Ending My Service!

Hi friends and family! You are missed! I hope your lives are going well and you've been showered with blessings since I've talked to you all last! :) Lots of things are happening around here. The library project at the high school has begun and is doing well. We received all 1,000 books two weeks ago and have been going full throttle since. We’ve been labeling, building shelves, and making a dewey decimal code for the entire stock. By “we are making the dewey decimal code”, I guess I mean “I am making a dewey decimal code”- which is dangerous. They aren’t familiar with this process because this is the first library they have ever had, so I am leading us as if I know what I’m doing. :) Talk about the blind leading the blind. I am leading a library team of 3 high school teachers, the high school principal (FYI- he went to school at University of Iowa), and five student representatives (8th grade through senior year) on a journey to build the first ever school library! Let’s cross our fingers! Sometimes I find myself leading people and I feel sorry for them. Haha I can’t help but want to ask, “Should I really be leading this meeting? You are honestly thinking I am the most experienced?!? You can read, right? That may make you more qualified…” High fives to those people who have sat through my community meetings the past 2 years. People of patience, that’s for sure. :) We had a close of service conference last week. The whole group got together to discuss post peace corps plans and do paperwork. May not sound that fun, but it was. We had a talent show. Despite not wanting to get involved, I sang Sweet Caroline with my friends Jay and Hilary. Who can say no to Neil Diamond? Not this guy. My friend, Lacey is coming next month though to keep me from the lonliness of losing the volunteers around me. I just can’t believe its already been 2 years. Well, sometimes I can…like when my grandpa is taking a bath in the middle of the homestead. Then it seems like time is crawling (I wish I were kinding). Lacey will be here just in time for the annual music festival BUSHFIRE. Lacey will get to see some of the people I have shared this experience with and also they will meet the girl from all the stories I tell. I’m really excited for her to come and she will be here just in time to help me with my final event in my community. I am doing a career fair and HIV/AIDS testing day for about eight high schools in the area. I originally was going to do it for the high school I teach at to get them ready for jobs after school or learn who to talk to in order to begin trade skills (carpentry, metal work, bead work, show making, bee keeping, etc.), but now the Ministry of Education asked me to include seven more of their high schools. YIKES! Since I am a pushover, I now am planning an event for all eight high schools and out of school young adults (projected 800-900 people) in one day on May 28, 2010. I want each of the teens to get an opportunity to get tested. It is a little bit of a stressful time because in itself it is a big task and I’m trying to end things here in my community, but I am lucky that one of my best buds from home will be here during that event to watch me slowly go insane. It’s been a while, so let me brief you on Easter! I preached for Palm Sunday about outreach and how to help HIV positive members in the church. It ended up going well and I pray that God was able to use that experience to help get people thinking about ways they can help. That is the great thing about living overseas, somehow just because I can spell my name that means I am suddenly qualified to be a high school teacher, government worker, build houses, diagnose skin conditions and preach. It’s hilarious. I think it’s my availability that gets me into the strangest situations. This is my life…randomness follows me. You will all suffer through it once again when I return. Maybe one of the things you miss about me (wink). But I’m apologizing in advance. :) Over Easter I went to beautiful Lesotho. It’s also a small landlocked country within South Africa, so in my ignorance I thought it would be like Swaziland. Oh my goodness! It was beautiful. People wore those wool blankets everywhere made of the besotho sheep herds that are everywhere in the mountains. You would walk for large amounts of time and not see anyone, but a little boy shepherd wrapped in a blanket herding a giant flock of sheep with bells around their necks. It was so cool. We made our vacation plans to be horse back for three straight days climbing up the Lesotho mountains to see waterfalls and cave paintings. Our first night was an adventure. No transport was left to bring us the rest of the way because it was after dark when we arrived in country, so we were stuck in the capital. The taxi guy didn’t speak English and no matter how many times I tried to speak SiSwati/Zulu to the man, he did not understand. I eventually tried to use Spanish, German, Italian, and I even broke out Arabic phrases…or at least something that sounded Arabic. Still he did not understand. I was about 5 seconds away from trying to communicate in whale noises when a drunk police man came to help. After sitting in a dark bus rank for an hour, the drunk police man took us to the Maseru police station. His English was good (wish I could say the same about his breath) and he gave me his phone to call the only person I know in Lesotho to help, a friend who worked with me during a Baylor teen camp last December. As my friend came to meet us, two of us stayed in the waiting room of the police station to wait for my friend had a place for us to sleep. The other two girls walked to the grocery store to buy bread and peanut butter for supper. Of course they were escorted by another police man. Haha We ate our supper that night in Lesotho’s capital police station waiting room and shared our food with a man who was brought in for questioning. We eventually met my friend, S’bu. We hailed another taxi only to see it was the same drunk police man from before driving a taxi car he recently invested in. As we arrived at the address S’bu instructed the drunk police man/drunk taxi driver (a jack of all trades) to bring us to, the man decided it was now or never to profess his love to me and become surprised when I didn’t share the same feelings. Somehow our taxi fair was reduced because of this and I left the taxi still single, so something went right that night. S’bu arranged us to stay at his friend’s house of whom was also an American volunteer with a British NGO called Kick 4 Life. We had prepared for the worst; rats, no water, and sleeping on the floor, but we were pleasantly surprised when the guy had a really nice place, had MTV, and we all were able to shower! Day 1. Needless to say, the trip was great. Cold, but great. We each had a horse. My guide always followed with his horse behind me because often times my horse, Jabu, would stray from the others and begin galloping in another direction. I was the only one that the guide made carry a stick the entire trip to whip my horse. I couldn’t do it, so the guide took the liberty to whip me (the horse) from behind periodically to pick up speed. This would often times surprise me and me and Jabu would end up sprinting until the guide couldn’t catch up with his horse Then Jabu would go back to his old shenanigans and we’d wonder away from the group. I would simpley say things like, “Jabu, I don’t think this looks safe…” as we contined to take a tiny trail along a cliff of a waterfall or “I wouldn’t eat that Jabu…” as it stopped way behind the rest to eat some farmer’s field of sorghum. Either way, Jabu was loyal to me. He got me safely through the Lesotho mountains. He never fell even in the rain. The trip was great. Just brushing teeth and eating a pot of rice and jumping back on my faithful horse. It tough to part with him, so as we arrived back to base camp I jumped off, took his reigns off, and gave him one last slap on the rear. “Good ol’ Jabu!” I said as he neighed loudly. That son of a gun. As I arrived back at home after my trip to Lesotho, my three amigos (my little nine year old bros) told me about the neighbor girl who had been bit by a snake while I was gone. It was quite sad for our family. I had just played with her the week before and marked her height on my growth chart in my room. While I was gone they were at their favorite spot on the rocks trying to get a pipe out fro min between a cracks and later realized it wasn’t a pipe, but rather a black mamba (they are really rare in my area). The snake bit the little girl on the leg. The kids ran and told one person who was bedridden. They had to wait until someone else came home. They took her to the clinic down my road where she died. Please pray for this family as they get through this. The grandma leading the homestead takes care of all the grandkids left behind from her daughters and sons who have died due to HIV/AIDS. A few months prior her roof burned down. I brought them blankets and medications for the ones who are sick and bedridden, but even emotionally I wish I could support them but language can be an obstacle sometimes. Please keep them in your thoughts and also with the little kids she was with (mostly between ages of 4-6 years). I am winding down at site otherwise. I have a little over a month before I leave my host family. I am dreading that day. For now, I try to just hang out with them as much as possible and be with people in my community. I’ve been working in the fields lately to help harvest the maize and throw stocks at my friend (Thobile), with love of course. Here is a video of us sawing wood together. We wanted to make an informational video on how to saw wood, but she became shy and I had to do the play by play. This is Thobile (my BEST friend here in Swaziland) and me trying to saw wood for the stove.
The project is still continuing with the roofing project. I’d like to thank everyone again who contributed. I will try to put up a video to tell you about the progress. We are hopeful it will be finished by mid-summer, but I will keep you posted!