My New Site!!

Hello again! I am excited as all get out at how awesome my permanent site is going to be! I did not have completely accurate information in my last report to you. I do not have a water tap in the yard. I do have to hike to a stream for water (eew. schisto). But it is not far. It is less than half a mile - probably not even a 3rd of a mile, so it is not bad. And Peace Corps is going to give me a couple 100 gallon drums to fill with water (I think I’ll set them up as rain buckets so they can fill up on their own in the rainy season) so I won’t have to worry about running out of water come dry season. But the rest of what I had heard was true. My house is HUGE (well... by Swazi standards. It is about 1.5 times the size of my bedroom growing up - for those of you who have been there). I have already drawn out 100 sets of plans for how it will be laid out. I have plans to make a big food/book shelf, benches to put along the wall for seating around my table, the table, and about 100 other things to make my hut a home.

The Methodist primary school where I will be working is really neat too. I am the third volunteer to be stationed in my village so everyone has an idea of my role in the school and community. They seem very open to any ideas I might have, and some of the teachers are really jazzed. I had some excellent conversations with a lot of the teachers and am pumped to work with them. I was surprised that we already covered the taboo topics around which Peace Corps suggests we tread lightly (corporal punishment and male dominance) and ended quite amicably with our differences in opinions, leaving, I believe, a good window to further discussion on the topics. AND (as I was hoping I would get to work on) they are really wanting to build a library. They have a bunch of books in the staff office, but no where for the kids to really access them. Also there is about a half an acre of land that used to be a garden but is no longer used, so I am thinking maybe start a gardening club for the kids and then they will have food they can bring home or eat at school and they will get a chance to try their gardening skills on different vegetables. They do have an agriculture class for the 6th and 7th grades where they grow a small plot of onions and cabbage (?) (I can’t remember what was in them exactly what was in them) which is fantastic, but hopefully we could grow enough food to feed the kids at school a variety of produce. Right now UNICEF provides the school with food to feed their ~150 kids one meal a day (which for many is the only meal they get) but it is only corn meal and beans every day. Some varieties of veggies would do wonders for these kids I think. I also really want to teach a life skills class for maybe the upper grades (5-7). But who knows. I am so full of ideas, but I still have three weeks before I move there, and then three months after that before I can start any projects. So right now it is just me being excited over potential.