Family Visit

My mother sent me an Easter care package awhile back that included a bag of jellybeans. I put the jelly beans in an empty peanut butter jar and put the jar on top of my cupboard thingy. At some point I thought I’d be nice and give Kamano, the now 1.5 year-old a jelly bean. Evidently this was a big mistake, because now he knows there are many more jelly beans and he knows they live in my room. First he would just hold out his hand for a jelly bean whenever he saw me and say “sweetsy”. Now whenever he sees me he grabs my hand and pulls hard in the direction of my room. It’s now gotten to the point that when I’m not home he’ll come up to my locked door and rattle the burglar bar, yelling “koko!” (knock knock) over and over again. If I had my druthers I probably wouldn’t give him one every time he asks but his mother tells me just to give him one to appease him because he’s quick to throw a fit. It took ten minutes to get him out of my room this morning because even if I hide the jar he just wanders all over looking for the sweets and starts to cry when you try to lure him out. Whoops, didn’t realize a single jelly bean could create so much trouble. The beans are almost gone now and I’m a little afraid of what will happen when I have no sweets to give him.

Speaking of family, I just got back to my village after a lovely two week visit with the real family all the way from America. They arrived the 10th and after getting over jet lag I showed them my village, which went splendidly. They were very popular with the learners and one of the teachers saw to it that we visited every single classroom so that they could ask my family questions and sing songs. Unfortunately that left no time to visit the primary school and I can only imagine the scolding I will get from the principal next time I’m there. My South African family was ridiculously happy to meet my real family as well. I haven’t seen gogo smile like that since before her mother passed away a month ago, and Julia was more excited about the tea my mom brought her than I’ve ever seen anyone get over tea (thanks for the suggestion Zita and Kristen!). The following day we travelled to the Pilanesberg Game Park a few hours east of here and stayed at a fancy-schmanzy lodge there. It was beautiful and quiet and relaxing and the two game drives we went on were amazing! I had been on safaris before in Uganda and Ghana that were fun and cool but we didn’t see many big animals, and none of the ones we saw were very close up, so I didn’t really have very high expectations for this one. The only thing I really wanted was to see a giraffe. But I was very pleasantly surprised. We managed to see plenty of giraffe, zebra, impala, springbok, elephants, guinea fowl, wildebeest, gnu (a kind of a wildebeest I think), warthogs, white rhino, and lions! We saw two of the lionesses twice in fact. The first time, just as our guide had given up on seeing lions that night, he got a call that there were lions on the road. He quickly turned around and zoomed towards the lion sighting and we got there just in time to see them walking down the road, just feet from our vehicle. It was very cool and we pretty much thought we had seen all we could see and couldn’t have asked for a better game drive. Given that, we had our doubts about waking up at 5:30am for another morning, very, very cold game drive, but turns out it was well worth it. We had been out for maybe 20 minutes and hadn’t seen much when suddenly on the side of the road in front of us was a lion. Just out of the blue we ran into one of the lionesses from the night before. According to our guide the two lionesses had been out all night hunting and still hadn’t found anything, so we followed the lioness who seemed very focused on her hunt. A moment later we spotted a lone gnu off in the field, the direction our lioness was headed. As she got closer to the gnu we spotted the second lioness ready to attack from another angle. It was clear that the gnu was utterly clueless and he really didn’t react until it was far too late and the first lioness had started her sprint for it’s neck. She took him down in seconds and after that all we saw were tails and legs flailing in the tall grass and heard the dying sounds of the gnu. It was really unbelievable that we were able to see this. Our guide told us he’d been working at the park for 9 months and hadn’t seen a hunt before this. It was one of those experiences that I’ll probably never forget. We got to witness nature at it’s purest.

After that we flew to Cape Town and did Cape Town things. I won’t go into too much detail since I already wrote a vacation post about Cape Town, but it was really pleasant. We stayed at a nice hotel and corrupted their secret, free, staff wireless internet which I abused to download the newest episodes of the “The Office”. I just couldn’t bring myself to feel bad about this at all, being used to free high-speed internet back home. Otherwise our time in the city was spent pleasantly, mostly outdoors. We had perfect weather save one rainy day and spent our last day petting cheetahs and drinking wine in the wine region. Somehow on one of our next to last days in Cape Town I got food poisoning/GI distress AGAIN! I think, and my mother agrees, that it was probably from the eggs I had at breakfast one of the days. I was so mad to be sick again after having just recovered from a month of sickness, but luckily my parents each had full courses of antibiotics that cleared me up pretty quickly. But now I’m left so dispirited over the ailments I have experienced from animal products that I am actually considering going vegan. Something to think on anyway. Now the family is safely back home in America and I’m readjusting to life at site. Surprisingly this adjustment was a bit difficult. I was sad to see the family go and after two straight weeks of nice hotels, amazing food and wine, adventures, and quality family time, it was a little jarring to return to Peace Corps normalcy. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the continuous transitions we seem to make from first world to third world here.

I returned to school this week to find that exams are in full swing. This surprised me so much I had to go and count the days left in the term on my calendar and as of today we have only 9 school days left. I can hardly believe it, the term just disappeared! I had left worksheets and lesson plans with my counterpart teacher to give to the students while I was away. So I asked the students if Mrs. M had taught them, to which they replied “oh yes, a lot!”. So I asked them what they had learned and received the answer “about the planets”. My lesson plans had absolutely nothing to do with planets and that might make sense if my class was a natural or even social sciences class, but for English I don’t really get it. But oh well! As long as they learned something! I also finally spoke to Mrs. M about taking back her grade 7 English classes next term and she didn’t seem to have any problem with that so I’m officially almost done teaching! I feel so free, although I will definitely miss those classes…we did have a lot of fun on good days. I’ll just have to continue working with them informally, which I think I’ll be much better suited to.

Well, Kamsa is banging on the door for sweets and Julia just killed a snake in the yard. Another normal day at site.