Things Got Busy, Fast

Well, now it feels like I`m doing something. First off, I have my bed and it`s amazing. I`ve had next to no money for the last week and a half and I`m pretty sure it`s only a matter of time before it collapses with me on it, but still totally worth it. Even though the carpenter`s workshop is just down the street, getting the thing home was a pain. It was raining, of course. The bed was bigger than the back of the truck so a thin rope was doing most of the work. Then, getting the bed into my room was another mess. I never thought I had a lot of stuff until I had to move EVERYTHING just to get the bed through the door. Thank you bhuti Kenneth, I couldn`t have done it without you.

Last week I started teaching swim lessons at a private school in the northern part of the country, really close to where we did our training. When I heard another volunteer from the group before mine taught last year, I pretty much begged them to let me help out. Yes, the water tastes funny; yes, the pool was considered “clean” just because you could actually see the bottom; and yes, there were frogs swimming around with us, but I still had a blast. It was pretty hot all of last week except for the day we were supposed to teach, of course. That day it decided to rain. Besides being half numb for the rest of the day after being in the water for 15 minutes, it was great. I should be helping out once a week until the end of the school term in December, so it should be a nice little get-away.

I got a mysterious text message a few days ago about keeping this Wednesday morning free because some “VIP from D.C.” is coming to my community. Apparently, there was an email with all sorts of details, but I never got it (this sort of this seems to happen a lot here). I`m supposed to set up a tour of my clinic, which I`ve been to maybe twice before, so this should be interesting.

Today, I FINALLY went to the high school to meet the principal and some of the teachers. Considering it`s been two month and there are still four other schools nearby, this isn`t much of an accomplishment, but still. The principal and everyone was nice enough, but getting any sort of definitive answer was next to impossible. For example, the principal couldn`t tell me what exactly the students were taught about HIV/AIDS, so he told me to talk to the Career Counselor. The Career Counselor couldn`t tell me anything, so she told me to talk to the Biology teacher. The Biology teacher just gave me some books to read and that was that. It`s weird how often you hear people say “the community needs help”, but when help is actually offered they don`t really know what to do with you.

Finally, something pretty important. One of the volunteers from the group that`s been here for a year is working with a non-profit group from the U.S., Books for Africa, to organize a project to bring books to some Swazi schools. How it`s going to work is all interested schools will apply, and then 30,000 books will be distributed among the 30 schools selected. Books for Africa will pay for the books, but it`s up to us to cover the $15,000 for shipping and handling. $5,000 of that will be raised by the schools themselves and the other $10,000 will be raised through a Peace Corps Partnership. This is where you guys come in. A Peace Corps Partnership is the official way people from the U.S. are able to contribute to PC projects abroad. Since I`m not the one organizing this whole thing I don`t know a lot of the details, but we`re all doing what we can to spread the word. If you are interested in helping out, please send me an email and I can get you more information.

Now back to reading two month old copies of Business Week and Maxim.