How You Know You Live In A Small Village

11.   Boys pee on your toilet seat because they are used to latrines.

22.  The entire village runs out of milk and bread.

33.  Cows, goats and chickens routinely walk by the classroom windows and are chased out of the school gate by learners.

44.  The village’s taxi driver buys you a live chicken for dinner just because he likes you (don’t ask).

55.  Most of your male learners are herd boys after school.

66.  Soccer and netball are always played barefoot.

77.  Some kids walk for over an hour to come to school, yet each grade has only one class.

88.  Babies cry hysterically when they see you because they aren’t used to white people.

99.  Since everyone knows you, people will stop the village’s sole taxi when they see you coming a block away in town.

110. Everyone has known your name (or at least your African name) since your second week in the village.

111. Daily, kids give you their parents’ cell phones to charge, because most people don’t have electricity.

112. You can run to the main road and back (~5k) on the only road in and out of your village and see no cars (besides hospital vehicles, only a handful of people have cars).

Update

In light of the tragic events at the platinum mines in Rustenburg last week, we want to let everyone know that we are doing fine.  In fact, all news that we have received has come from either the internet or friends and family in America.  We have yet to hear any South Africans mention the shootings.  Additionally, Peace Corps hasn’t sent any updates/warnings with respect to the incident.  Last year, during the London riots, Peace Corps emailed us that travel to England was restricted.  Hopefully that illustrates how overly cautious Peace Corps can be.  So in short, we are not affected by the event.  It is obviously a terrible tragedy that illustrates the deep tensions between unions and the South African police, and we can only hope that we have witnessed the last of the violence.

On a more positive note, we are still doing well at site.  Last weekend we met up with a couple friends and finally had a chance to watch some of the Olympics.  We loudly cheered on as the American ladies won the 4x400 gold relay.  We may have started a chant or two of “USA!  USA!” but, fortunately, the South Africans were largely amused by us. 

In continuing the Olympic tradition, the theme of this past week has been sports.  On Thursday, our school was visited by a primary school about 10 miles away and we hosted two games of netball and two games of soccer.  Netball is a distant cousin of basketball:  all passing, no dibbling, no backboards o the hoop and areas on the court restricted to certain players.  It is exciting to watch and kids were very fired up with cheers.  Whenever we scored a basket, all of the kids rushed the court.  After the netball it was the boys’ turn to play soccer.  Sports for children are virtually nonexistent in rural areas like ours, so this was a very exciting day for the kids.

This past weekend, our community hosted another soccer tournament.  The entry fee was considerably higher than the tournament in June, so unfortunately the primary school boys were unable to play.  Despite the absence of the boys playing the part of Cinderella, the tournament was still a lot of fun and provided much-needed entertainment to the community.

To sum it all up, despite the terrible incident at the mine last week, we are entirely safe and still doing very well. 

P.S. Our new goal is to post once a week.  Sizobona (we will see).