Christmas!

One of Dr. Easton’s favorite stories came to my mind as I wrote this today. The one about a man who was apologized to his friend for writing such a long letter, because he didn’t have time to write a shorter one. That describes me with this blog post. 

Today I cleaned my room/house while listening to Christmas music and while sweating profusely.


I drank tea out of a Christmas mug, but it was iced tea.


I dried my dishes with a Christmas towel, after I took a cold bath. 

Basically my point is that I’m in the middle of the South African summer, yet its Christmas time! Its hard to remember that its really December and the holiday season.  School’s out here because their summer vacation starts the beginning of December and runs through the middle of January.


I kind of like that set up –  during the busy holiday party season kids are out of school and people can schedule their summer vacations around Christmas and New Years. 

Of course vacation and busy holiday season with parties and what not are not exactly my daily reality in the village.  Instead the “festive season” is business as usual here in the village with a few extra family members coming back from jobs in the cities. 

I actually recently got back from an adventure in the city myself. After our first 3 months in our villages all Peace Corps volunteers in SA get together for some more training. To the training we bring one person from our village with us. This person is to become our “counterpart” – working with us to organize activities and hopefully taking complete control of the projects we help start.  

During the training we learned about program development and management and we started gathering ideas for projects we want to start. Paulina, my counterpart is one of my neighbors who is on part of the School Governing Body. She is very excited about working with me, but lacks experience and background knowledge in setting up programs. 

The training was funded by PEPFAR (as US grant that funds HIV/AIDS initiatives).  I’m pretty sure I learned everything there is to know about HIV during the training. For instance, did you know that after the initial infection, if someone with HIV takes good care of their health and has a high CD4 count, they can have unprotected sex without infecting their partner? Life with HIV doesn’t have to be the death sentence it once was! People are living long and full lives as long as they know their status and take measures to lead a healthy lifestyle. 

One of the best moments of the training was when they gave us all a game called Master AIDS. It was an adult version of Chutes and Ladders that substituted in condoms and viruses. Land on a condom and you climb up the board, land on a virus and you slip back to the beginning. But of course you must answer a question about HIV before you even get the opportunity to roll the die!


The training was a great opportunity to get excited about the upcoming projects I will be working on. Sometimes its easy to get discouraged in the village, but meeting up with other volunteers who are experiencing the same things that I’m experiencing and have the same desires that I have is awesome. Now the problem is that I’m inspired about too many projects and now I need to narrow/focus my attention on just a few. Currently I want to focus mainly on establishing libraries in the schools that also cater to the schools. I’d also like to continue and expand a young women’s support group and an exercise club that have both spontaneously sprung up.

In other news I was one of 3 people in my group of 55 volunteers that was elected to be part of the Volunteer Advisory Committee (VAC). The VAC meets once every quarter with PC staff members to discuss current issues and concerns that volunteers have. It was an honor to be elected in this capacity (plus it means a free weekend in the city every quarter!) – I’m excited to get to know a little bit more about how the Peace Corps office functions. 

Now I’m off to start my own Christmas vacation! It will be my first Christmas outside the US and away from family. To ease the pain I’ve saved my pennies for a vacation with a few other volunteers hiking through the Drakensburg mountains and ending in the beach town of Durban for New Years! We’ll be staying in hostels the whole trip and on Christmas Day we are taking an 8 hour hike to a famous waterfall. Don’t worry, last weekend I bought a Santa hat from a guy selling them on the street. If its not too hot, I’ll be wearing it the whole time!