Sepedi!

Well....

I've finally settled into the country and have about 10 minutes to describe whats been going on this past week. We left DC Monday at 5:40 and got into Jo'burg at 4:40 on Tuesday. The flight was close to unbearable at one point, b/c the lovely air conditioner decided not to work. We fell asleep nice and cool, but woke up in our own sweat :).

Once we arrived, we drove about an hour and a half to our training site, and since then we've been geting to know each other and our trainers. Today, we found out what our target langauge would be. As you can tell from the title, I will be learning Sepedi (along with bits and pieces of Afrikaans and Setswana). This means I'll be placed in Limpopo. We have also been interviewed so the local staff can get an idea of where we'd like to be placed for our two years. I hope I get what I want, which is as rural as possible. All locations have electricity, but some may have to walk a short distance to water or will atleast have water outside their home.

Tomorrow we go home with our host family and I'm really looking forward to meeting them. That's about it for now. The other volunteers are awesome and the local staff are GREAT.

Shala Kabotusi (spelling?)....this means "bye" ....

Old School Communication

Well....I'm currently on a two day vacation in Florida with my mom and a few other family members who will be here tomorrow. My goal is to do absolutely nothing.

It was difficult saying goodbye to my father as he dropped us off at the airport this morning, but I know he and my mother will make a trip out to see me, so I had that to fall back on. Plus he's very proud of my decision to serve in the Peace Corps :)

Packing turned out to be way way way more difficult than I originally thought, and now I'm lugging around a 70 lb bag (my 2nd 70 lb back is waiting for me in Washington D.C.), a loaded down backpack, and my guitar which is getting heavier and heavier by the hour. I decided that I'd rather pay the "excess weight" fee than to try to figure out which clothes and shoes to take out to bring the weight down. Plus, it doesn't help that it's winter in South Africa which means warmer (aka heavier) clothing. Oh well...I'll either pull, break, or build up my arm muscle.

I wanted to post my address in case those of you reading my blog want to participate in some "old school communication". Yep....you guessed it....LETTERS! We've been told that we won't have consistent access to internet during our three months of training, so they advised us to write letters home and have our friends and family write to us. I received a great going away gift of postcards and stationary (thanks E), so I have plenty of writing material. But it'd be really nice to hear (or read) what's going on back in the States. So for those of you who have decent penmanship and the patience, you can write me letters (or send me care packages with newspapers, TIME magazines, or anything that involves Stateside current events) to the following address:

LaTosha D. Parker
Peace Corps
PO Box 9536
Pretoria 0001
South Africa

I leave for staging in two days, and my nervousness/excitement is rapidly increasing!

Paz...

Countdown

I'm down to the last two days at my apartment, and I'm using every free moment to finish packing up my place. It has been an extremely tedious task. I'm also down to the last three days of saying goodbye to my friends. Luckily, I'll have a few more days to spend with the family, but saying goodbye is going to be difficult for all of us.

Oh yea.....and I'm also discovering how difficult it is to pack all the items I need w/o going ridiculously over the airline weight max or w/o making my bags so heavy that I can't comfortably carry them. It is also necessary for me to organize my belongings into two categories: "essential and non-essential". The "non-essential" bag needs to be full of items that I won't need during my three months of training, while the "essential" bag stays with me.

I'll spend the latter half of this week on vacation with my family in Florida, and then it's off to Washington D.C. for three days of staging. Once we arrive in Jo'burg next Tuesday, we will travel about an hour and a half north of the capital (Pretoria....I know, I thought it was Jo'burg for the longest times too) to our training site at Marapayne Education Center near the town of Bela Bela in Mpumalanga Province. We'll be assigned to our host families later on in the week, and I'm really looking forward to meeting the people I'll be living with over the next few months. I hope they like the gifts I'm bringing from the States.

We've been informed that we won't have access to internet on a regular basis during training, so we'll be relying mostly on old-fashion communication: writing letters. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to update my blog during training. I'm hoping atleast once a week like I'm doing now, but we'll just have to see.

Oh well....back to packing up my dishes.....till next time......