Now, Lend Me Some Snuff; I Am Your Neighbor!

A collection of random observations. . .
-Since women don't traditionally smoke, I naively thought that I wouldn't see women using tobacco in the village. I haven't seen any women smoking, but snuff seems to be popular in the female 35 and over crowd. Twice, there's been a knock on our door and the person wanted to share (ie have) my Mma's snuff.
-Learners fetch/clean/send messages for the teachers. Pretty much, if anything except teaching needs to be doen, a learner does it. Need to sit? A learner gets a chair. Need to talk to another teacher? Have a learner get her. Need to clean your dishes? Wax the floor? Don't worry, a learner will do it. Nobody thinks it's a problem and the learners seem thrilled to do it (a way of showing respect is to do tasks for someone). There's even a verb for it, from the Peace Corps Volunteer-written Sepedi Manual, "roma. . . send a child to do meaningless tasks."
-I've seen a few mice but lizards are all over the place. Our cat eats insects, table scraps, and lizards. I'm still looking for a two tailed one.
-SMSs (text messages) are fantastic. . . My favorite converstion so far included pickles, cookies, mealier meal, crack, and magic carpets. It's up to your imagination to put them all together!
-'Them' is the worst word ever created. It's very hard not to use it, but it seems to be the one word that keeps racial stereotypes going. I've spent some time with Afrikaners and while everyone I met is completely sweet and kind to me, they're afraid of the villages and make broad, negative comments about the people living here. For example: 'Their children are lazy.' 'The men only want to drink and don't want to work.' 'They all smoke marajuana.' 'They don't understand that we work hard for everything that we have (as opposed to them who don't).' Add in the women who are completely subservient to the men, and it's like I'm in the late 1960s with modern conviences. I do my best to dispel these stereotypes and hopefully get people to interact. . . The stereotype about Americans, 'They're rich.' Give us money!
-Young children are the best ambassadors! The children at the cresch (pre-school) are willing to hug and play with anyone, regardless of their skin color. Plus, such unconditional love brightens any day.
-It's rained! It rains about 200 mm a year in my village (about 7 or 8 inches), and the first storm happened on Friday night. My Baba shut off the radio and tv and informed me that using my cell phone would attract lightning, but I continued to SMS any way. With our corrogated steel roof, the rain sounded more like hail. Even a light sprinkle sounds like heavy rain. On Saturday there was 41 mm (a little over an inch) of rain, heavy enough to destroy some houses in my village, create pools of water in the dry river-bed, and wash out some roads. It had been so hot that I couldn't sleep at night, but after it rains it's nice and cool! Hopefully it will start getting green too!
-Breasts are acceptable to slash in the village while thighs are not (unless exercising). It seems that the larger the woman, the more acceptable the flash. I really didn't need to breasts each the size of my torso. . .