Almost a volunteer!

This is our training room, where we've spent way too much of our time lately.

At least this time we were making party decorations!

Kate, Eden, Jess and Liz.  I think Jess looks like something out of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory :)  (That's a LOT of paper chain right there.)

Prepping for the party, Luis makes a LOT of pasta!

Spaghetti, garlic bread, coleslaw, and baked beans- American food that the Batswana sort of liked.

We had a craaaazy thunderstorm after the party.  This was at the cafe we like to hang out at, where we got caught for about 45 minutes.

Not sure if you can see how the streets are flooded after the storm.

Puppies!  Of course it was necessary to re-enact the lion king since the puppy was named Tau (lion).

The puppies loved Emma.

I kinda want this girl, not gonna lie.

MoFengke, the fun 8-year old in my house.

Tswaname and Maudu :)

Thankfulness

The last few weeks of training have been rough, because some of the subject matter is heavy, and we are so ready for training to be done.  But the last couple of days have been a lot better, as things are finishing up, the end is visible, and we’ve been planning for a party.

So on a lighter Thanksgiving-ish note, here are 30 things I’m thankful for, in no particular order:

1.  My host family.  I've had good conversations with my host mom, fun hanging out with my host sister and her adorable little girl, and Thato and I officially treat each other like brother and sister, aka half of our interactions we are laughing at and making fun of each other J

2. There are the cutest puppies EVER in our compound

3. Beginning to shop for some things for my new home at my site.  My nesting instinct is going craaaaazy

4. Obama won the election! (Not trying to throw politics at anyone, but this did legit make me very happy)

5. Our internet works again at school

6. I got a care package from my mom

7.  My fellow trainees- I’ve had some great conversations with people this week that really make my heart sing

8.   Current PCVs- there are a lot of really awesome people serving here in Botswana, and they have been very welcoming/sympathetic/friendly to us trainees

9. Cadbury chocolate

10. I can walk to school- I’d be going waaay more crazy if I wasn’t getting any exercise

11.  Fatcakes and meatpies

12.  I’ve lost 10-15 pounds.  Granted, this is mostly a result of getting rather epic food poisoning several weeks ago and subsequently not eating much meat, but I’ll take the silver lining.

13.   Being able to read hundreds of books on my kindle.  I’ve seriously read 25+ books since I’ve been here

14. PST dance parties

15. Orange and Pineapple Fanta

16. E-mails from friends back at home

17. The feeling of accomplishment I get when washing my laundry by hand

18. Gorgeous sunsets

19. PC staff, especially our language instructors.  They put up with a lot of complaining and crazy Americans and still manage to like us J

20. Catching up on my favorite web comic

21. The skit my friends made this last week about PC safety policies, which had the line: “hide yo chickens, hide yo wife!  Avian flu is comin’!”

22. Generations, the South African soap opera I’m sort of addicted to

23. The little kids in my neighborhood that yell HIII!!!!! when I walk by twice a day

24. Ridiculous thunderstorms

25. I’m going to be a junior secondary school, aka mostly working with teens

26. A fun party for our host families last Saturday

27. No more language tests for a few months

28. PC got a Sekalagadi teacher so I’ve been able to learn some Sekalagadi

29. I become an official PCV this week!

30. I’m in freaking Africa! 

Rinse Cycle

So I knew it would be hard to explain my two years of Peace Corps service to people that have never experienced it.  What I wasn’t prepared for was how draining pre-service training would be, and how it’s really hard to explain the insanity factor to people who haven’t experienced it.

I feel like I’m in a washing machine.  Everyone tells you it’s a good thing, you are going to get clean and ready to be used.  Woo!  Except you don’t realize how long the wash cycle takes.  It’s a lot of fun in the beginning when you are tossed in with all of these other people along for the ride, and you don’t think much about the water filling up until you are spinning around.  And even that is fun in the beginning, until you begin to get a little seasick from the spinning and the close quarters and the constant reminders that you aren’t clean yet but you will be if you hang in there.

And sometimes the spin cycle pauses and you are thankful for the lull, and then you begin to go stir crazy from the lack of movement.  And then you start spinning again and think, thank God, something is happening!  Except then it won’t stop and it’s so repetitive. Spin, pause.  Spin, pause.  And throughout the whole process you are aware that it will end soon, but not soon enough, but when it does you’ll miss being close to everyone, even if your introverted tendencies are not happy about being submerged for this long, thank you very much.

Also you begin to wonder if the whole process is actually worth anything, because you are pretty sure they forgot to add soap, so you’ll have to clean yourself when you get to site anyway.  Currently you are just soggy and slightly seasick.

Then you realize they did put in something like soap, but it’s not actually soap- so it won’t get you as clean as you want and need to be, and you’ll probably have to scrub it off at site later.  It also burns your eyes at inopportune moments.  Those frustrations on top on of the spinning and closeness makes you want to jump out of the washer not infrequently.

At this point, we are counting the days until we are done soaking and spinning and are clean enough to swear in as Peace Corps volunteers.  At which point we’ll go to our sites and find all the stuff that pre-service training didn't wash out or prepare us for and be frustrated all over again.  But we’ll be free of the washer for a while at least.

I don’t know if this made sense at all.  Sometimes I feel like I really am going crazy.  If I ever see another flipchart again, I might do something drastic.  Then again, I helped come up with a rap yesterday about taking malaria prophylaxis, so the drastic might already be happening :P

Finally some pictures!

It takes sooo long to upload pictures at school, but I was finally able to get a few up today.  Here are some snippets from my Botswana life :)

 Cows at my host family's cattle post.

 Dancing at the cultural site!

 They made us dance too!

 Botswana chess.  I'll let you know when I figure out how it works.

 Yummy food.  Clockwise from the white stuff on top: Paleche, grilled chicken, cabbage, seshwa (pounded beef, in the middle), and a roll.

 Maudu, the adorable 1-year old in my house at her birthday party :D

 My host family: Me, Tswanama holding Maudu, and my mom.  My brother Thato wasn't there.

This was during a crazy thunderstorm we had a few days ago (actually the same night hurricane Sandy came ashore in the US).  This was at night, lit up by lightning.

Also, We're all going crazy

I want to be as real as possible on here.  I can’t say everything, because this is a public blog, and therefore I’m not going to write specifics, especially anything negative, that would be traced back to my host family, or people in my village, etc.   But 26 months in the Peace Corps won’t be all roses either, and I don’t think keeping this blog annoyingly cheerful when I’m in a bad mood would help me or my readers.

That being said, we’re all going crazy.  And by we I mean Bots 13 in training. 9 weeks of sitting in training, at least 2/3 of which is review, some of which changes, makes for a reallllly long 2 months.  And it’s a necessary beast, because we ARE getting lots of good information.  Really good language training, really helpful cultural information, necessary other information.  But we are at the point of climbing the walls and really wanting to be at our sites.

Part of the problem is that PC is filled with bureaucracy and requirements from PC Washington that we can’t escape.  Part of the problem is that Botswana is also really good at bureaucracy.  And part of the problem is that we have a group of people highly educated in different areas that all need to be put on the same page, so most sessions are new information for some people and review for many more.  Also some of the sessions seem completely pointless, like when we get outdated health information that we know is wrong, or when we get a 3 hour session on information that could have been given to us in 30 minutes if we didn't have to do group work and make a flip chart.

We’re currently trying to gather information about our sites and getting anxious when we hear that not all of the housing is set up yet, or that it seems most schools didn't know they had to pick us up and take us to site.   I’m sure most of this will be resolved, and my situation seems pretty good, but it does raise anxiety levels.  That with our boredom = crazy.

On the plus side, we met our supervisors and/or counterparts (teachers we will be working with) yesterday and most of them seem very nice and eager to have us.  My counterpart seems super nice and helped me make a game plan of things I can do at my site, like running after school clubs and teacher trainings.  So there is a use for our training J

So… slowly going crazy.  Only 3 weeks of training left!

Language, and my Setswana-Spanglish

Learning a language is a really interesting process.  Especially the second time (or maybe 3^rd, depending on how you look at it) around with competent teachers.

I’m a native English speaker (hopefully that’s not a newsflash) that didn’t learn any other language until I was 13, when I started Spanish.  It was rough.  Long story short, I had a horrible few years in the public school system with bad teachers and classmates and really learned nothing, except a hatred of foreign languages.  By the time I got a good teacher (4^th try’s the charm) it was too late: I hated Spanish and I dropped it.

Fast forward to college, where I needed 3 years of high school foreign language to be able fulfill the language requirement.  I had 2.5 years.  Rats.  So I started over again with Spanish, learned way more than I did in the previous 2.5 years, but still decided that I sucked at foreign languages.  I can carry on simple conversations in Spanish; order food, tell you a little about myself, get a few directions, etc., but that’s about it.

Now I’m in the Peace Corps learning Setswana, a Bantu language spoken in Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia.  At first, it took my 2 whole days to just remember my Setswana name.  But after a week or two the sounds became more familiar and it got a bit easier.  And besides the actual Setswana, I’ve learned a few things.

1) I actually don’t suck at languages like I thought I did.  Granted I’m not amazing or anything, but it’s coming faster than I thought it would.

2) I’m beginning to see the link between music, math, and language.  People always told me that if you are good at math you are good at language, and I was always like, you’ve never met me apparently.  I’m pretty darn good at math- my college major got me close to a math minor, but I thought I was language inept.  Now I’m realizing that pattern recognition, something my math brain is pretty good at, is really helpful for languages.  I’m not sure I have ‘the ear’ that people talk about, but maybe at least I won’t require Setswana for dummies.

3)  Spanish is waaaaaaaaaaay easier than Setswana.  This has renewed my motivation to pick up my Spanish again once I get back to the US, because shoo.  If I can learn Setswana, I can definitely learn Spanish.

4)  I know more Spanish that I give myself credit for.  This is because every time I want to say something in Setswana and I don’t know the word for it, the Spanish word pops into my head.  Not helpful brain, not helpful.

5) I might actually like languages. Who knew?  I’ve hated and then found I didn’t actually hate enough things that I’ve learned to never say never, but this revelation is pretty amazing.  I still maintain you can put me in a mental hospital if I ever claim to like physics though.

6) If I like languages and don’t completely suck at them… this opens some pretty cool doors.  There are some places in Africa that I’d like to work in the future that are francophone, and I could go from there.  My one current worry is that I’m not sure my brain knows how to sort out multiple languages, as evidenced by my substituting Spanish for Setswana.  I’m afraid that Setswana is dislodging my Spanish, and that French would dislodge my Setswana.  Maybe someone who is trilingual can comment on this.  Maybe I just need to cement them both better in my brain.

So, language is obviously going okay. Ke ithuta Setswana!  (I am learning Setswana!)

My site is Salajwe!

So I've gotten my site announcement, and it's Salajwe!  From what I know, it's a village of around 1700 just south of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.  There is a primary school, junior secondary school and clinic, as well as 1-2 shops.  My shopping village is Molepolole, which is 2-3 hours away depending finding a hitch.   Luckily I think I can get non-perishables in my village, so I can stock up on vegetables when I go to Moleps.
I'll be working with the junior secondary school, which is ages 13-15ish, heavy on the ish.  Of the 750 kids at the school, 600 of them board there.
I don't know anything about my living situation yet, but there is another volunteer in my village who works at the clinic, so she is trying to scope that out for me.  Salajwe is not on a tarred (paved road), so I think I take a khombi (minibus that seats about 14) and then hitch hike the rest of the way.  Hitching is pretty safe here and very common, so don't worry too much about my safety.  Also we don't travel at night, due to drunk drivers and cows (and not always in that order).  If you are going to worry about my safety when traveling, it should be from accidents, not sketchy people picking up hitch-hikers :P
So!  I have a site!  And I get to go there in less than a month.  I'll update with a new address when I procure one.  :D