PCV life scattered on my table

As I’m preparing for my last few classes and activities with my students and teachers, I’m chuckling at the contents strewn across the desk (okay, large table) in my house.

• Colorful lists of emotionally healthy and emotionally unhealthy behaviors
• Boggle and Bananagrams (for the English club that never really materialized)
• Toilet paper
• Hand drawn diagrams of the male and female reproductive systems
• Corresponding labels for above diagrams
• Several books of lifeskills lesson plans
• Hand sanitizer
• A hand made dice that has potential consequences of alcohol abuse (car accident, injury, late for work, etc.)
• Name-tags for a mini camp
• A fly swatter (bc holy moly the bugs lately!)
• A stack of index card sized papers with sticky tack on the back that say things like doctor, nurse, weak, strong, etc, for a lesson on gender
• Various pencils and markers
• A hella lotta sunscreen
• Condoms (male AND female) and a wooden penis
• A loose ball of various colors of embroidery floss for bracelet making
• Scissors, a pocket knife, and string (for making those name-tags)
• Duct tape
• In Her Shoes, an activity to talk about Gender Based Violence
• Chalk
• My external hard drive
• Tennis balls that I need to label for a game  
• Peanut butter and a spoon (cuz ya know, dinner)
• A clean sock, bc I’m debating making a puppet
• A water bottle
• A screwdriver (my light switch plate decided to jump off the wall earlier for no reason)
• Gin

You know you’re a PCV when… 

Botho Festival

Some volunteers in Gabs (there are a bunch of volunteers that extended for a third year that live in Gabs) organized an art and craft festival with the theme of Botho. Botho is Botswana's national value of respect; I think it translates to 'I am because we are'.

So there were artists selling their crafts, lots of kids activities, and different things to raise awareness and celebrate Botho.

I helped by teaching kids (and some adults) to make friendship bracelets. 

Singing and dancing for the kids. 

My friend Kagiso from my village came to teach bracelet making too. I taught her all the patterns I know and she's already made up several of her own, trying to start a small business.

I managed to take the cutest picture on the planet.

Making bracelets.

Playing games led by Nina.

A cool art sculpture of a Baibab tree made from used ARV (anti-retro virals, HIV medicine) bottles. 

It was a fun day and gave me an excuse to stay in Gabs an extra day after IST :)

Goals 1-3 (and 4)

Peace Corps Officially has 3 goals.

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

The one that everyone thinks about when they hear 'Peace Corps Volunteer' is goal one. This is the development work- clubs, projects, etc. So far in this category I officially have a few teacher workshops, and some quasi-functional clubs. Unofficially I have kids playing in my yard and lots of random conversations with kids, teachers, and the occasional community member. This often falls under goal 2 as well.

For goal 2, I've explained everything from food, dating customs (please at least ask me my name before you propose. Seriously. Arg.), education, sports, weather (our school bell sounds like a tornado siren and made me jump the first month or so I was here), family, college, transportation, pets, politics, healthcare, you name it.

Part of the reason I'm keeping up this blog is goal 3. I also hope to talk to a lot of people and groups when I come back to the USA. For the rest of my life, I'll probably be talking about Peace Corps and my time in Botswana. That's why when you go back home, you are a returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), not a former PCV. Once you join, you'll always be a PCV in one way or another :)

Unofficially, there's also what volunteers like to call goal 4. That's the things we hope to accomplish on a personal level during our service. While you shouldn't join PC only for personal development, it's good to acknowledge that PC service will change you as a person. As our director said once, the volunteers that do the best tend to have joined for a mix of personal reasons and to give back to others (paraphrasing, don't quote that).

So I thought I'd share some of my goal 4. Since my goal 1 is inching along and sometimes feels like its regressing, I've decided to focus more on goals 2-4 lately. This also comes from some soul searching last week when I realized I need to take charge of my own happiness more. I need to come up with my own ways to feel productive and give good effort to my projects and life, and not rely so much on outcomes right now.

Some of my 4th goals:
- Read 200 books during my service, 100 of which are classics. I'm almost at 60 right now, and around 15 of them have been classics.
- I want to learn to cook more things, especially vegetarian dishes. So far I've learned to cook a few more things- pancakes from scratch, morogo (the way they cook greens here), lentils a variety of ways, homemade tortillas.
- Writing. Keeping up this blog, some reminiscences, some creative writing ideas, some journaling. If I'm brave enough I might post some of that here. So far I've got the blog, a journal, and a few other things.
- Keep in touch with people at home. Facebook/E-mail/Letters for now.  If you write me I promise to write you back!  Safe to say my facebook addiction has survived Africa.
- Learn to play guitar. I bought one here and haven't touched it yet.
- Trivia- I'm trying to memorize the periodic table and all of the countries and world capitals. Maybe I'll be good on a trivia team for once when I get home! Yes I know I'm a geek.
- Get in shape. I brought some exercise bands with me and also haven't touched them.
- I'd like to learn some of the constellations. Once again, I have a small star chart I haven't touched.
- Finding different ways to be creative. Sometimes I've colored, or sketched, or watercolored. I've made friendship bracelets to give to kids, and I'm planning on making some collages for my walls. And I want to keep track of my digital pictures and caption them as I go along, so when I get home I'm not overwhelmed.

So these are some of the things I try to do in my current large amounts of free time. 4th goal for the win!   I also watch TV/movies sometimes and play too many computer games, but those aren't really goals :P
Anyone else have ideas of things for me to do?

Scenes from my porch

Usually when kids come over to my house, they either play with my soccer ball or color on my porch.  

So my porch often looks like this.  I like it when I have between two and four kids coloring.  Sometimes I'll try to talk with them or sketch as they color and jabber.  More than 5 is a little overwhelming.  Sometimes I've had my porch colonized by like 11 kids attempting to "share" 1 coloring book.  I don't know how to say in Setswana that sometimes the kids in my village have a mob mentality :P

But the other day about 6 girls showed up with long wool strings and played a fantastic jumping game. 

You can't hardly see the string/wool they are jumping over, but they jump and clip it with their feet and bring it down to a place they can get over it. So little kids can get over a 4 foot rope.

They almost always land on their feet, and they have amazing style and form while jumping.

The girls friends look like its no big deal that she's got a 2-foot aerial right there.

And sometimes I swear they can defy gravity. My village kids might actually be ninjas.

And this is KT, my neighbor's dog. He comes by when I'm cooking to get leftovers and scraps.  And I might have bought him dog food. I promise I'm not actually trying to kidnap my neighbors dog.  Just fatten him up a little bit. He's a sweetheart. 

So this also happens sometimes, even though I try to have a, 'no kids in the house and no dogs on the porch' rule =)

Things that happened today

Text message at 7:16am. Grump grump.  It was important, but today's a holiday. And... I'm up.

Waited to leave my house until the dipapata lady set up shop in the field next to me.  Instant breakast.
Missed hanging out with a teacher at school in the library due to said laziness.  Bummer.

Lent out my soccer ball and coloring book to 2 kids.

Wrote for a bit.
Water colored for a bit.
Finger painted for a bit.
Hid from children during this time.

Had the following conversation via text message with Aileen:
M: I just did an abstract watercolor of peace corps and or ministry of education. Clearly I have too much free time.
A: I am assuming there's a lot of red and vague hints of teeth in this painting. And yeah, we have too much time.
M: No actually it looks more like a tragic circus.
A: Also accurate.

There's no point to this post except to say that sometimes my life is really random.

Feeling better and a tourist-y day

I guess I should start by saying I’ve felt pretty good the last few days, and that I was able to go to the field on Wednesday and Thursday.  Friday is our day for data analysis so we don’t usually go to the field that day anyway.  This week we switched Friday and Saturday, so yesterday we actually went to a large craft market.

I know a lot of people have been worried about me and the fact that I got malaria.  However, I’ve been in good hands and seem to have recovered pretty well.  I’m still waiting on the results of the rest of my bloodwork to make sure it wasn’t anything else, but since I finished the malaria medicine and now feel better, I’m calling my illness malaria until I hear otherwise.  What makes it complicated is that I had malaria tests run three times and they came back negative.  However, a negative malaria test in a malaria endemic area doesn’t rule out the diagnosis, because the tests aren’t perfect.  Anywho.

Yesterday I was a typical American all day it was was nice :)  I slept in and then Diana and Sylvie and I went to the Culteral Center in downtown Accra, which is a large semi-tourist-y craft market.  You can buy almost anything in the normal open air markets, but most people don't sell a lot of crafts there, its more like food and household supplies and clothes and such. 
The craft market was very large, and really the first place people were trying to get us into their shops to buy things since I've been in Ghana.  Even then they were pushy but not completely in our faces (mostly); I know a lot of other places in West Africa are much worse.  We walked around and haggled and bought some things for about 3 hours, and then took a taxi to Oso, a tourist-y part of town where we found a rather western restuarant and I got a good hamburger.  We also got ice cream there, my first since I've been in Ghana.  Then our on cab ride home we sang along to random country songs and Christmas carols off my friends' iphones.  I think our cabbie must have thought we were a little nuts.  We continued to listen to Christmas music once we were back at our house, and started planning other sightseeing adventures for the rest of the summer. 
I was also able to briefly talk to my mom and then my uncle for a while, so all in all it was a very good day.  Yay for not being sick!