Life Moves Pretty Fast...

…If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. A quote from one of my favorite movies – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I thought of it when writing this entry because it seems to me that life DOES move pretty fast! I can’t believe that it’s almost JUNE. Unbelievable. I’m still loving life here in SA. In the past few weeks so much has happened that it’s hard to figure out what to focus on! I’ll start with a much needed update…

I need to give a cockroach/pest update since so many were concerned after learning about my issues. Thank you for all the support. You can rest easy now though. Right after that blog was written the weather got consistently colder SO – I haven’t seen ANY cockroaches in my room since that blog (maybe one small one I can’t remember). BUT I also went to the local hardware store bought sealant and a caulk gun and went Tim-the-Tool-Man-Taylor (from the show Home Improvement for anyone who missed that reference) on my room sealing off anything that even resembled a crack or hole. That also included my entire ceiling to wall boarder. It was quite the project – lucky for me I have a tiny room. There has also been a very noticeable decline in cockroach sightings in my main house. I asked my host sister if this was due to the weather and she said “yes”, followed by “But yyyooouuuhhhh – in summer – there are SO MANY”. Great. I can’t wait.

Side story: I thought that cockroaches were my biggest pest problem until I discovered that an army of ants had made my windowsill their indoor ant hill (I didn’t notice right away because of the full wall lace curtain that I can’t move covering my window). This situation was quite alarming as there appeared to be thousands of ants (and their larva - yuck) on my windowsill! I have to tell this full story because in retrospect it is quite hilarious and depicts perfectly the kind of things that I’m dealing with that make me occasionally say: “I can’t believe this is my life”. So I get my powder “DOOM” called Blue Death which keeps all kinds of pests away. I begin to sprinkle it on my windowsill thinking that it will gradually kill the ants.

Well it sort of did – BUT it made the whole hill go into full panic mode and ants started running in all directions. The ants it did kill that tried running were falling off the edge of my windowsill INTO my shoes. I decided that was not the best route to proceed. So I grabbed my trusted spray DOOM and killed them that way. At this point it was getting dark outside and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get the thousands of dead ants/larva off my windowsill, so I decided to wait until the next day, and remove my full wall lace curtain. But before I left them I went outside to discover exactly how these ants were getting into my room. By a tiny crack in the wall by my window of course. WHY ants would walk up a wall to find a small crack to make their city INDOORS is beyond me…but it happened. The trail of ants along the wall of our house wrapped pretty far before they got to my window. (This hole was sealed the next day with my trusty sealant I might add).

Cleaning up the mess the next day was not what I would describe as pleasant. I have burglar bars on my windows so there is a physical barrier to cleaning the windows, let alone getting thousands of ant corpses out from the tiny space between the actual windowsill and burglar bar. The “best” method was knife. I spent a good half hour attempting to clean up the evidence of the ant city. It was really gross, and I felt really bad for all the dead ants and their larva that I had killed. But at the same time – they brought it on themselves when they decided to make my windowsill their home. This room is not big enough for me and thousands of ants.

Moving on - I want to talk about the weather because it has been SO COLD here. The weather reminds me a lot of Oregon and Northern California. It is coastal weather here – cold nights, cool mornings and evenings, and warmer during the day. The climate in the Eastern Cape is extremely varied – and it is the only province in South Africa to have all seven ecological zones. It is currently winter and has been getting colder and colder. And then I convert the temperature to Fahrenheit on my phone and realize it’s not actually all that cold. But – temperature is completely relative so it feels really cold. In the US we’re so used to the fact that even if it’s cold/hot outside; indoors it’s not the same temperature. Well here there is very little difference between indoor and outdoor temperature so at my work it feels freezing on a day that is 55 or less because it is that cold inside too. Imagine trying to work in an office that is colder than 60 degrees – it’s hard. Thank goodness we have our trusty space heater. Last week it was rainy and when we looked up the weather it said that it was 12 Celsius but felt like 7 (which is 46 degrees!). Luckily we’ve had some sun – so it’s been nice and warm in the sunshine.

Work has been so busy lately (in a great way!). We have so much going on – and I’m hoping that I can just get everything done by the time that it needs to be done. I’m currently working on helping to plan an internal assessment we have to do, and am also putting together a strategic planning workshop! I’m trying to get these things done before the end of June. I have In Service Training (IST) at the end of June which I’m really excited about because that means I get to see all of my fellow PCVs from my group!

On an annoying/sad note Congress passed the budget recently and reduced the Peace Corps budget by $25 MILLION while at the same time increasing the budget by more money than what has sustained the Peace Corps for the last 50 years. SO that directly affects PCVs in the reduction of services that we are able to have access to while in service. It also has drastically reduced our travel allowance that we get quarterly (at least in PC South Africa) to an amount that will barely get me to the nearest big city (along with other budget cuts)! This has also resulted in the ending of two whole Peace Corps programs – one of which is PC Romania. I have a friend from ISU who is a PCV in Romania and he is so disappointed and upset about this (currently serving volunteers are ending their services as planned they just aren’t taking any new volunteers). Such a bummer.

I have an update about friends! I have basically been adopted by a family that lives on the next street from me. They have three girls who are all in high school but close enough to my age and they are my new friends! We dance to music videos, watch celebrity reality shows and Generations (my favorite soap opera), and they feed me…a lot. It is the family of the founder of my organization and the HIV/AIDS coordinator of the Municipality. They are a great family and I love hanging out with them! They tell me I am one of their sisters and part of the family and so it’s nice to have a place where I can hang out! The other day was the 20th birthday of one of the girls and we had a little party – it was so much fun!

Random News: I’m very excited for one of my best friends who is going to be joining me in the world of PC when she leaves June 1st to serve in Ecuador! Apparently in Ecuador they use the dollar which means she will have a very real understanding of how much money she’s making each month. Potentially really depressing, but other than that I’m so excited for her to begin her work with HIV/AIDS (just like me!) so we can share stories!

I spent last week with one of my fellow PCVs at his site while our organizations did a combined training. It was great to hang out with a fellow American! I also should add that he is staying essentially in a hostel. He gets to stay where the park rangers would stay at a big game reserve which now serves as the volunteer housing for the (loaded) foreigners that come to volunteer on this game reserve. All I cared about was the shower! Washing my hair in a bucket = really annoying.

The situation with washing my hair in a bucket is the perfect segue way (which ps I thought was spelled segway and I had to google it) into my closing thought. I recently got a card from my cousin with this amazing quotation on it exemplifying this whole experience:

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone” – Neale Donald Walsch. I agree completely.