Valentine's Day

Strange Valentine's Day.  I am away from Eric so it was pretty uneventful in the romance department.  I did go out to dinner with Jess and Jim and two Americans we have recently met who are teaching English on a Fulbright to Xhosa kids.  Soper also joined us as he is our appointed social chair.  We went to this restaurant called The Island.  It is far into Summerstrand and views the ocean.  Nice place.  I had prawns and calamari and, in the festivities of Valentines, chocolate desert.  Nice evening.  The restaurant even gave us free drinks for being single on Valentines.  haha.

Mustangs

City Lads filled weekend.  We had a game Saturday - STILL not registered so I played manager and got the roster ready, organized the player cards, and communicated with the refs.  Not my favorite way to spend a soccer game/Saturday, but oh well.  We won 5-0 even though the wind was insane.

Sunday we had a friendly so I was allowed to play.  It was actually a funny build-up.  We were playing a team from more in-town/richer area and all the girls were colored or white.  When City Lads rolled up, we are a township team and then I am just this white girl.  I felt like people would look and wonder what I was doing.  Then I sat out the first half so everyone was still wondering.  I got to play the whole second half and things went quite well.  I am playing up top, but more of a holding forward - just what I like.  Right in the beginning of the half I was able to dribble through some defender and get an ok shot off.  Within 15 minutes I had scored and a girl was designated to man-mark me.  I don't know the last time this happened to me, but it felt awesome.  We won 3-0.  I want my players card!

ToC

Last week was the most exhausting week of my life.  I am talking by Friday evening I was crying for no reason - purely from a level of exhaustion.

Me with all the new coaches

We were holding our Training of Coaches (ToC) for the new coaches.  This is nice and all, but being in charge of the logistics of a training of 30 people is insane.  Supplies, lunches (that people like and are different each day), tea breaks, transport money, etc. etc.  When I did get a little down time (usually lasting max 1/2 hour before I'd be sent out on another errand) I got to get to know some of the coaches and sit in on their practice runs and give feedback - This part was fun.  The rest of it meant me getting home around 5-7 each day and falling straight asleep.

The benefits were that I was never bored, the new coaches know me more than any other intern, and I was actually able to watch and participate in the training which was cool.

Little Reality

My time spent in the townships has been so danger and event-free that I sometimes forget that there is a definite violent and dangerous side to living here.  It has become normal for me to work here, go out drinking here, spend time with my friends here, and even walk around here and not once have I ever had a problem with anybody.  Perhaps this is because I stand out so much, but who's to say. 

Anyways, the other day Chika and I went out to get lunch at a shopping center right down the road.  While we were there she saw a man that she knew so we went over to talk to him.  He was an older gentlemen and very nice.  Chika introduced us and we said our pleasantries before Chika and him had a brief conversation.  Before we left he gave us each 2 rand.  It was the ultimate grandpa-style gesture.  He was just nice.  Two days later Chika told me he had died.  He tried to break up a fight between his son and another guy and the other guy ended up shooting him.  I couldn't believe this and I still don't know how to handle it. 

Living here has been very strange.  I feel so safe wherever I go.  The people I spend time with have made me feel that the space I move within is very safe.  Things like people being shot, or getting car jacked, or robbed just seem completely foreign to me.  Am I being silly to not be more guarded?  I don't know.  I don't know what to think about any of this...

Lanuage

Sometimes it is so frustrating working in an office with a group of people whose first language you don't understand and they strongly prefer to speak it.  There are countless times that I am alone with a group of people and they carry on a conversation in isiXhosa while I sit not being able to participate, understand, or enjoy it.  It just gets annoying.  I know that they don't do it to be rude or to cut me out or anything like that, it is just more comfortable, but I seriously hate it.  I'll just sit here.

Seaview Lion Park

Last Saturday we decided to have an adventure and went to the Seaview Lion Park.  This place is about 1/2 hour from our home and is in this beautiful area.  There is a great view of the ocean, hence "seaview" and it is just this huge park with zebras and giraffes, and impalas, and they happen to have some lions and tigers in enclosed areas. 

The tiger cubs are from the Johannesburg zoo.  When the zoo couldn't care for them they offered them to this lion park.  The lions also have some cubs and this place makes its money by allowing people to pay to pet these cubs.  They are sooooo cute.  Dirty, but cute.  Lion cubs eat 4 times and day and sleep 18-20 hours!  That is insane to me.  They feed them ribs and steak too.  Not a bad life.

We spent a few hours at this place, petty cubs, seeing the big lions, and driving around looking at the other animals.  It was a so nice out too.  Just a great day.

On the way back we stopped and walked down to the ocean at one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.  The rocks were so dark against the really blue-green water.  It was amazing.

Random Updates

It has been raining for 3 days now so I suppose I will update.  Sorry for the delay.  This week has been a bit exciting.  Besides my usual last-week-of-the-month fun, with reporting and all, our office has been filled with people going in and out interviewing for positions with the RCT or as new peer educators.  The RCT people got their own office right down the hall from ours so they did their interviews secretly there while the new coaches had to sit in our office until they were called into a back room. 

We get to meet all the new coaches today - and by we I leave out Jess and Will because Will is still back in the states (heard he got a job offer!) and Jess is in Cape Town to take her GMATs.  Hopefully they are cool.  In other, even better news, Shuffle got hired to do Monitoring and Evaluation for the RCT!!!!  I am so happy for her, and proud of her.  She described herself as "over the moon" to me yesterday when I called her.  For more selfish reasons, she will now be in the office everyday.

Other new info:

Flavored water is the best thing.  You can even get sparkling flavored water so it is like drinking soda, but you are drinking water!  It is insanely delicious. 

Earlier this week I spent the day with Shuffle working on transcribing a Skillz Street focus group.  After our last Skillz Street we had random girls from different groups come an extra day and talk about their experiences, what they learned, how they would use the information, etc. etc.  Ngwenya conducted the discussion and it was entirely in isiXhosa.  The people analyzing the info are not Xhosa so they needed everything translated.  I sat in an office with Shuffle for 5 hours listening to a recording.  She would translate and I would transcribe.  It was not a bad way to spend the day - I was busy, Shuffle got paid, and Cape Town was happy.

I have over 40 active bug bites.  They are actually much better now then when I decided to mention this in my blog a few days ago.  There was a period of time that I was getting multiple bug bites every night.  They itched so bad I was going crazy.  I closed my window at night and I'd still wake up with 10 new ones!  I ended up buying this plug-in that you put a tablet in every 14 hours and it spreads an insecticide so that the bugs stay away.  This, plus me wearing bug spray to bed every night has helped immensely and I have gone 2 days straight without any new bites!  This is big news.  My ankles look disgusting.

Strategic Meeting

Back at work, we are planning for the year.  We have received out targets from headquarters and are gung-ho about being more organized this year.  We had a strategic meeting to discuss how to do this.  Hopefully planning the year out in advance will help, rather than last year when we arrived in August and by October we had to do 2 Skillz Streets to get our targets!

I also need to start thinking about our fundraising touranment...

First Minutes with City Lads

Big soccer week last weekend.  On Friday we got out of work early to play a game against Umzingisi.  This is another organization in the area that does similar work to us, but steals our flair and brings in a lot of English interns for just a couple weeks to play soccer with kids.  More soccer, in other words.  Anyways, we played them before in the fall, and this was a rematch.  There are a list of reasons why this didn't go to great, and the list is as follows:

1. We just had the majority of our coaches (thus our players) leave GRS when their contracts ended thus having next to no players.  We had Danny and Ivaylo - the film makers - play and borrowed some Umzingisi guys.

2. The "interns" for Umzingisi are all young dudes who take this game wayyy to seriously.

3. The City Lads had a scrimmage right afterwards so none of them played.  This means no Titie, no Ngwenya, no Nowie.

We lost badly.  O well.

The bright side was that the City Lads did have a scrimmage directly after against the KUBS.  I got to suit up and played the whole second half.  My first minutes with the team!  This was right after I had finished by antibiotics for the gall bladder issue so I was out of shape and still feeling a little pain, but I made some good plays and felt good over all.  We won 1-0 (should have been worse) and get to play this team again for real this weekend.  Hopefully my player card comes in this week like it's supposed to.