Hardcore!

Here goes with my resolution to update this blog more often. Good news is, it’s been a very busy week for me. Now that I have two people translating for me, I’m now out in the community pretty much every day. If anything, I’m really struggling to find the time to properly write down and compile all the data that I’m getting, both the data that is exclusively for my own research, and the data which I’m collecting for the NGO.

Although I’ve got a translator, I am very proud to say that I really feel like I’m making progress on the language front. My grammar is still very bad –and always will be, I’m sure, - but I’m finding that I now understand a fair bit of what is being said around me. The preschool teachers are a big help; most of them have pretty much stopped speaking English to me unless they’ve tried to tell me something several times, and it’s become clear that I don’t understand what’s been said. I appreciate the tough love approach.

The language-learning has been hard work; I get up every morning at 6:30 and study for about an hour (with a coffee and a chocolate-espresso rusk, of course. FYI non-South African friends, a rusk is kinda like a biscotti only fatter and not quite as hard. I source these babies from a

gourmet food store several hours from here. Gotta keep it civilized). Every week I make myself new vocab flash cards (English one side, isiXhosa on the other), and every 3 weeks I dig out my old cards to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything). And when I’m out and about in the community I always make notes in my field notebook every time I either hear something thatI’d like to understand, or when I’m trying to express myself and realize that I don’t know an important word. Dorky perhaps, but effective.

That said, although I’m busy I’m still running the after-school program up at the local primary school. This week we did puzzles, and the tweens were really into it (see picture). Unfortunately, although there was a range of aptitudes in the group –as with any group of kids,- I was amazed and dismayed to discover how poor their puzzle-solving skills are. These kids are in their early teens, and most of them really didn’t grasp that the puzzle is a square, and that the square will have straight edges that must line up. It was really frustrating to sit with them, take a piece of puzzle, and say “okay, what is this picture of?”” Okay, so it’s a piece of a pink flower. Where’s another piece with part of a pink flower on it?” And then, once they’d found the piece, watch them try and fail to fit it one way, not noticing that if they turned the piece 45 degrees it would actually fit together. Makes me pretty grateful for all the brain-building time my parents put in with me (NOT to suggest that parents are neglecting their kids here, or that these kids aren’t clever. They just haven’t been exposed to this sort of stuff much). In any case its rewarding to work with them in any case, and they seem to enjoy themselves as well.

Research-aside, it’s also been an adventurous week on the personal front. I’m currently sharing my house with Leisl (a long-time manager of the backpacker lodge, who now lives elsewhere but comes back periodically to help manage some of the microenterprise projects in the village), and this past weekend we went on a big hike over the river, down the beach, up and down some hills, and into the Mpame forest. It was an excellent walk, we met lots of local people from the next village, bravely ignored people’s warnings that there was a “igrogro” in the forest (a monster, apparently), custom-ordered a skirt for me from a mama in the neighbouring village (she’s known for her excellent skirt-making skills, and I want a red, rose-print traditional shweshwe skirt), investigated a fallen-down and abandoned treehouse, and arrived back in our village just before dark, being chased by a rainstorm, and had to swim the river-mouth with our bags over our heads because the tide was high (the river spills into the sea, so when the tide is high, the river is high also).

And finally, here’s a picture of me huffing a newly-charged car battery up the hill to my house in wheelbarrow. That hill is steep, and that battery is heavy! But that battery powers three tiny strings of LED lights in my house, so it’s worth it.

Miss you guys.

P.S. I’m going to shamelessly request some of you to send me music! I’ll even pay for the USB via email money transfer, if you live in Canada. I still haven’t managed to replace much since my IPOD was stolen in April, and I’m getting pretty tired of the same few albums.