (which I’m still not even positive was the correct one), I would have to turn around and come back about 45 minutes later so I wouldn’t get back to Gabs super late. And I didn’t think there was public transport so I’d be relying on hitching.  So I sighed and turned around and began my journey back to Gabs. I got back after 3, so I know that if I had tried to go all the way to the wedding I would have gotten back around 8 or 9, which was too late (we aren’t supposed to travel after dark for lots of reasons).

On the bright side, I got to hang out with a friend in Gabs this weekend as I stayed at her house and I also got to go to church this morning, which I haven’t been able to do since… July. So that was great, even though I didn’t make it to the wedding.

The interesting thing is… not much of what happened actually upset me. I just sighed and realized the weather/transportation/getting wrong info about the wedding were not things in my control, and moved on. Maybe I am culturally integrating ^_^

And I'm considering building an ark as a secondary project.

Vacation Part 6: Capetown

Capetown is beautiful, even in winter. We attempted to hike Table Mountain, went out to Cape of Good Hope nature reserve and Cape Point, we saw penguins and Ostriches, we went to Stellenbosch Gardens, the Gold Museum, the Slave Post museum, and the waterfront. We attempted whale watching and Robbin Island but the weather didn't work out and the boats were canceled. 

The gardens.

On the way to Cape of Good Hope are penguins...

Penguin!

Swimming

Taking a good look around.

Ostriches IN the road at the Cape of Good Hope. We were all, let's roll down the windows and take pictures!! Our cab driver thought we were nuts.

Steenbok!

We visited an ostrich farm and got to feed them. This one was a little bossy.

Cormorant drying his wings.

 Yummy food everywhere.

The civic center had a neat exhibit on Nelson Mandela, since we were in Capetown right after his 95th birthday.

This is an art exhibit at the civic center. Using fence from Robbin Island, the artist represents the tiny cell than Nelson Mandela served something like 18 of his 27 years in prison.

As you can see, a cloudy day at the waterfront.

More pictures coming, I'll update this post later (forgot my memory stick with the rest of the pics).