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Life is short, so let's go live it.

**all opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of the Peace Corps or any official US or Namibian organization.**

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

April/May Holiday - South Africa travels

I'll keep it brief, because my computer informs me that it will die in 7 minutes. 

We (me with some other PCVs) went to South Africa to explore, and to run an ultramarathon. After hanging in Cape Town for a few days (and running the race), Luke and I went around part of the Garden Route to see what was there. Here are some key experiences:

on the way to Robben Island 

A former prisoner of Robben Island, who still lives on the island and shared his experiences with us

Mandela's cell


after the ultra. What a cool experience. Never have I ever been so exhausted during/after a race.

View from the top! or, kind of the top.. on a hike from Wilderness, ZA (on the Garden Route). Beautiful! and GREEN!

We went paragliding!??!?

view from the top. from Luke. No way was I going to try to bring my camera...

Another hike


After ZA, I hung out in Sossusvlei (in the Namib desert) to help with an environmental education program with grade 11 learners from the south of Namibia. We helped them to learn about the desert and to complete research experiments and collect data on their own. It was really cool, and awesome to get to work with Gobabeb (and Grinnellians who are working there!) again. Unfortunately, I seem to have killed my camera.. but photos may be coming since there were a billion cameras there.

Integration by parts

(I wrote this post about 2 months ago, and finally loaded the photos.. sorry for any lag time that becomes evident in the text!)

by which I mean, piecewise community integration. Yes I did giggle when typing the title for this post.

I realized today how ridiculous my life would have seemed to me when I arrived a year and a half ago. And yes, I saw Tses for the first time in August 2012, so it has been basically a year and a half that I’ve been in this place!

Here are a few examples.

Most mornings this term, I get up and run or workout, come back, leave my door unlocked, and go shower. When I come out to make my coffee, there are between 1-5 kids seated in my living room. Finishing homework, sitting and talking, or sleeping in my chairs. While I’m drinking my morning coffee and trying to finish waking up myself, I usually help them with their last few homework problems, ask them questions about school, or do more real-life-y things like tend to their bumps and bruises and arguments. We’re legitimately a family (of our own kind) now.

The other huge change I’ve noticed lately, outside of school, has to do with sports. I’m officially the “sport teacher” at St. Therese now, as my counterpart from last year passed away earlier this year. At the moment, I’m only actively coaching track and field (one hour of practice four times per week) and boys’ soccer (not officially started yet, but every weekend or two we have a match with a team from one of the locations in Tses). IT’S THE COOLEST.

Last year, I was really frustrated during sports. Things are really unorganized so I would get grumpy about waiting around for things to happen… and then when the kids finally showed up for practice, I would struggle to get them to follow my directions. I’m not sure if I didn’t have the authority in their eyes or if I didn’t have the legitimacy, since they didn’t know or trust my training methods yet. Either way, that’s changed. The kids see me training for our marathon every day, and they have experienced my coaching for a year. Now, when I tell them how to improve their form in track, give them workouts, or coach them in soccer, they usually listen! It’s incredible. They’ve started even getting angry if I miss a practice or if I work with another event group for too many days before attending to them. It’s such a great feeling, too. We had our first track meet last Saturday and they performed exceedingly well. I am truly so proud of their hard work, and also so proud of the way we have come to work together to be a real team.



I’m sure you can tell I’m kind of floating on air right now. Things aren’t perfect nor will they ever be… but my place in my community is pretty solid and that makes all the difference.