Inverting the calendar: Christmas in June and July 4 in winter

     The group of volunteers who came a year before us is now starting to leave, so our group threw a party for them at our favorite backpackers hostel. It seems to be a tradition to have a Christmas theme for this, I think because its hard to get really Christmassy in the December heat, so why not right at the winter solstice? Here are 4 of our group at our celebration.

I've become very fond of some from this group whom I've gotten to know. Peace Corps attracts some able and interesting people.  The one on the left, one of my favorites, was born in Sudan but moved shortly to Kenya for the first 8 years of her life; she is a devout Muslim, and we are observing Ramadan together, but I'm doing mine in reverse, only fasting from around 9 at night till 6 a.m.;Eid sounds more my style, anyway.  The one on the right is from Ethiopia, but grew up in Maine and is a devout Roman Catholic.

Our High School has been preparing for weeks for a traditional dance competition at a beautiful stadium 30 miles from here. (Its a “company town,” built and dominated by the sugar plantations surrounding it. There is a country club where we sometimes go for pizza or, in the heat, a swim and, mostly, for free but very slow WiFi.)  We went with the High School to the competition. There is one main event for the men

The women have a traditional dance competition.

In addition, the women compete in a drum majorette exercise (Another school's team is in the background of the picture above) and also in hip-hop dance moves and something with balloons, all very western-inspired I think.

One of our favorite volunteers was there with a dance team from her Primary School for the Deaf.

When she is with them, she is totally on, navigating between them and the hearing world, and helping them learn to deal for themselves.  She is an astonishing person.

     Katherine helped serve the lunch they brought in enormous kettles from the school.

Awards were announced

And the winners went crazy.  These are our drum majorettes, in their hiphop dance costumes, where they did very well.

Our traditional dancers did not qualify to move on to the finals near the capital city, but our drum majorettes will go. It may seem sour, but I would prefer to see scarce resources at our school devoted to activities with more academic content. Particularly, for girls, less jiggle. But it was great fun being with our friends.

     We're teaching about the immune system now in the primary schools, to create the foundation for what HIV does to it. Katherine cut out little symbols of CD4 and B cells (we call them “Captain” and “soldier”). This is the 5^th grade at the poorer school. Thee tall boy towards the left, aged 16, is a real trouble-maker, but we pulled him on-board, some, by getting him involved with the enactment of the immune system process. The others are 14.

That didn't work with another 19-year-old 5^th grade troublemaker, whom I tried to get involved and ended up having  to throw out of class. We're still working on classroom management.

We have no condom classes at the High School now for a week, so I washed the models and set them in our dish-drying rack.

The female parts on one have separated, right up by the cervix; don't you hate it when that happens? I've put duct tape around the vagina, which works pretty well but the vagina slides off the labia, so I'm going to apply some Super Glue to keep those parts together. Ah, friends, don't try this at home. Our 2 female parts models are now piled on the table right as you come in our door, so I'll remember to get to them. Think any visitors will be surprised to be greeted by 2 pairs of gaping labia as they enter? We had trouble figuring out which way the cervix fitted on the vagina, to be sure we glued it right, but we found a way to determine that, too.

Peace Corps Volunteers assembled for a July 4 barbecue at the PC Country Director's House in the capital. The newly arrived group was there, and also the group before us, for one last get-together.  All but the 2nd from the right, Elizabeth Nguyen, are in the older group which is leaving.  Elizabeth is in our group and works at an orphanage, where they keep her very busy.

It was fun meeting the new group, feeling how much we'd grown in a year in our ability to navigate here. Some of the newbies were pretty stressed; so were we back then.  Sometimes we still are.

     We then went to our favorite backpackers hostel and said good-bye our way. Someone put on some early 90s boy bands and some of the gang got into it as the night progressed.

Katherine went to bed early!

Now we settle down to about 6 more weeks of school in this term, followed by some travel in August: a 5^th and 6^th grade class trip to Durban, SA with the wealthier primary school in mid-August, followed shortly by a 2 week trip to Victoria Falls, Chobe Game Park and the Okavanga Delta in Botswana at the end of August. This coming week we teach the transmission of HIV, which of course is pretty key to what we are dealing with, but has a lot of words and will be a real challenge at the poorer primary school, where the students' English is weak. We're trying to think of a way to make a game of it.