A Tale of Two Ovens (and other stories from the past two weeks)

It’s official! Tony and I have graduated from trainees to full-fledged volunteers. On September 17, 2009 at the Mmabatho Palms Resort and Casino in Mafikeng we swore in with our 39 fellow friends and trainees.

But let me back up a little and explain how we got there…

After our site visit we returned to our training village, Marapyane, and our first host family to finish up training and take our dreaded tests. The most feared and evil of which being the LPI or Language Proficiency Intake. Our task was to sit in a room and have a 30 minute conversation with our tester in Setswana. This was followed by a randomly drawn situation card which ranged from useful scenarios like – You meet someone on a taxi that you think can help you with a project you’re working on, explain your project and ask them if they’d like to get involved. – to completely useless scenarios like – Your family is coming to visit from America. Call a hotel and make a reservation for them. (I call this useless because everyone, even Tswana speaking people, would use English to do this). Peace Corps requires a score of intermediate-low to pass and I was sure I failed miserably but somehow both Tony and I scored intermediate-high! I’m still slightly convinced that the tester mixed up my tape with someone elses but whatever, I’ll take it.

After testing came shopping day…l bet you’re wondering why I followed that with a … and not a !, because if you know me at all, you know that I have a love/talent for shopping. Not this time. We were dropped off at the Collonade Mall in Pretoria at about 11:15 and told to be back and ready to go by 2:30. That gave us approximately 3 hours to buy everything we needed (house-wise) for the next 2 years. That means pots, pans, an oven, silverware, plates, storage, etc…Now, we can definitely get most of these things in our shopping town but then the problem becomes how to get them from there to our village since the only transport back and forth is by taxi and taxi = many people packed into a kumvi and definitely not enough room for stuff. So it was either get it now or risk not being able to get it for a long time. In an effort to maximize our time we and some of our other couple friends developed a divide and conquer strategy. The boys took half the list and went one way, the girls took the other half and went the other way. This would give us plenty of time to get everything AND have lunch and a beer before we had to leave. It’s fail-proof, right??? Wrong, don’t worry we find a way to mess this up, just you wait.

The whole thing was a blur, frantic conversations about which electric kettle was the better buy, lamp shades flying, “are these dish cloths ugly?” It can be best compared to an episode of that show Supermarket Sweep, except not fun and with no cash prizes at the checkout counter – just a problem with my credit card that forced me to jog to the opposite end of the mall to withdraw cash from the ATM.

After all of our items were finally purchased and packed onto the truck the girls team and I went to the *Spur (see below for an explanation of this amazing establishment) for a celebratory beer. All was well until the boys showed up and Tony and I discovered that ‘oven’ was on both of our lists. That’s right, we bought two ovens. Tony sprinted back to the truck to try and get it off to return it only to find that the truck had already left. I tried really hard to care but I was too worn out and really enjoying my beer and friends at the Spur and I figured we’d work it out somehow, which we did - thanks for buying our spare oven Hillary! So all in all, shopping day = mass chaos/confusion/insanity but all worth it for the beer and friends at the end.

After shopping day and testing, all that was left was to say goodbye to our host family. This was much harder than we thought it would be. We’d grown used to the crowded house, the loud music, and kids 24/7 and we’d really come to love the entire family. The last night they bought us a cake and threw a little goodbye party and we exchanged gifts. They gave us a beautiful set of embroidered sheets and we gave them a set of new knives, a photo album full of family pictures we’d taken over the past 2 months, and Connect Four of course (because every family needs connect four). This is most definitely my favorite new picture:

I think that pretty much brings us back to swearing in...which was awesome. We got to relax with all of our friends one last night at a super nice hotel and casino before we all went our seperate ways. The new US Ambassador to South Africa was there too and he even posed for a super cheesey prom style photo with the couples and the Peace Corps country director! Which I don't have because my camera batterie went dead before we took it - but here's a pic of me and Tony right before the swearing in:

Now we're back at our pemanent site...for good. We are in what Peace Corps refers to as "Phase 2" or the "Community Integration Phase," until December 17th. During this phase (which used to, very accurately, be called "Lock Down") we are pretty much forbidden to go past our shopping town because we are supposed to be getting to know the community and our fellow teachers (although we do get a few weekends leave for Thanksgiving and to visit other volunteers at their sites). This is all great - EXCEPT, 5 days after we got here school let out for Spring Break and all the teacher's left town so we have A LOT of free time. Like, A LOT. Sleeping late is out of the question because the chickens won't allow it, I've yet to get any knitting or art supplies from town, and reading, interneting, and watching movies can only kill so much time in a day. SO, Tony and I have developed this list:

TOP TEN THINGS to do during a Spring Break on Lockdown:

10. Make your own horse shoes

9. Fashion a weight set out of concrete and rebar

8. Try to lure baby goats with rotten carrots

7. Learn how to raise chickens for eggs

6. Start a running club - (possible with absolutely no effort by jogging through the village and seeing how many children will stop what they're doing and randomly decide to jog with you - despite the fact that they're wearing giant combat boots or no shoes at all)

5. Listen to the hand-crank transistor radio while waiting for solar batteries to charge

4. Chase cows away from your laundry

3. Stare out the window of your current house at your future house wondering when the renovations that were supposed to start a week ago will actually start.

2. Take a bus to town and sit there in the hot sun for 45 minutes while two women scream at eachother because one of them threw the other's corn meal out the window.

1. Hypothesize ways to keep your margerine from melting because you can't figure out how to get the rifrodgerator you bought from town to your house.

Let us know if you can think of anything else we could do!

That's all for now!
Tune in next time for a tour of our rondewal, and an update on our new house.
Later,
Kim and Tony