Happy New Year!

It’s the start of a new school year! It’s the beginning of the end for my time in South Africa! Yay! I’m excited about coming home but nervous because I have no idea what I want to do or where to live. Add in the self-esteem black hole called medical school applications and my return stateside seems like it’s going to be a crash course in stress. The educators at my schools remembered that I’ll be going home in the coming months and have (kinda) committed to working more with me for the next school terms. We had a productive meeting about starting a library at my key school yesterday and my fingers are crossed that the momentum will carry throughout the year. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of teachers that want to work on a library at that school!

It’s also the end of summer holidays. For affluent South Africans, Christmas and New Year’s means a braii (barbeque) on a beach. I’m happy to report that I celebrated my best Boxing Day ever (December 26) by going to a beautiful, deserted beach surrounded by a game reserve (we saw a rhinoceros on our drive to the beach) then returned to pink champagne, dinner and chocolate cake. Hope that Boxing Day next year will be just as good. (And on a beach. I love beaches.)

I won’t bore you with all of the details about my holidays. I’m working on a complete version with a few pictures, but it will take me awhile to complete. The trip wasn’t entirely without worry. About a week into holidays I got a text message from my supervisor reminding me to report all of the days that I was a vacation to her. It got me wondering why she would remind us and the Peace Corps South Africa rumor mill went into full force. I heard that four people had been administratively separated and sent home because they did not report their travels. I started to worry about all of my friends and debated over text message where people were and whether they reported their days. In the end, it wasn’t anyone I know. The newest group of South African volunteers swore into service in October, meaning that they could not travel from their sites until December 22 (it’s a Peace Corps policy, no travel for the first three or last three months of service). A group of four decided to break travel restrictions and went hiking in the Drakensburg Mountains, close to Lesotho (far, far away from their sites). One morning they woke up to discover that all of their belongings had been stolen during the night. They called the Peace Corps office for help, got air-lifted out of the mountains and tried (in vain) to explain that it really wasn’t their fault that they left their sites without telling the office where they were going while on travel restriction. If they had waited a week to start hiking and told the office, they wouldn’t have been sent home.

The trip back to site was long, but the transition from vacation to village life has been made easier by a huge stack of books that I picked up from one of the women I travelled with and packages of books from Joanna and Cara. Thanks! I can’t think of anything better than escaping into a good book.

A few days after I returned from my holiday, my host mom started telling me about all of the food that they didn’t have (basically, there was mealie meal for porridge and they needed everything else) and I felt pressure to buy food for everyone. Since that wasn’t the original deal that I set-up with my host family, I can’t afford to feed myself and my host parents and they can afford their own food, I confronted my host father. We had a nice chat (even though it was difficult to hear him over the television) and he told me that the food that I buy is as an occasional ‘gift’ to the family. Basically, it’s an extra and I shouldn’t feel pressure to buy things. I wanted to tell him that I wanted to cook for myself all the time and buy all of my own food, but I chickened out and told him that I have eaten too much bogobe (hard porridge) over the past year and I will cook for myself on the nights that they eat bogobe. I don’t know what my host mom thinks of the new deal, but I feel great. There’s so much freedom in cooking for myself and I don’t have to worry about eating all of their food. Plus, I get to eat something other than bogobe and potatoes for dinner.

Hope all is well with everything at home. . .