Things So Far

Hi everybody! I really hope that this blog works.

The last blog entry I wrote was right before I went to staging for Turkmenistan. Then, after getting to South Africa, I wrote a note on Facebook because at the time I didn't have the opportunity to set up a blog. But, now I'm settled in my permanent site in South Africa and I'll have regular internet access.

I think I'll start with a summary of what has happened so far, and please excuse me if this blog is a bit random and disorganized. The details will follow in another post. We arrived in SA in the end of January and drove to a small college northeast of Pretoria called Ndebele College. There we started training and were assigned to language groups. There are 11 official languages here and I began learning Siswati, which is in the same language group as Zulu.

After a week at the college we were transferred to our home-stay families, with whom we would reside with for the next 7 weeks. I and three other people had language sessions every week in the morning and afternoon. Over the next several weeks we had facilitators come and have sessions on NGO development, AIDS, and South African culture. We were also able to go to Johannesburg and Pretoria to go to museums and to go shopping. During this time we had extremely limited internet and phone access.

During the 6th week (I think) we learned our permanent site placement. Mine is in a village outside of Tzaneen, which is in the Limpopo Province. It was surprising to find that the language they speak in the village is not Siswati--it is Sepedi (different language family). So, I was going to have to learn a different language. But, you know, that is exactly the kind of thing that happens here. Nothing is really for certain, and you can't take yourself too seriously.

Over the next several weeks I visited my site, returned to my home-stay, had a home-stay goodbye party, and left for my permanent site.

I must go now and do some work. More details to follow!