Pics that didn't publish, babies, and more!

First off, here's the picture of the "Life Skills" homework that didn't publish:

Secondly, here's the next post:

After over 5 months, I can now say that I’ve settled somewhat comfortably into life in the village. The adjustment period was actually harder than I imagined, for a variety of reasons that I won’t burden you all with now. I think the hardest part, actually, is just feeling that no one around you really gets why it’s hard. In any case, I am now accustomed to bathing rarely, to washing my clothes twice a month (basically, when I run out of clean underwear) in a plastic tub, and to filling my weekends with visiting friends in the village, drinking in the shebeen, writing fieldnotes, long beach-walks, and treks to neighbouring villages in hopes of finding a greater variety of vegetables than is available in these parts (its nearing the end of winter now, so the gardens arebare.) Now when the odd guest at the backpacker lodge asks me “so, what is there to DO around here?” I realize I am actually rarely bored. That’s not to say that its paradise. It’s still a struggle to express myself properly, the lack of privacy is sometimes exhausting, and going months without snuggles and (ahem) romance is definitely bad for the soul. That said, here are some excerpts from the past couple weeks:

Here’s a less-than-flattering picture of me with a friend’s one month-old baby. Both my friend

“K” and her sister both had babies in the past month, so I’d gone over to visit the four of them. This family is one of the few in the village to own a television, which they power with a generator. I ended up spending part of the morning chatting, playing with the babies, and watching wrestling on TV (wrestling, for some mysterious reason, is very popular in this village), along with about 15 other neighbours.

And here’s a picture of some mamas, and a giant pile of meat. Karen (an American teacher who came out for 9 months last year to help get the preschool started, and who came back again for 6 weeks in July-August) and I had gone on a Sunday afternoon trek to the nearest trading store, and were walking back through a neighbouring village when we came across some of our local village mamas sitting with a bunch of other women. This gathering consitutes the remnants of a funeral which had taken place the day before; the sister of the sub-headman from our village had passed away. These mamas were working on finishing off the rest of the cow that had been slaughtered for the occasion, and Karen and I were privileged enough to be given a large slab of beef (and a knife with which to cut off bite-sized chunks).

So Karen and I were both having a nice time chatting anlaughing with the mamas, when a grandma cut off a large piece of pure, jiggly fat and passed it to Karen. This is considered a choice piece of meat in these parts, and was a generous gesture. Karen managed to get it down with a smile. Since Karen is a few decades older than me –and therefore of much higher social standing in this community-, I hoped I might be spared the privilege. Not so. My piece of fat was even bigger than Karen’s. I managed to chew twice, swallow it down in pretty-much one solid lump, smile gratefully, and say “mmm…limnandi!” (mmm…delicious!). I wasn’t hungry for about 18 hours after that, and it took several hours for me to get the congealed fat off the roof of my mouth. In the meantime, I struggled to communicate even more than usual because was unable to make the ‘q’ click (the one that sounds like a cork-bottle opening) due to the slippery-ness of the fat on the roof of my mouth.

More to follow!

Once again, it has been far too long since I updated my blog. In the past month a lot has happened on my end; I went to Zanzibar for two weeks with my lovely friend Jen Smith, I hired myself a regular translator, the lodge in the village got broken into (and our guards got kidnapped! But they were returned safe and sound), and much, much more. Rather than start at the beginning and update you all on the whole month, I’m going to post a bunch of shorter blog posts over the next few days.

So, beginning with yesterday: I am still running my after-school program for

grade 4, 5, and 6 at our local school, and although there are some ups and downs (mostly due to poor attendance by the teachers, meaning that as often as not there are no students at school either), the program is going well. Yesterday we tried building things with ‘Zoob,’ a lego-esque building toy which was donated –to the amazement of everyone in the village- by the South African government through the Community Work Program (this job-creation scheme. I won’t go into detail here). The kids were surprisingly enthusiastic. Here’s one picture of many:

Less inspiring is this page from a grade 6 student’s “Life Skills” workbook. In case you can’t read it properly, here’s an excerpt, with the spelling corrected: “a knight’s weapon was a double-edged sword that was very heavy it was his most prized possession knights would march into

danger and then using two hands hold the heavy sword fight against the enemy usually the enemy also had a sword so the two swords would hit against each other the knights jumped out of each others way so that as not to be hurt by the sword.” These kids’ language abilities in English are minimal, and they’re literacy is poor. No fault of their own; the school is just complete shit. This text –which is confusing even for me- has clearly been copied off a blackboard. Aside from the fact that knights and swords don’t really feature in these children’s lives…

After the “Life Skills” workbook, imagine my surprise when I found an interview with Justin Bieber in their isiXhosa reading-comprehension textbook:

More to follow in the next day or two…