2016 into 2017 - Let's go!

End to a great 2016

2016 was my first calendar year enjoying the beautiful country of South Africa, my home.  2016 brought the good, the bad, the unfortunate and the too great to even describe events and I wouldn’t be the person I am without any of those wonderful events. 

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I had what I would call an incredibly successful year. My primary job of teaching some of the greatest kids I have ever met led me to challenge myself as an educator that I never knew I would have to do.  In the beginning I struggled with language barriers, kids who had given up because they had been held back 4 or more times, lack of effort, more interruptions than Hillary had during a debate with Donald Trump, and a general confusion of what I was even supposed to be teaching.  As the year went on, I learned what made my students tick, I learned where they live, and I learned how we could work together to motivate them to try their best and succeed in English language learning.  Now I won’t say that the middle and end of the year didn’t hold its challenges as a teacher…it did.  My mom can attest to the fact that I called her multiple times crying in my office with the door locked because I didn’t think I was getting through to my kids or this was all just too hard.  However, with each of those days…I got better, my kids got better, and we figured out a way to work together. I’d call that a pretty great success story.

This is my Astro-Quiz team or "the big 4" as we like to call them.

If this wasn’t rewarding enough, I was blessed to start a library open to all learners in grades 4 through 7 (I’m working on the younger kids, but my Tshivenda is not quite up to snuff), worked with my Creative Arts class to paint a World Map on the side of our school, led a GLOW (girls leading our world) club after school, led a BRO (boys respecting others) club after school, coached an amazing team of Astro-Quiz (like quiz bowl but with only astronomy related questions) ladies, and led an after school yoga program (Roots Tribe Yoga) centered around self-awareness and taking care of yourself inside and out.  I also found great success (and failures) in taking 68 girls (20 girls from my school) to a 4-day girls empowerment camp more than 3 hours away from where they live.  Now that this blog post is sounding a whole lot like a VRF (Volunteer Report Form) (and also sorry about that), the point of my rambling is to share with you all that my year here has been anything but boring and to also share with you how I felt my year went.

My grade 7 creative arts class working on our world map.

(Side rant: Living in a village is not boring.  Do I get bored on the occasion? Yes. Did I get bored on occasion in the United States? Yes. I still struggle to get everything done that I need to accomplish some nights and I spend other nights doing just what you all do at home…binge watching tv shows. So although our lives look pretty different while you all are living in houses and drive to get your groceries and I am living in a rondeval on a beautiful mountain, my life is anything but boring. (Okay, end rant…sorry about that).  )

However, its also nice to get out of the village every once in a while and vacation in some first world (and some not) amenities.  I was blessed to have worked a lot of hours in the years leading up to my Peace Corps service that has allowed me to vacation during each of my breaks.  These wonderful vacations took me to places such as Cape Town (with my beautiful parents – love you!), home to America to visit for 2 weeks (I learned all about Pokémon Go…which seems to be irrelevant now), Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana (where I maybe hurled my body off of a perfectly good bridge), and India and Sri Lanka (bless this crazy, colorful and unique culture).  Blessed doesn’t even begin to cover these experiences.

All in all, I’d say 2016 was a good year for personal growth for myself….even if things weren’t working out so well globally and nationally back at home.

My 20 GLOW girls at the end of CAMP GLOW. 

Struggle bus 2017

This year didn’t start off the best for me per say, but I can definitely say that it can only go up! (And it has been.) The New Year started out in Sri Lanka for me.  Sri Lanka has some of the most beautiful beaches I have seen this year (haha…get it…it’s the only beach I’ve seen this year).  However, here is where things for the year went wrong…

1.  Our first day of the year, we thought we would start off with a snorkeling trip…which turned out to not be our greatest idea.  Long story short, we ended up on a tiny boat with a tinier man who then proceeded to row our boat to the coral reefs. With 2 life jackets for 3 people, choppy waters, and very poor weather, we were successful in seeing precisely nothing while some of us ended up feeling rather sea sick and unamused at the entire experience.  Not the best way to start of the New Year…but we will recover. 

2.  So, we headed back to Colombo later where we would fly out the next morning (5 am to be exact).  However, upon arriving in Colombo, we couldn’t leave. Because our layover in India was more than 24 hours before we left to go to Johannesburg, they wouldn’t let us check-in to the airline and insisted that we deal with our mistake elsewhere.  After some panic, we came up with a plan to call their office at 8 am when they opened (it was 3 AM at the time).  After an eventful day of two offices, 5 hours waiting at a travel agency, many tears, and $200 later…we had a flight home. 

3.  All seemed well, we got on every flight with no issues.  On our flight from Ethiopia to Johannesburg, I started feeling quite sickly. I thought it was just a headache and it would be fine once I got some sleep. I still had the headache when I woke up though. My headache turned into a migraine that just wouldn’t go away, which lead to vomiting and pain so bad that I couldn’t see.  So, after 2 more days in Pretoria than I would have wanted…my migraine was (mostly) gone and I was on my way back to site..or was I.

4.  Transport…in the US, I had a car…in South Africa, I rely on public transport.  2017 has not led to the greatest of relationships between this public transport and me though.  Upon trying to leave for Pretoria the first day…my bus never showed up (strike 1), but on the second day I was very successful in getting back to Venda.  Upon getting to my shopping town in Venda, I discovered that taxis are not currently running to my village because we have gotten too much rain and the roads are of poorer quality than usual.  (The roads leading to my house are mountainous and a bit rough to begin with…that will happen on a mountain though.) Luckily, I ran into a family from my village who was finishing up their meal at Nandos.  They promptly invited me to join them and informed me that they would be taking me home.  That #blessed (thanks Bruno Mars) life was back! Struggles to get in and out of my village has continued in the following weeks of January (since I wrote this post in the beginning of January) and while taxis still don’t really come to my village most days and walks from a neighboring village down the mountain (about a 2 hour walk) are usually a big part of any journey away from my village, I have found the beauty and fitness in the 2 hour walks and found an appreciation for taxis that I never knew I could have. Isn’t that what life is all about? Finding your privileges and finding out how good you have it so you can appreciate all that you have more? I sure think so.

Roots Tribe Yoga with skill & sillyness.

Since these series of unfortunate events (which I hear is now on Netflix??), my luck has mostly been turning around! With some minor problems with getting in and out of my village because of rain being the biggest issues I have faced, I would say 2017 is bound to get even better yet.  I believe we will still struggle with transport for another week or so (its still raining…my love/hate relationship with rain has never been stronger…), but I know that in time we will have that semi-reliable transport in and out of the vill once again!

Thanks to those of  you who listened to me complain (mostly my mother- thanks Pamela!) in the beginning days of 2017 and those of you who listened to me complain via this blog post! Its nice to come out of situations knowing that they could have been worse and they now serve as funny stories of luck not always being on our side. 

Cheers to another year of teaching, struggles, happiness, changes, and the biggest change of all….the year of America! See ya in a few (more than a few) months America!