Hey everyone. Things are starting to pick up a bit now. I can’t say I’ve really started any real “work”, but there have been or will be a bunch of random things keeping me busy this month. I probably won’t be starting any regular work at my schools or clinic until next month (which might be a good thing considering its about 90°F in my room and even hotter outside) so until then I’m still looking for ways to keep entertained.
Book project update: the Peace Corps Partnership is fully-funded, hurray! For those of you who were able to help out with a donation, thank you very much! Because of you 30 schools or community libraries and several thousand kids will have access to these new books. I’m not sure how we’re going to do this exactly, but there is some sort of “thank you” in the works for all of the donors. We’re also trying to get some posters and other decorations donated from another U.S. group to help make the libraries look nice. We still have a couple of months before the books get here, but there will be plenty of pictures when they do.
Me and two other volunteers have also started working on a new Welcome Video for the next group of volunteers. They try to send a DVD with some basic information about Swaziland to the new group a month or so before they get here. Every few years they let the volunteers make a new video and we were lucky enough to have the money this year, which is especially a good thing since pretty much no one had anything good to say about the last video. There’s going to be a lot of interviews with people talking about the good and bad of PC life in Swaziland, pictures of all of the different regions, a lot of examples of some of the work we do, and whatever else we want to throw in there. I’ll be going to the sites of a few volunteers to film their communities so all of this free time I have right now will actually come in handy. We’re going to try to put the video up on YouTube once we finish so everyone back home will be able to check it out too.
A small group of us are going to try to go out to dinner for Valentine’s Day this weekend. The other week we found this kind of nice restaurant in Matsapha, the small town close to me. So the plan is to go out during the day and then take a taxi back to my place afterwards. Who knows how this will all work and being out at night always complicates things, but it’ll be an adventure if nothing else.
Last week I started doing swim lessons again. There’s another volunteer helping out this term, at least on some weeks, so it’ll be a lot easier to handle all of the kids. Now if I can only remember to bring the sunscreen next time I’ll be good.
Starting next Monday I’ll be in town all week for meetings. The first couple of days are Warden’s training for our Emergency Action Plan. In case something crazy happens, like a big natural disaster or someone tries to overthrow the government, there’s this whole list of steps we go through depending on how bad the situation is, everything from just having to stay at home to being airlifted out of the country. PC volunteers in two or three countries had to be evacuated last year, so these things do happen, but the chances of anything serious happening in Swaziland are extremely low (one of the benefits of living in an absolute monarchy). Each region has a warden from the older group and an assistant from the newer group who are kind of in charge of making sure everyone in their area is where they’re supposed to be if something happens and I’m the assistant for my region. I’m not sure what this means exactly so pretty much this training is just an excuse to hang out. Then right after that starts Peer Support Network training. I mentioned PSN before, but pretty much it’s a group of 7 of us elected to be people the rest of the group can talk to if they’re having a hard time with something and stuff like that. PSN also plays a big part with the training of the new group coming in June. I’m not sure what we’re going to be talking about next week, but it should be enough to keep us busy for a few days.
And then they finally got around to rescheduling the CDC HIV/AIDS workshop that was originally supposed to be in South Africa the first week of December for Botswana the first week of March. This thing has been canceled and rescheduled so many times I don’t really remember what the whole thing is about, but I’m sure it’ll be informative.
Wow, when I write it all out like that it actually looks like I’m doing something. Then I remember most of these things aren’t really helping my community, at least not directly, and that’s something I’m still working on. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to get down to work once things settle down.
Well I’m off to go wash my dishes before it gets any darker. Thanks again for everyone that helped out with the book project and to those that weren’t able to this time, don’t worry, you’ll get another chance. Talk to you guys soon.
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