Birthday: 67!
We celebrated
my 67th birthday with pizza lunch at the only restaurant in the dusty shopping
town 25 km from us, with a volunteer from our group (left) and a volunteer in
the newer group who was visited by her husband, from their home in Alaska. They were just back from seeing the game in
Botswana, at Chobe.
Both volunteers live near the town where we met them, but
the visiting husband had rented a car, so they drove us back to our site, after
a big grocery shopping binge - a true birthday celebration!
Running Buddies
Last week I started off on my customary run. A slender
dark figure raced out to join me - Bonkhe,
age 12, 4th grade last year at the
"poorer" school nearby. We
only teach grades 5 and 6, and Bonkhe was very proud to tell us at the end of
last school year that his teacher was sure
he would be promoted to grade 5, where we would teach him. Alas, when the new school year started in
January, it turned out he had failed English, which automatically precluded
promotion, but he still makes a point of greeting us at school, and around the
community.
Bonkhe kept pace with me on my run 2 weeks ago,
and, on our way back, which was slightly uphill, his pace pushed me a little
harder than I would have chosen had I been alone. I do yoga stretches at the mid-point
turnaround of the run; I don't know the siSwati word for that, and Bonkhe doesn't
really get the point, but he imitates my triginashina (spelling?); the
one-legged holding the foot by the butt stretch eludes him.
When I started
my run earlier this week I hollered for
him and he immediately came sprinting to the path, and we ran well
together. I've taken to running
shirtless so as not to trash a shirt; they already know I'm odd, so going
around shirtless can't be that much of a shock by now. 1/2 way through the run Bonkhe pulled off his
shirt, but he was careful to put it back on when he returned to his homestead.
Oh, perhaps I
should mention, the first time Bonke ran with me, he ran barefoot. I run in expensive REI "trail running"
shoes, more like low cut boots, now a little bedraggled. And I've used pliers to pull an acacia thorn
out of those boots, that came all the way through to my foot. This week when Bonkhe ran out to join me he
was running in crocs, more like bedroom slippers. Seemed to work just fine for him.
Here he is with other kids from the surrounding
homesteads.
CONDOM PRACTICE AT
THE HIGH SCHOOL
Last week,
with the help of one of the smart young science teachers at our high school, we arranged to give condom use demonstrations to
each of the science classes - she thought it important to get to the students
before they went on break. Two girls
have dropped out in the past 2 weeks because of pregnancy - pregnant girls are
not allowed to attend school. We reached
all 420 students at the high school, giving all the boys a chance to put male condom on model penises (slightly larger than life size (at least, I think
so!)), and the girls a chance to do that one, and the same for a female condom
on our model of female genitalia.
It is well
we now have 2 weeks of break; you
relate differently to a student after you explain to him or her that after climax they must firmly
grasp the base of the penis while it is still stiff, holding onto the condom,
now full, before sliding it out of the vagina, to be sure the condom does not
slip off. We got some questions that seemed to have been
searching for an answer for a long time, and some students were very serious;
others were silly, the way teenagers working with plastic penises and vulvas
are bound to be.
Here are our
models in our dish rack after we cleaned them up after last use.
THE PURLOINED CELL
PHONE
We each teach
a section of Form 4 (junior) English language once a week at the local high
school, and we assigned them homework of taking a book out of the school
library and reading it and writing a report over break. Here they are thronging the library.
PIC
Unfortunately I did not keep watch over my backpack and my
cell phone, with 2 years' worth of phone numbers, has disappeared. This is a common occurrence, so, as
instructed, a day later I filed a police report in our local shopping town, 15 miles away.
The police were
very responsive and helpful, and quickly took a statement, but whoever trains
the Royal Swazi Police has been reading too many British detective novels; I don't recall saying, as part of my
statement "On that fateful day" (seriously) nor would my description
of what I wrote on the board in my Form 4 section's room ("I lost my cell
phone in the library - there's a reward!") have been phrased that I "immediately
raised an alarm."
As instructed we went from the
police station to the phone company office nearby, who sent us back to the police
station for another paper, which we obtained after paying about $US 1 at the
nearby Department of Revenue office and taking that receipt back to the police,
who now said we needed to go to Manzini, to the main phone company office, to
initiate tracing the phone. When we got
there 2 days later the phone company said we needed another kind of paper from
the police back at the station where we'd filed the original report. We tried the Manzini police, who also said
to go back to our shopping town for that paper and bring it back to the Manzini
phone company. But we're giving up on
that official process; the phone company estimates it takes months to trace a phone, once the paperwork is in order! A teacher at the high school is going to call
the girlfriend of another teacher, because the girlfriend works at the phone company and, with
information from the police report, may be able to get the tracing done in a
few days.
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