Our first official cloudy day in Kimberley. It even rained a little! Today I have spent most of the day calling around to the schools where we had interventions running before the strike to see if we can start up again. It has been an impossibly, grueling process. Who knew something so simple could be so difficult. I call and the principal is out, then I call back and he is in the classroom, then I call back and he will call me back. Have a received a call? You bet not. This has to be done for 9 schools. We really need to get our interventions back up and running and pack 5 weeks of work into 2 weeks so we can reach our numbers by the end of our fiscal year, October 1st. Probably tomorrow we will start running around to all of these schools so that we can meet with them in person and get a real confirmation. Hopefully we will be back on in at least two schools tomorrow. We also have a meeting tomorrow with LoveLife about the Heritage Month Festival this weekend and a development course scheduled with the coaches. Probably another busy day ahead of us full of running around with our heads cut off.
Today we also met a girl from Florida who just moved to Kimberley 2 days ago to work with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, which is partnered with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of South Africa. She will also be here for the next 11 months and may come on part time to help us out and fill part of the shoes of the missing intern. She seemed very nice and hopefully with her we will begin to grow our group of friends here in Kimberley. She also graduated from the University of Florida in 2009. I will tell you more when I know more.
This past weekend I attended the Tri-Nations rugby match between South Africa and Australia in the Bloemfontein World Cup Stadium. I met up with a fellow intern from Lesotho to catch quite a rugby game if I’ve ever seen one. I haven’t, but it was still awesome. I played once at soccer practice. First of all my bus was running on South Africa time and arrived in Kimberley 2 hours behind schedule, which landed me in Bloemfontein right at kick-off without tickets or a place to spend the night. On top of that thank goodness Doug has a South African Sim card for his phone, because otherwise I would have never found him. Luckily the bus station in Bloem, is basically the tailgating parking lot for the stadium, so I didn’t have to go far to get to the game.
After I found Doug we went directly to the ticket window to find that tickets were now selling for R300 apiece. Knowing that we could have gotten them for cheaper earlier or from someone selling them in the parking lot, we decided to pass and head back out into the tailgating areas away from the stadium in pursuit of some tickets. On our way to find tickets we passed four huge white Afrikaner guys who told us that we were going the wrong way and that the game was the other way. They had obviously been having quite a good time for the past few hours. We told them that we knew that, but we didn’t have any tickets. One of the guys goes, “Oh, we have an extra just come with us.” Of course I replied with a “Really?,” which tipped off the presence of foreigners and made them our new best friends. However, as great as a free ticket was, we were still short a ticket because there were two of us. We made this little detail clear and our new best friends decided to purchase another ticket off of someone selling them for us. It was pretty cool being adopted by these crazy men. They spent the entire game explaining the rules, introducing us to their entire clan over and over again (their were 16 of them), feeding us local specialties (biltong or beef jerky and some sort of Slim Jim type thing), as well as American specialties like Coke and Captain Morgan, and simultaneously teaching Doug inappropriate words to shout in Afrikaans. One of the guys gave us his number and told us that if we ever come to Pretoria to give him a call because now we are family and we will stay with him. The also invited us to the Braai after the game (cookout, bar-ba-que, tailgate), but we regretfully declined because we did not yet have anywhere to spend the night.
When we decided to go to the game in the middle of last week, we didn’t really make a whole lot of plans ahead of time (or any at all) thinking that it would be easy to figure out once we got there. That is something that works when you are traveling in off times to places or when you are going somewhere where the one of the biggest games of the year is not being played. I didn’t realize how big of a sport this was and how big of a showing there would be at this place. I knew it was the game being played for second and third place in the Tri-Nations tournament, but that didn’t really mean too much to me. The amount of people there well outdid the amount I have ever seen at a professional football game in the U.S. Also this was a World Cup Stadium and there were no empty seats. After the game we met up with a few of Doug’s friends from Maseru, a girl from Kenya working for the Clinton Foundation, a girl from Italy working in an orphanage, a guy from Columbia and a guy from South Carolina that were working in the English Language Institute. As a group we drove around for 2 hours going into lodge, after hotel, after resort in search of a room and after all that time and 20 hotels later we had only found one room for two people. After our search, Doug’s friends decided to head back to Maseru and Doug and I got the one room left in all of Bloemfontein. I had made a return bus reservation, but Doug had decided to fly by the seat of his pants, so when we got to the bus station around 9:15 a.m. the next day for my bus, we found out that the only bus heading to Maseru for the day had left at 6 a.m. that morning. Luckily we are pretty good at thinking on our feet and Doug was able to find a taxi mini bus back to Lesotho, but don’t you think that between Maseru, Bloemfontein, and Kimberley, all capitals of some sort and all within an hour and a half of each other that there would be more than one bus every other day. If I had wanted to go to Bloem on Friday or Sunday that would not have been possible, I could only go to Kim on those days. I remember from when I was in Cape Town and Western Cape that buses were easy to find and public transportation was everywhere, I am quickly learning that same system does not exist in Northern Cape or the Free State.
At the end of the day today we had a strategic meeting for FY 11! This was exciting because we are gearing up for a huge year; we are doubling our staff, we are tripling our couches, plus we are doubling our interventions and graduates. So we have a lot of work to do this year to reach our targets. It was also nice because we are going to be moving into our projects, things that we can now put our names on as opposed to just finishing up the past interns work. There are a few new things being put in place in terms of teambuilding, woowoo, with the coaches and we also got a chance to get a better understanding of everyone’s role and how it will all fit together. A little excitement in the office today!! Unfortunately this could also mean the end of lots of blogging.
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