Writing away the month of June

I'm challenging myself to write every day this month. A month that will mostly be filled with teaching classes, eating soup, and huddling in my sleeping bag at random hours trying to stay warm; it's winter here.
Two days ago my fellow PCVs and I completed a big GLOW camp; the biggest thing I've planned, and probably will plan, during my Peace Corps service. It was a huge success, and in related news, I could use a few uneventful weeks.
So this month is for teaching, working on my reading list, and trying to write every day. I probably won't post everyday simply because my internet isn't super reliable, and not everything I write will be for the public eye, but hopefully I'll post more than usual this month. If you have suggestions for things for me to write about, leave them in the comments.
Tah!

A little more normal

I realize I've been bad at blogging lately. And then I realized that one of the reasons why, is that a year into my service, I think things are finally seeming quasi-normal to me. Not that I like everything, or don't have bad days, but I'm learning to shrug at things, roll my eyes, and be assertive when I need to be. And normal amounts to less blogging, because I tend to write when something stirs an emotion, whether it be happy, sad, angry, or whatever.
It's also the end of the school term here and not a lot has been going on. So when big shiny things aren't happening, I forget to write sometimes.
So I'm going to attempt to try a weekly post on random things that happened during the week, no matter how big or small.

I still exist...

Hey blog world and friends!
I still exist. I realize its been over a month since I've posted, and I apologize. I don't like to disappear with no warning.
There's several reasons for the disappearance. One, June kind of sucked for me. A lot. I'll go into that more in another post, but I was just down in the dumps for pretty much the whole month. And I didn't really want to be posting angst-y whiny posts then, so I just kind of went silent. (Silent on the blog. I talked with good friends in both Bots and America and tried to take care of my mental health.)
Then my mom and friend Carol came, and we gallivanted all over Botswana- Gabs, my village, Maun, and Kasane. We also went to Victoria Falls in both Zambia and Zimbabwe, and then spent a week in Capetown.  THEN... I collapsed and was homesick for about 24 hours. Then six other PCVs and I ran a GLOW camp for 32 kids in our region! And then I really collapsed in a pile for a day or two. And then this week school has started again, so there's been lots of planning meetings and me trying to stick things on the ever mystical school schedule.
I'll post lots more about my travels and GLOW camp as well. This is a teaser, I promise the next post will be much sooner than a month and a half from now!

I can't write things down

All of these interesting thoughts that could be posts float through my head and then I forget to write them down. I'm attempting an experiment this week to see if I can blog everyday, even if it's short. Joanna inspired me, what can I say? =)

I had a good conversation with my uncle Art tonight. Granted, I should have been doing homework, but this actually turned into a better than normal conversation that I'm glad I took the time for. Sometimes I can't wrap my brain around how much the world has changed in the last 75 years (arbitrary number, slightly younger than my uncle). To hear his stories of growing up in the rural south as the son of a minister and a teacher, moving a lot, not having a lot of money but making ends meet, milking cows and feeding chickens. It seems eons removed from my life today, growing up in suburbia. Yet I feel like it's part of my past too, and I want to learn more about it. I was intrigued a few weeks ago studying polio briefly in one of my classes, because my grandfather had polio, or a polio-like illness, in 1946. The doctors were baffled as to what it was, which makes me think that it wasn't polio (I'm pretty sure they could recognize it at that time). I tried looking up some of the generic symptoms my uncle was telling me about, but there's really no way I can figure out what it was without a medical record or interviewing someone that was there. But I know they had recently got sulfa drugs at that point, and then penicillin, which was life changing.

Maybe the fact that there are such drastic changes in the last several decades is one reason I love biographies and learning about people's lives- so many of them are so different from my own, simply because of when and where they lived. Sure, reading the biography of a president is informative, but I think reading Laura Ingalls Wilder is just as informative, because it tells how a whole generation of people lived, even if they weren't famous. I wish I could persuade lots of my relatives to write their memoirs simply to record how things were, how they grew up, what life was like in a different time. Famous is relative anyway. One reason I like to write things down is I wonder if in 60 years, my notes and commentary of how I am living today will shed light on now, whereas the future could be vastly different. I don't really thing I'm going to be famous and that people will what to know every detail of my childhood; rather I want to preserve this moment in time for the future.

Why do you blog?