Exhausted, but Alive

Once again, I have failed over a long period to update the blog. Once again, my apologies.

My mom came for a visit and wow! We squeezed in quite the South African holiday.

We...
-went to Simon's Town to see "seals" and wound up going on house tours
-took a train journey cross-country
-drove in Jo'burg
-zoomed around the Pretoria Zoo
-observed an ostrich family
-hit a game park that was awesome and terrifying
-hung out in my village
-visited a beach town with one main attraction that we missed due to "rain"
-watched a musical production starring several of my Kuruman friends (You guys are amazing! The singing! The dancing! The costumes!)
-jumped off a mountain
-swam with sharks
-saw tons of birds and a few giant dogs
-realized that "professional surfer" is not a viable career option for me
-regretted my choice of university
-pat a cheetah
-admired plants hundred of years old
-visited some choice museums that are a bit off the beaten path
-almost never slept
-seemed to cheat death on a fairly regular basis
-looked for sheep, found an evil horse
-rode machines of torture
-got a few serious work-outs
-ate so much kingklip I never want to see it again
-discovered the wonder of snoek
-got trailed by a few dassies (rock hyraxes)
-drank hot chocolate at Cape Town's very own Alpine ski resort (wait, that was Table Mountain...)
-nearly met a tragic end due to adverse weather conditions at Cape Point
-enjoyed a tour guide who was practically incapable of uttering a verb that did not end in "ing"
-spent too much time aboard busses
-got in some excellent photoshoots
-went shopping (obviously)

And so much more, I'm tired just thinking about it!

Clearly, very little time was spent just lounging about and relaxing. Mom and I are practically professional tourists.

In other news, my right wrist has decided it's had enough with me and all the typing on my tiny phone, so I'm wearing a brace and trying to rest (hence the list instead of complete sentences).

Happy holidays! And thanks for the birthday wishes!

Turkey and Post-Turkey

Hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving. I certainly did, but ever since then I've been suffering from a mild viral infection. Being sick in a village setting is draining, especially when I'm busy trying to wrap up my schoolwork and domestic chores in time for my vacation. So, if you've been trying to get in touch with me lately, thank you, I always enjoy hearing from you, but I've been a little too wiped out lately to formulate a coherent response.

Anyways... Thanksgiving!

Just like last year, I went into Kuruman to a guesthouse where the owner prepared a fabulous feast for about a dozen Americans (all volunteers). There were not one, not two, but three whole turkeys and we ate all of them over the course of the day. I baked four loaves of psimo spitiko (sp), and they were a hit. Other volunteers prepared banana bread and apple pies, everything was delicious. It was such a refreshing change from my regular village fare of rice and beans or bread and peanut butter. After the meal, and the Christmas crackers which contained both very self-explanatory crowns and completely inexplicable pink plastic bits, E brought out a surprise. It was a hand-drawn board game.

E is a fantastic artist, as well as my roommate during staging. Her board game was loosely based on Monopoly. Each player started out with R500 and had to make their way around the board without going bankrupt. Each place on the board was somehow related to Peace Corps and/or South Africa, and there were both PC acronym cards and Ga Ke Itse (I don't know) question cards as well. I took several pictures of the board. It was almost too beautiful to play on, especially considering the dirty rocks we were using as pieces. Anyway, I suffered a brutal loss after being sent back to PST and then spending a few too many nights clubbing in Pretoria. Other players suffered such fates as being trapped at taxi ranks, tied to other volunteers in a relationship and being stuck on indefinite medical leave in Pretoria. Such is life.

After Thanksgiving was, of course, Black Friday, which K and I duly celebrated with a trip to uber-cheap clothing retailer, Mr Price. Afterwards I made my way to a classier part of town to spend the rest of my weekend with some Afrikaaner friends. I went swimming, played chess, worked on my language skills, watched rugby and cricket and generally lazed about. The feasting continued with a braai Saturday night with several other families. (SA rubgy played England and won, finally.) As much as I love a good bacon roll washed down by cheesecake, all the rich food left me feeling less than well. That, combined with whatever virus I picked up, led to my spending most of Sunday sleeping off the previous few days.

I'm feeling a bit better, but still a little rough around the edges. I hope to spend as much time resting as possible between now and next week in order to be in tip-top shape for my upcoming vacation.

Oh, and one last thing that some of you may get a kick out of. It's been raining quite a bit lately, and the pit toilet in the backyard could not take it any more. It has caved in. So if you were thinking about how "Posh Corps" SA is based on my long weekends spent eating, shopping and swimming, let me say that right now, I would trade in everything for a decent hole in the ground.

Gratitude

As much as I bashed Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love the other day, I will cop to one sentiment I wholeheartedly share.

"Maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices."

Happy Thanksgiving! And thank you.

Anthropological Study: SA Mating Rituals: The Jive

Bar, club, lounge, tavern, whatever you call it, and wherever it is, the same scene plays out again and again.

There is music of the loud and thumping variety and there are men and women hoping to attract each other with the awesomeness of their dance moves.In South Africa, however, people do not dance. They jive. The best way I can describe what jiving looks like is as follows:

Imagine a tyrannosaurus rex with its really small arms. Now imagine a person imitating a crimpled, limp tyrannosaurus rex. Shoulders up, elbows in, wrists flapping in the breeze. Got it? Okay, now picture said person hurling their body with great force in a series of random directions at high speed. In order to prevent themselves from toppling over entirely, they keep their feet in constant motion. It might appear that they are attempting to trip themselves. In fact, they are just trying to remain vertical.

Done well, this display is quite impressive. Done poorly, well, it's still a lot more interesting than what you might see in America.

Intellectual Snobbery

I'm a voracious reader, but not particularly discerning. I consume books of all types: trashy, high-brow, best-sellers and basically whatever I can get my paws on. I just like to read. Quality is a secondary concern. Often I find popular books highly entertaining, if not particularly enlightening, hence my love of authors like Sophie Kinsella. So regardless of my collection fancy Russian literature, I do not consider myself a snob.

A few months ago, while perusing the library at the Peace Corps office in Pretoria, I heard another volunteer state that she did not read popular books. Mentally, I instantly catgorized her under "snob". Well, maybe she is and maybe she isn't, but I should apologize because I definitely am.

Long, long ago I stumbled across a Newsweek that reviewed two very popular books in America: Julie Powell's Julie and Julia and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. Finally, I have read them both. In my humble opinion, they were terrible. I had trouble getting through them. Powell and Gilbert are not masters of the written word. Their stories were fundamentally interesting, but their narratives wandered. Their voices came off as whiny and unsympathetic. It's tough to be a W.A.S.P. in America these days. We (Gilbert and Powell) deserve more. We're destined for greatness! Life as it is is just so unsatisfying. That was the message I got. Also, according to Gilbert, if I'm not happily married at 34 I should just roll into a ball and pray for divine intervention because 34 is just so terribly OLD! She, at the time of writing, was not even part of More magazine's target demographic! (If you don't get that reference, good, you're not a forty year old woman looking for fashion tips and insipiring stories of reinvention.) Ugh. Ridiculous books, but at least we got two decent movies out of them.

We have yet to get a decent film out of Alexander McCall's Ladies' Detective Agency series, but I have also been consistently underwhelmed by those books. I recommend them if you're interested in seTswana culture, but if you just want a good mystery, look elsewhere.

Looking back on books that I have enjoyed I find more evidence of my snobbery. I absolutely loved Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. I think that's my favorite book ever, all 900 pages of it. Other members of my personal hit parade are historical biographies and non-fiction. I'm a nerd. And a snob. I'm a nerb. Or a snerd.

Crazy Animal Lady

If Rustenburg (Rusty, Rusters, Rustafarian) had lived, today would have marked 1 year since he came into my life. I still miss him. He was a wonderful dog.

The people here in Loopeng seem to agree with me. They actually liked Rusty. He was (relatively) calm, well-behaved and friendly. Shaka Zulu, on the other hand, is nuts. Totally and completely crazy. Insane. The vet seems to think this is good. He's got plenty of energy. It means he's healthy. I keep trying to convince myself of that every morning at 5 a.m. when he decides to start using my feet as chew toys. There may be less pleasant ways to wake up, but I don't know them.

I was afraid that Shaka's ferocity would set me back a couple light-years in my quest to convince people that animals can be pets, companions, not punching bags. Sometimes even I want to punch that little beast. Anyhow, it seems that my fears were unfounded. I got home from school today to find a half-dozen neighbor kids playing with Shaka. They were tossing around his rope toy and, of course, playing tug-of-war as "Drop it" is not yet a phrase the dog recognizes. Anyways, it warmed my heart to see children actually having fun with a dog in a respectful manner (i.e. not causing the dog any physical harm). While I doubt people will soon start putting collars and leashes on their dogs and going for evening walks, at least the concept of "play" has been adopted.

Since the kids had Shaka and his evening exercise under control, I wandered around to the background where my host father keeps his donkeys. I like donkeys. I think they're pretty cute. Most people here treat them like, well, I'm not sure there exists an American equivalent of the village donkey. Let's just say these animals are literal beasts of burden. Rather than harass or mistreat them, as many Loopeng-ers are apt to do, I decided to pet them. They seemed scared at first, but loosened up eventually. Just call me the donkey whisperer.

Petting a donkey is pretty weird, but what I did next was truly bizarre. I wandered into my hovel empty-handed and wandered out with 2 carrots. I wanted to feed the donkeys. This was probably not the most culturally-sensitive thing I've ever done. The carrots were perfectly suitable for human consumption, and those neighbor kids looked hungry enough, but I was intent on my donkey feeding mission.

Do you know what a donkey likes to eat?

Neither do I, but not carrots.

That's right, I could not convince them to eat my carrots! At least not in my presence. I left them on the ground and walked away eventually. The donkeys ate them then. Maybe they're just very polite? In any case, I am definitely the crazy animal lady. Who knows what creature I'll adopt next?

Middle of Nowhere

Rolling into Kuruman on a taxi from Pretoria is a bit of an exercise in contradiction. On the one hand, it is generally a relief to be that much closer to "home", but on the other hand it is usually late in the evening when I arrive and I am instantly presented with a conundrum. Where to sleep for the night? Guesthouses are nice, but expensive. Friends are welcoming, but I hate to take advantage. On my last trip to the big city, I decided to avoid the issue altogether. I decided to stay with a friend in Vryburg.

It was great. I met her in town and we took a taxi to her village. I love visiting other volunteers' sites. It's so interesting to see how differently we live in such similar circumstances. We did some baking, a lot of dishwashing, but mostly just gabbed the night away. I was sad to leave the next morning, but leave I did.

This volunteer had managed to get to my site from Vryburg before. She had no difficuly, so I didn't anticipate any. Silly me. Once at the taxi rank I was informed that there were no taxis to Loopeng, but I could take one to a nearby village and then catch another taxi from there. At the time, this seemed not only plausible, but possible.

After waiting several hours for the taxi to leave the rank, I was crushed when we suffered a flat tire just after leaving Vryburg. It took a while to fix, but eventually we were on the road again.

Instead of taking a direct route through the Moshaweng valley, this taxi went wandering through the bush. It was scenic, but as the day wore on I started getting nervous. Where was I? How close to home?

Fading hopes started to turn to panic when the taxi suffered another puncture. Once again it was repaired, but by then the sun was setting. We drove on.

Eventually I was the only passenger left on the taxi. The driver arranged a ride for me to a village I recognized as only about 30 km from mine. When we arrived it was completely dark. There were no taxis. I was in trouble. Panic turned into a giant ocean of despair and I was beginning to drown.

Luckily, there was a tuck shop not too far from the road. I wandered in and lo and behold! A learner from Moshaweng was perched on the counter. She took me under her wing and tried valiantly to get one of her friends to come rescue us. I clung to this faint hope, but alas, rescue in the form of a motor vehicle never arrived. Rescue in the form of a kindly tuck shop owner who gave me a blanket and a place on her floor surely did arrive. I was exhausted and slept like a rock, despite the constant hum of house music.

The next day we woke up bright and early and walked out to the tar road, where we sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and waited for a taxi to come along and take pity on us. I read Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith. I had almost finished when salvation, in the form of four wheels and an engine, finally showed up.

24 hours after I left my friend's place, I made it home to choirs of "Sego, where have you been?"

It was a long story.